Bug – Greg Laden's Blog

Things to do after installing Ubuntu Mate 18.04

Greg Laden — Wed, 23 May 2018 17:52:01 +0000

1) Uninstall it. It is flawed in key ways. It will be difficult to get your Dropbox working, if you use that, installing software form .deb files is not automatic and requires hacking. There are some other problems too.

2) Check back here in a few months, see if I’ve updated with good news. Meanwhile, get back to whatever you were doing, because you don’t want to be doing this.

Added:

I tried to get info from Mate about the problems I encountered. They really provide no way to do that, so I tweeted about it referring to their handle, so they would see.

The tweeted back two responses. The first one said a combination of “nothing is broken” and “tough luck.” The second twee is shown in this screen grab:

That is a moving GIF with the boy’s eyes blinking. It is intended to mean, “tough shit, sucker!” or words to that effect.

(I provide a screen shot because I assume cooler heads will prevail, maybe, at Mate HQ, and the immature dickhead who tweeted that will be countermanded. Or maybe not. We don’t ever hear anything good about their development community. Only bad things.)

So, don’t look for an Ubuntu Mate explainer on this blog.

Preparing to install Xubuntu right now!

Linux Mate Desktop Volume Control Button Gone: Fix

Greg Laden — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 16:23:27 +0000

If you use Mate as your Linux Desktop you may have noticed that your volume control disappears now and then.

For me this started about a month ago and I found a quick fix. Go to terminal and enter:

killall mate-panel

This kills the mate-panel. Then, the panel will automatically come back, and some stuff that was broken may now be less broken.

This worked to restore the volume control until about two weeks ago, and that stopped working. I probably changed something else on the panel. So, the above fix may or may not work for you.

A second fix, not as good, is working for me. I opened the Control Center, and found the “sound” section (under “Hardware”) Then, I dragged that to the panel.

This allows you access to the volume control, though not as a simple widget. Rather, it give you the whole sound system configuration dialog.

Once I did that I realized that I’ll just keep that on the panel even when the sound applet starts working again, because it is pretty darn convenient.

Meanwhile, yes, this is a bug, it has been reported and it is being discussed. I think this is simply something that will eventually be fixed, and after some future upgrade you’ll find it is no longer a problem.