Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Beta 1 is out!

Support & Help Requests
1

Hi all,

As the subject says, Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Beta 1 is out and now includes (most of) MATE 1.10. There are also big improvements to Ubuntu MATE Welcome that were contributed by our very own @lah7. Thanks Luke, you’ve done a great job!

I also helped with the release management for the Ubuntu flavours again, you can find the release announcement here.

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2

My pleasure, just polished up a bit… all inspired by a little concept. :smile:

Thanks to you too @wimpy, without Ubuntu MATE I’m not sure what I’d be using Ubuntu-wise!

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I burned an image of the mate 15.10 iso file on a fat32 partition on a usb portable hard drive using the Startup Disk Creator and also using ddrescue. In both cases I get a boot error.

I’ve been using this method for years to try out new distros. In fact, I’ve no problem burning Ubuntu Mate 15.04 on the same partition and booting from it.

Any ideas from anyone?

Thanks in advance.

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I do not use either one, but would like to know what the boot error said.

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There isn’t much of an output. It says boot error plus names of some people. Pressing any key resumes normal boot.

On a 4 GB USB stick, the Startup Disk Creator says there is not enough space on the disk.

I was, however, successful using ddrescue on the same stick.

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Like I say, I do not use it. But I have used unetbootin in the pass using the manual install method. I have found it capable of installing different iso and will also work with the mini iso.

Since SDC is out of space, maybe the route to go. A mini install starts at about 40MB and will download direct from the internet, so a wired connection is needed.

Hopefully someone else with a better solution will come along. Goodluck

7

Hi,

I hope I post at the right place.

I have an ubuntu-mate 15.10 and since today morning (Aug 28th 2015) after having updated everything, I have a problem with caja at logon. It start new caja processes (4 at the time) and doesn't stop. The process seems to die but new ones are started as soon.

Also, plank should start but it doesn't and I'm not anymore with my regular theme (Numix circle). The panel is not set to "cupertino" anymore either.

Am I alone to have this kind of problem ???

Also, I have a popup at start that says caja abended; I already sent error report for this.

I'm on a Dell Latitude E5530 (all intel), 8GB with kernel 4.1.0-3-generic and mate 1.10.1

Regards,
Bernard

PS: I just found out that I have lots of these messages in the syslog

caja[11446]: segfault at 1 ip 00007f154612a354 sp 00007ffcad71c8a0 error 4 in libgobject-2.0.so.0.4506.0[7f15460f6000+51000]

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Out of curiosity I decided to give unetbootin a try. I installed the latest version using the ppa. Upon booting it took me as far as the splash screen and then balked with an error message.

I guess I will now just wait for the final release.

9

You could install 15.04 and upgrade to 15.10. Its a bit of a lengthy process, but works well on a vanilla install.

https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/installing-upgrading.html

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I just would like to add that I have updated my personal laptop at home (an AMD A6-3400M with a radeon card) with ubuntu-mate 15.10 and it doesn’t show any of these problems.

11

Similar results here. I run 15.10 (Xeon processor & geForce graphic) as my main system since it was first release and have not had any downtime, just some hiccups. Now that we have m1.10 and a Beta release, I think its all downhill. Thanks people/devs :smiley:

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I started with alpha 1 then 2 using vitrualbox with no problems just installed the beta on computer using xfs file system geforce graphics dual core amd also installed konversation as well as synaptic and samba. Haven’t ran into any problems ram usage is about 290 megs at startup with zero load average.The MATE team has done a great job will stick with beta till the final comes out thanks for a great system.

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13

Here’s my quick overview of the Beta 1 release from boot to shutdown…

Boot

I booted the 32-bit edition from USB on two old test laptops with spinning rust drives. Two quick observations:

  • I’ve never seen similar boot graphics behavior-- After selecting the default boot entry, it doesn’t completely erase the GRUB screen, but instead shows a large black box in the middle leaving just fringes of the GRUB menu. Screenshot This is where it spends the majority of the time while booting, presumably loading the initrd. After a while it briefly shows the actual Plymouth boot splash, followed by the login screen. On fast systems with an SSD this wouldn’t appear to be an issue, but with a slow spinning disk it could give the impression that the boot process is hanging. Boot speed is actually quite good, faster than most distros on this old laptop.
  • I don’t really like the new Plymouth bootsplash with its large Ubuntu Mate logo and no text. I preferred the previous style with its larger Ubuntu MATE stylized text and a small superscript logo placed as though it were a ® symbol. In addition to being more visually pleasing and professional looking to my eye, it also improves brand recognition for users who don’t recognize the logo, and won’t see the name of their OS in any other screens after that from day-to-day.

Hardware Detection

As usual, very good, with the exception of one trip-up that I’d like to mention here because @Wimpy tends to handle bug reports better than Ubuntu does. :slight_smile:

  • My other old laptop has Broadcom BCM4312 WiFI, which used to require proprietary firmware to be installed. Ubuntu has never supported this chip out of the box since the beginning of time (9 years ago when I bought the laptop). But apparently some kind of open source firmware must have come out in past years, because recent versions of Fedora now support the WiFI automatically out of the box. Would it be possible to take a look at my bug report and see about adding this open source support for BCM43xx to Ubuntu? Edit: The source of the free firmware in Fedora appears to be this: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/b43-openfwwf

Ubuntu MATE Welcome screen

Very well done! This is a great innovation. The new Software button allows installation of a Software Center and also a number of common recommended packages, organized by category. Again, very well done!

