Gene,
Haha, reading your posts made me want to join in just for fun.
As I had a few Debian partitions and LMDE-Sid-gnome, I would just create one partition just to play with LMDE-testing-gnome and add Mate to see how that goes.
Started from LMDE iso on 201109 so that it is fresh, not going to be affected by gnome3 ( just hope
)
Installation when OK, as usually, but worried about d-u breakages.
Now I change repos to what I read from Steve on some posts and d-u. well, 857 packages
took very long to download, then in the middle of upgrade, it just does not proceed and suddenly return to root prompt!.. I thought testing should have been more stable and less playful than Sid...
got stuck, did a few rounds of d-u, got all sort of problems,
finally got to gdm3 but without icon and cannot login.
got to command prompt again, this time use aptitude to d-u, haha, luck on my side, it provides an option to delete the gstream...bad...deb and another one so as to clear the dependencies.
after some 5-7 reboot, d-u ( the longest in history
)
Finally I got similar to what look like standard Gnome2 with top panel.
I choose not to install mintmenu
after reading your posts
Install Mate per zerozero and your posts. went OK. now I have a running LMDE-Testing-Mate running on
kernel 3.1.0-1-amd64
So far so good, very snappy,
file manager is
Caja 2011.11.10
ff is 5.0...have not install iceweasel 8 yet.
default fonts as you already know, kind of bad. so did a bit of change on appearance to get it nicer for aging pair of eyes...
change theme to Shiki-wise... so it is nice now..
start to play...
lmde64testmate wayne # apt-cache policy gnome-session gnome-shell
gnome-session:
Installed: 3.0.2-3
Candidate: 3.0.2-3
Version table:
*** 3.0.2-3 0
500
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
gnome-shell:
Installed: 3.0.2-8
Candidate: 3.0.2-8
Version table:
*** 3.0.2-8 0
500
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
lmde64testmate wayne #
EDIT: may be should also change testing to Sid??