MATE on Debian Stable (wheezy)

[guy]

So then I thought, let's be brave (for me), before upgrading to Jesse I'd try upgrading my poor broken Wheezy desktop. So I sort of followed the advice on LinuxG, but instead of sudoing all the time I opened a root shell and did:

$ add-apt-repository 'deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/debian wheezy main'
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install mate-archive-keyring
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-extra

Very nice, just a couple of issues:

First, the MATE desktop help is broken, I am getting "package not installed" type messages. Any ideas on how to fix that? Specifically, I want to move the bottom panel to the top of the screen.

Secondly, in the synaptic Software Sources dialog (Settings > Repositories) the tabs and most of the tabsheet contents are white text on a pale grey background, quite unreadable. A few tabsheets have patches of black text. Any ideas on what options to change to get black text throughout, and where/how to access those option settings?

Plan B is to try installing the more recent Jessie instead but if it suffers the same issues I'll still need answers.

[guy]

After a bit of fiddling:

Text colour problem solved with a change of theme.

Panels moved by [Alt]-Left-drag.

Still no desktop help though. Hopefully I won't need it anyway, the MATE desktop is intuitive enough for a bit of fiddling to resolve these things, I had almost forgotten what that feels like. It's good.

[nelz]

Which missing package is it complaining about? It may be looking for Yelp, the GNOME help browser.

[guy]

Which missing package is it complaining about? It may be looking for Yelp, the GNOME help browser.

It just says something at help:mate[whatever] is not installed.

[guy]

And this morning, DISASTER! After powering up and logging in the "busy" pointer whirls away and hangs. I can still log in to GNOME Classic, but MATE has exploded. Any ideas?

[lok1950]

Have you checked xsession errors?

Enjoy the Choice