Well, its no surprise after Ubuntu 12.04 came out, many wanted the old gnome2 like interface back. Some would have tried the gnome classic option in 12.04, or some like me would have tried installing mate – the original fork of gnome2 project.
Chances are there with multiple WMs running, your Mate will have problems applying themes. And when you launch the System->Preferences-Appearance you would get an error message as shown below.
Unable to start the settings manager ‘mate-settings-daemon’.
Without the MATE settings manager running, some preferences may not take effect. This could indicate a problem with DBus, or a non-MATE (e.g. KDE) settings manager may already be active and conflicting with the MATE settings manager
Fix is simple and its explained in these posts http://forums.mate-desktop.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=175 and https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-session-manager/issues/2.
Backup the below files before editing them.
#Replace the contents to the one as shown below.
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Mate Settings Daemon
Exec=/usr/bin/mate-settings-daemon
OnlyShowIn=MATE;
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=Initialization
X-GNOME-Autostart-Notify=true
X-GNOME-AutoRestart=true
#Next file
#Replace the exec line as shown below
Exec=/usr/bin/mate-settings-daemon –no-daemon &
Now save these files and reboot. Note: I have not tried to check if other WMs (classic, unity) will work after applying the above method, so try it at your own risk. For now I only needed MATE to be a ‘working’ desktop manager.
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Removing the non-English names worked for me with Linux 17.1.
Thanks!
I think the problem isn’t in “gnome-settings-daemon.desktop” it’s in “mate-settings-daemon.desktop”.
The above works OK as a hack, but you are better off editing the mate-settings-daemon.desktop file instead. There’s an error somewhere in all the name[]= statements for the various languages, causing the rest to fail. I just deleted them all, and everything now works fine. No need to touch gnome-settings.
Changing settings within Mate now works as well (it will still give you an error if you edit gnome-settings instead).
My file at “/etc/xdg/autostart/mate-settings-daemon.desktop” now looks like this:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=MATE Settings Daemon
Exec=/usr/bin/mate-settings-daemon
OnlyShowIn=MATE;
X-MATE-Autostart-Phase=Initialization
X-MATE-Autostart-Notify=true
X-MATE-AutoRestart=true
@acerimusdux – thanks for that tip, simply deleting non-English name statements (and rebooting) worked for me too on Mint Petra (16) Mate. (owing to the apparent need for a reboot I didn’t bother trying to narrow down the problem any further)
Removing non-English names (plus reboot) worked for me under Linux Mint Debian, thank you so much!
Work like a cham. Thank you very much 🙂
Welcome
I followed all instructions but found no solution. Finally I disabled autologin, then it worked.
Great ! Thank you.
Great thanx – works well
Hi,
many thanks for this information. It helped me to fix this issue. But instead of changing the whole configuration of “gnome-settings-daemon.desktop” and risking the loss of functions in Gnome and Unity ( I also didn’t test this, but I still wanted to have Gnome and Unity working after the change) I just added “MATE”:
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;MATE;
This works well with my Ubuntu with Gnome, Unity and Mate.
I hope this is helpfull
thx for the hint