MATE has finally found it’s way home.

As some of you may know MATE was created by an Arch Linux user, Perberos. It is somewhat ironic then that MATE has never featured in the official Arch Linux package repository until now. That’s right, MATE is finally available in the Arch Linux [community] package repository!

You can find out everything you need to know about installing MATE on Arch Linux from the following wiki pages:

It is also worth noting that the now obsolete unofficial MATE package repository will be removed once all the Arch Linux mirrors are synced. So go and update /etc/pacman.conf and remove the [mate] package repository.

The other advantage of getting MATE into the official Arch Linux package repository is that MATE will now also feature in the Arch Linux ARM package repository. I can finally retire my Raspberry Pi (armv6h) and Cubox Pro (armv7h) build “servers”. I’m not sure how long it will take for all the MATE packages to appear in the Arch Linux ARM package repository but I have already seen that some packages are built.

MATE runs really well on the Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM, so if you have a Pi and a spare SDCARD, give it a whirl. I’ll be writing a blog post about how install Arch Linux and MATE on the Raspberry Pi with some useful performance tweaks in the near future.