Thanks to the efforts of the MATE package maintainers for Debian MATE 1.8.1 is available in Debian Jessie (testing) and also Debian backports for Wheezy.

As a result of MATE 1.8.1 hitting the Debian testing repositories earlier this year, MATE 1.8.1 is also in the official archive for Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. The Ubuntu MATE team have recently created a MATE 1.8.1 PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr at the request of the Ubuntu Technical Board and also a MATE 1.8.1 PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

If you require MATE packages for Debian or Ubuntu then the package repositories above are the official repositories to use.

We’ve removed the package repositories hosted on mate-desktop.org because some were unsigned and others have not been maintained for many months. Therefore, as of now, the Debian and Ubuntu package repositories hosted on mate-desktop.org have been removed.

The openSUSE MATE team is proud to announce the availability of MATE 1.8 for openSUSE. The patterns are not available anymore, and won’t be in the future due to official inclusion of MATE in openSUSE. We can’t support openSUSE 12.2 anymore, MATE requirements are not provided in the right versions in that one. We have changed our schema of repositories, to avoid people having to change their repositories for each update. Now there is just one place, X11:MATE:Current.

To install it, please replace or add our repository:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/MATE:/Current/openSUSE_12.3/X11:MATE:Current.repo

After several weeks of review the application and selection period for the 2014 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is over. 4,420 students proposed a total of 6,313 projects for this summer. From those, 1,307 students have been accepted and the MATE Desktop project is one of the 190 Open Source projects that will be working with students this year.

In our second year as a GSoC mentor organisation the MATE team received 4 student proposals we were allocated 3 slots for student projects.

I’m delighted to introduce our GSoC students for 2014:

• Avishkar Gupta will be working on adding ePub rendering capabilities to Atril, the document viewer of the MATE desktop.
• Michal Ratajsky will be working on adding GStreamer 1.0 support into the MATE desktop environment in order to replace the dependency on the deprecated GStreamer 0.10 library.
• Alexander van der Meij will be working on improving Caja extensions so they can be integrated during runtime and also create a single user interface for Caja extension configuration.

Please join me in welcoming these new contributors to the MATE team and wish them every success with their respective projects for the summer.

On behalf on the entire MATE team I’d also like to extend our thanks and gratitude to openSUSE who are our GSoC organiser for 2014. They did a fantastic job in helping secure these GSoC placements for the MATE team that will provide much need development resources to the project.