  • My only suggestion for the welcome screen design would be to maybe make the Software button a different color (green?) to make it stand out better, since it actually offers important functionality instead of just fluff introductory information.

  • I installed Ubuntu MATE without setting up an internet connection first, and later configured WiFI after first boot. But since the APT lists had never been updated, it threw a bunch of unresolvable dependency errors when I tried to install something from the welcome screen. It worked correctly after running apt-get update. So hopefully this bug can be fixed.

  • Under the “Office” category it might be good to offer WPS Office as an alternative to LibreOffice, as it looks uncannily similar to Microsoft Office and offers almost perfect compatibility.

  • Under the “Sound and Video” category there is a “Codecs” quick-install. But I think it would be best to have another main category for “Proprietary Software” with a quick-install button for ubuntu-restricted-extras. The advantage of this package is that it installs Microsoft fonts, which are extremely important for MS Office file import fidelity in LibreOffice, as well as the need of Arial for the interface of some Wine programs. Also the ubuntu-restricted-extras package pulls in Flash, which new users will probably need at some point. My observation has been that users almost always try to go to adobe.com and download the flash plugin, not realizing that it’s available from the repos. Commendably, it is available as a quick-install under the Internet category in the Ubuntu Mate Welcome, but I think it would be best to install the whole kit and kaboodle with one meta package directly from the Welcome screen.

  • I opted to try the AppGrid software center. A few comments:

    • Incredibly fast and snappy
    • Very good organization and search
    • Generally works well, but for some reason it won’t allow me to install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package, and it hangs and has to be force closed.

  • As for alternative software centers, I think it’s really commendable that we are offered choice! In addition to AppGrid and Ubuntu Software, what about Lubuntu Software, Deepin Software, and Mint Software? Again, I think the importance of a software center for new users can not be overemphasized, so it’s great to see that @Wimpy actually cares about this aspect.

  • After installing a Software Center from the Welcome screen, I think it would be good to put it as a shortcut on the desktop and in the Mate Menu favorites, if in use.

Look and Feel

Superb. Mate Tweak is quite possibly the biggest innovation to Gnome2/Mate since its beginning. I have seen users immediately reject Mate with its foreign two-panel design and triple menu with no search. But Mate Tweak gives the incredibly intuitive option of a Redmond-esque layout with the searchable Mate Menu. For 15.10 the Mate Tweak tool has been improved and streamlined. I also really love the fast option of enabling Compiz for quarter-tiling windows in Aero fashion.

  • The first time I tried to switch to Redmond, all panels disappeared, and even after a re-boot it didn’t come back. Fortunately I could open mate-tweak from the terminal and select another layout and then switch back again to Redmond, at which point it worked again.
  • Another small bug after I enabled Ubuntu indicators is that it didn’t remove the Mate volume applet, so I had two volume indicators.

Shutdown

There appears to be some sort of bug delaying the shutdown process. I hit ESC on the shutdown splash, it it only shows “[OK] Started Show Plymouth Power Off Screen” and then hangs for well over a minute. Ubuntu 15.04 on this same machine shuts down almost instantly.

All in all, looks like Ubuntu MATE 15.10 is shaping up to be an incredible release. My intention with this long post isn’t to nitpick, but rather to hopefully improve a little bit more on @Wimpy’s brainchild. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu MATE yet, do yourself a favor and give it a test run. I think we can safely say that Ubuntu MATE is a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu itself. Unlike its parent, Ubuntu MATE is meticulously crafted to very high standards that put familiarity, aesthetics, simplicity, and ease of use in first place. Most importantly, @Wimpy actually listens to users and tries to accommodate their varying preferences instead of predilecting his own. Many thanks, and congrats to @Wimpy and his team for this valuable contribution to the open source community!

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I know there’s always work to be done, but I’m really liking my beta upgrade. Till mate, I was only LTS. You people make it hard being happy with a LTS release :slight_smile: I run 15.10 host & VMs (backup w/u12o4); in Nov it all gets wiped and replaced with 16.04. Maybe then I’ll get back to my lts kick :slight_smile:

Next release I plan to spend time with compiz and find my perfect setup along with other eye candy. I’m big on eye candy these days :slight_smile:

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15

How was installation of Beta 1 for everyone? I just tried to install onto a bios-freed Acer C720 chromebook with upgraded SSD and hit a major show-stopping bug. Installation doesn’t finish complaining that some file “Is a directory”. I get a warning about my hard drive being old (although 15.04 installs fine and I’m getting no warnings about the SSD) and the installer stops. I let the system report a bug here and I’ve put in some details about what I was doing. I also tried installing via the mini.iso image but that won’t install grub2 to the hard drive. I’m wondering if there is a major bug somewhere in the installer.