How to install Cinnamon and MATE from non GUI distro?

[msmafra]

What are Cinnamon dependencies hen you are installing it from scratch, like installing it from a non GUI distro like Ubuntu Server?
I want to do the same with MATE.
I just want to make two simple distros one with MATE and the other with Cinnamon, without any other GUI. How can I do that?

For me would be better to use Mint but I don't know which packages to remove to keep only Cinnamon or only MATE.
I really prefer to use Mint (I use it in my notebook) but I don't know why, Ubuntu is booting much faster them Mint, actually is presenting the Desktop much faster, meaning that the whole process is, again, faster. Mint is a much more friendly distribution I think Ubuntu with its hateful Unity GUI is going to die.
I use Gnome 3, it has its problems but is a billion times better than Unity and is not as obstructive and time consuming as Unity.

[xenopeek]

You can find the packages and sources of Cinnamon and MATE for the next release, here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/list.php?release=Maya

Cinnamon requires at least Gnome 3 (it sits on top of Gnome 3). MATE is a fork of Gnome 2, so it carries a lot of libraries itself (see above link) and like Gnome 3 will require X to run. There will a be a lot of (cascading) dependencies from these packages. Not an easy answer I think, but your package manager should handle the dependencies if you install the .deb file. You can investigate the dependencies of the .deb file, or look at the source, but this only tells you what packages Cinnamon or MATE are depending on, not what those packages in turn are depending on, and so on...

[squeezy]

I've done this quite a few times already. Either DE brings in all the deps it needs. For Cinnamon simply install the package "cinnamon". For MATE install the package "mate-desktop-environment".

I have not had to install Gnome 3 before installing Cinnamon. You do have to bring in a couple of basic things like the gnome-terminal package. I outlined some of my Cinnamon adventures in another post that I'll find and link. MATE is a complete and very polished DE at this time, more so than Cinnamon. Cinnamon seems to have a few more rough edges.

I'd highly recommend starting with a Debian base vs Ubuntu server. I use a Squeeze 6.0.3 Live ISO to start my installs. I have the version that just installs a basic shell environment. The Live ISO is a great Debian package to start with as it's designed to be burnt to a CD or USB stick using something like Unetbootin. Much easier to use than many other Debian installers. 10 minutes to install, then change the sources to what you want and away you go. I've used both Debian wheezy or Mint LMDE repos as sources, I can post my source files and preference pinnings if you'd like.

Regardless of the main repos I use, I always include the Mint packages repo so I can get the great font rendering Mint and Ubuntu have, plus I like to use the MDM login manager that's only found there AFAIK. Installing this brings in all the X stuff you'll need, too.

EDIT: Here's the thread where were talking about running pure MATE and Cinnamon desktops. viewtopic.php?f=200&t=99741&start=20

The thread is about running an LMDE-Stable setup but about halfway down this page we branched off into this topic.

One thing I'll add to my info above re: MATE, I found recently that I could not use the repo from packages.mate-desktop.org when using the Mint LMDE sources. There must have been enough updates in the MATE repo to make it incompatible with Mint's snapshot of Debian testing. I haven't tried Mint's MATE packages against Debian testing either as I tended to prefer the newer packages in the packages.mate-desktop.org repo. However, I just built a MATE box yesterday using purely Mint sources that is really running sweetly. Everything works together so well. It's a testamint (<- that's a pun ) to Mint's UP philosophy.