Hello, first time posting on Mint forums (or any linux forum for that matter). Gnome 2 is the only desktop I've ever really been happy with so I'm really excited about MATE and have been working with it for a couple days trying to tweak it to make it work better for me. So I'm posting this to share a few things I've come up with so far. Some have for sure been mentioned in other posts on Mint forums but theres a couple I'm pretty sure I came up with on my own.
First an easy one, in Control Center there is no option to set up a screensaver. All you need to do is go into Software Manager and install xscreensaver. Theres a bunch of packages with extra goodies for it available as well if you like that sort of thing, I know I do. Installing this package gives you screensaver option in Control Center. When you first run it it will popup a dialog asking if you want to start it, go ahead a click yes. To make it run on startup, go to the Mint Menu-> All Applications(if your menu is on favorites) -> Preferences-> Startup Applications, click the add button. Put screen saver or whatever you want in the name field and in the command field type:
Now that left me happy enough to start with on my desktop so I turned my attention to the laptop. So once I had Mint 12 installed and my MATE session going I noticed the lack of battery/power controls. I found an acceptable (to me) solution for this on Mint Forums. In Software Manager install xfce4-power-manager, and add that to Startup Applications same as you did for xscreensaver. For the command field simply type:
So now I have my laptop in a more usable state. I log into a Gnome 3 session to see if i dislike it any less. Opinion hasn't changed so I switch back to MATE. I notice that it doesn't play the Mint startup sound which is so much better than other OS's startup sounds in my opinion and makes me smile everytime I turn on the computer. If you want it back you can add another entry to Startup Applications
and for the command add this line:
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/usr/bin/canberra-gtk-play --id="desktop-login" --description="GNOME Login"
Now I'm pretty pleased with my desktop, feeling good about trying to make this work instead of going back to an older distro, so I start poking around and at some point press the Print Scren key. This gives me an error saying that if tailed to execute 'mate-screenshot', no such file or directory. To fix this we make a symlink from gnome-screenshot to mate-screenshot, open a terminal and type this stuff:
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cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s gnome-screenshot mate-screenshot
Now when you press Print Screen you can take a screenshot just like normal.
Heres hoping that these few things will be helpful to some people or even better that they become uneccessary as MATE matures.
