SOLVED - Installing Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce concurrently

[woodsman]

Hi All,

We are assembling an LMDE demo computer for users to test and experiment. We want to concurrently install Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce.

As LMDE is offered as a live disk with only Cinammon or Mate, we are hoping to find a nice how-to about all required packages to pull. Querying the package manager seems to be a hit-and-miss way of trying to ensure we install all the necessary packages.

Any suggestions how best to proceed?

Thanks.

Edit: I should add that although we are Linux users, we are new to Mint and Debian.

[dclement]

I've done this (2 DE only) on a PC which was 1st set up with Mate (2013 ISO, already without XFCE): I added XFCE afterwards with the package xfce4-session. I did have to add some XFCE utilities that I missed, but I believe it would be just fine for a quick test. Note that the packages names vary a little: so you would have to add
- xfce4-session (because XFCE is no longer in the LMDE ISOs)
and one of
- cinnamon-session (and probably cinnamon-session-common)
- mate-session-manager
(depending on which ISO you selected).

HTH, Daniel

[py-thon]

I read somewhere that installing Mate and Cinnamon parallel does not work because of version conflicts.
Why don't you install 3 independent versions of LMDE and decide when booting? There is usually enough space on the HDD and for demo purposes this has the advantage of showing the "intended" programs for the DE (for example Caja, Nemo and Thunar). If one installation has all the DEs users will mix everything up and not understand the differences.

[woodsman]

After a nominal review, we are going to ignore Xfce. The differences in system resource usage between Mate and Xfce are not enough to worry us. Mate provides the same functionality, probably more.

I discovered mint-meta-debian-cinnamon and mint-meta-debian-mate packages, which I think goes toward installing both desktops when starting with one Live DVD or the other. We need to experiment more with that.

Regarding conflicts, we haven't tested extensively, but thus far the only conflicts we notice are a handful of duplicates in the menus, but that might have been caused by our own newbie approach to installing both desktops. We are still learning how to use Debian tools while concurrently learning how Mint is distinct from Debian.

Overall I am finding myself comfortable with both Cinnamon and Mate, despite the two desktops being nominally different in several areas. We want most users to have the option of either desktop, although some with older hardware and the lack of 3D hardware acceleration will have Mate installed.

Mutli-boot is an option for the demo system, but ideally in the end we want to install both desktops and let users decide. For the demo we also might boot into one desktop and run a VM with the other desktop so users can more easily compare the differences.

Thanks for the help.

[clfarron4]

Install MATE first and then install the cinnamon package. After that, you can configure Cinnamon to run with mate-terminal, pluma and what not.

[woodsman]

Install MATE first and then install the cinnamon package. After that, you can configure Cinnamon to run with mate-terminal, pluma and what not.

I was going to attempt that next. I had already tried the reverse.

[woodsman]

First installing the LMDE Mate Live DVD and then manually installing the Cinnamon packages is working well.

Some nominal caveats:

A few items will appear twice in the menus. Editing the menus for the preferred app of each desktop resolves the duplication.

A couple of items in the Cinnamon menu don't run. For example, the Terminal menu option. The resolution is install gnome-terminal and then update the menu for duplication.

Both are decent desktops but Cinnamon 2.0 seems polished. The larger selection of applets and desklets is nice too. Looking forward to Cinnamon 2.2 and Mate 1.8 in the next Update Pack.

[clfarron4]

A couple of items in the Cinnamon menu don't run. For example, the Terminal menu option. The resolution is install gnome-terminal and then update the menu for duplication.

You can set these to use the MATE equivalents using the menu editor and dconf-editor, completely removing the need to install the gnome packages. I've done this.