BACKGROUND/Basic Setup

I’ve had to install MATE on three OL9 systems now, so I figure I should properly document it. I’m reproducing this on a freshly installed OL9 VM, from this image:

https://yum.oracle.com/ISOS/OracleLinux/OL9/u5/x86_64/OracleLinux-R9-U5-x86_64-boot-uek.iso

I’ve chosen the basic “Server with GUI” installation just to get the majority of the packages I want installed, even though I don’t plan to use the default GNOME GUI.

I’ll mostly follow the Rocky Linux instructions from here:

https://docs.rockylinux.org/guides/desktop/mate_installation/

Package Installation

First we need to install the epel-release package to get the EPEL repo enabled:

sudo dnf install epel-release

Now we can install the remaining packages. I’ve broken out the list, just to make it easier to see what all is getting installed:

sudo dnf install \
    NetworkManager-adsl \
    NetworkManager-bluetooth \
    NetworkManager-libreswan-gnome \
    NetworkManager-openvpn-gnome \
    NetworkManager-ovs \
    NetworkManager-ppp \
    NetworkManager-team \
    NetworkManager-wifi \
    NetworkManager-wwan \
    adwaita-gtk2-theme \
    alsa-plugins-pulseaudio \
    atril \
    atril-caja \
    atril-thumbnailer \
    caja \
    caja-actions \
    caja-image-converter \
    caja-open-terminal \
    caja-sendto \
    caja-wallpaper \
    caja-xattr-tags \
    dconf-editor \
    engrampa \
    eom \
    firewall-config \
    gnome-disk-utility \
    gnome-epub-thumbnailer \
    gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free \
    gtk2-engines \
    gucharmap \
    gvfs-fuse \
    gvfs-gphoto2 \
    gvfs-mtp \
    gvfs-smb \
    initial-setup-gui \
    libmatekbd \
    libmatemixer \
    libmateweather \
    libsecret \
    lm_sensors \
    marco \
    mate-applets \
    mate-backgrounds \
    mate-calc \
    mate-control-center \
    mate-desktop \
    mate-dictionary \
    mate-disk-usage-analyzer \
    mate-icon-theme \
    mate-media \
    mate-menus \
    mate-menus-preferences-category-menu \
    mate-notification-daemon \
    mate-panel \
    mate-polkit \
    mate-power-manager \
    mate-screensaver \
    mate-screenshot \
    mate-search-tool \
    mate-session-manager \
    mate-settings-daemon \
    mate-system-log \
    mate-system-monitor \
    mate-terminal \
    mate-themes \
    mate-user-admin \
    mate-user-guide \
    mozo \
    network-manager-applet \
    nm-connection-editor \
    p7zip \
    p7zip-plugins \
    pluma \
    seahorse \
    seahorse-caja \
    xdg-user-dirs-gtk

Installing LightDM

You can use MATE with the default GDM, but I have switched to lightdm on all of my machines. I don’t remember why at the moment, but I think it had something to do with wanting to be able to change the greeter…

Anyway, you can install lightdm with:

sudo dnf install lightdm-settings lightdm

That is also covered in the Rocky Linux instructions, but they don’t cover actually getting lightdm working:

sudo systemctl disable gdm
sudo systemctl enable lightdm

I generally reboot after all of this, to make sure that everything has properly taken effect.