Installing Mate Desktop in CrunchBangpublished on January 19, 2014

You want Gnome2 back, don’t you? Well, good luck finding it in any updated repositories; gnome2 has been deprecated for some time now. But what if you’re a curmudgeonly old geek that just wants his easy-to-use desktop environment back?

Enter Mate Desktop, a fork of Gnome2.

I dropped Ubuntu years ago when it became apparent the distribution was becoming more and more bloated. I have since been running various flavors of Debian; my standard workhorse distro is CrunchBang. This documents the process of installing Mate Desktop in CrunchBang Waldorf.

1. Open /etc/apt/sources.list in an editor…

   sudo geany /etc/apt/sources.list

   …and append the following to the bottom of the file:

   # Debian Wheezy/CrunchBang Waldorf Mate Desktop repository
   deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/debian wheezy main

   Save and close Geany.

2. Update your software repositories and install the mate-archive-keyring…

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install mate-archive-keyring 

   …then update again and install the Mate Desktop, with extra packages.

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-extra

   Mate Desktop is now installed.

3. Open /etc/slim.conf in an editor…

   sudo geany /etc/slim.conf

   …and add Mate Desktop to the SLiM Desktop Environment rotation:

   # sessions            openbox-session
   sessions            openbox-session,mate-session

   Save and close Geany.

4. Select your default session manager:

   sudo update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

   Rejoice, you're done! Restart and login for your new (old) desktop experience.