CentOS - Dec 2020 - Oracle Linux 8 - short experiment with install and basic setup of Mate Desktop

So after reading other folks' opinions of an Oracle Linux 8 (thanks again,
Nicolas!) trial installation, I decided to crank up a Virtual Box session and
try an install myself.

As others have stated, what you get when you install OL8 is identical in every
way to what you see when installing Centos 8; literally the only difference is
the logo and the default desktop background.   There are no demands for
registration or anything else when you install OL8.  It's exactly the same
experience as installing Centos 8.

Since I use Mate on my computers (installed from
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/stenstorp/MATE/ ) I immediately decided
to see if I can get that going.

I ran into two small issues, both easily dealt with.

First, the PowerTools repo doesn't seem to exist under that name on OL8. 
It's called ol8_codeready_builder, for some reason. "dnf-config-manager
--set-enabled ol8_codeready_builder" works fine and gets us where we need
to be.

A slightly more serious issue is that the oracle-epel, found through the rpm
named oracle-epel-release-el8, appears to be less complete that the original
Fedora epel found at
https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm.  Mate
requires ImageMagick as a dependency for caja-image-converter and if you have
oracle-epel installed it can't find ImageMagick.

The solution (at least the solution that I used, which worked) is just to delete
the oracle-epel-release-el8 rpm and install epel-release-latest-8 rpm instead.

Then the Mate desktop can be installed on OL8 from the copr rpms listed above.

Ultimately, the take-away here seems to be that if you decide to use OL8 instead
of Centos 8 you'll be better advised to stick with "real" epel and
not the oracle epel since there appears to be at least some stuff missing on the
oracle epel.

After I jumped through those minor hoops, what I ended up with was an Oracle
Linux 8 installation with a Mate desktop and literally everything looks and
works identical to what I already have with Centos 8.

(An issue that I haven't seen anyone address yet is this.  It's my
understanding that epel builds their stuff on the current RHEL.  Therefore the
upcoming Centos Stream might get out-of-sync with whatever epel is building on
at any given point in time.)

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Le 13/12/2020 ? 05:30, Frank Cox a ?crit :
> So after reading other folks' opinions of an Oracle Linux 8 (thanks
again,
> Nicolas!) trial installation, I decided to crank up a Virtual Box session
> and try an install myself.
I've made a few corrections to the article. If there's enough demand, I
could
translate it into english:

https://blog.microlinux.fr/migration-centos-oracle-linux/

Thanks for the heads-up for EPEL. I'll look into that.

Cheers,

Niki

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