Mate is a forked and rebranded version of gnome 2 distributed with Linux Mint 13 'Maya'.
Here are the files for a simple mate + xmonad session, where we fire up a mate session but replace the windowmanager with xmonad.
Getting things to work under Mate seems mostly straight forward. The one painful step required is to port the XMonad.Contrib.Gnome module across to Mate, since Mate has renamed all of Gnome's internals to be called by new names. The ported version of this configuraiton module is included inlined into the xmonad.hs file included.
Makefile
xmonad.desktop
xmonad.hs
xmonad-mate.desktop
The mateconf-2 step in the Makefile seems to be broken. Perhaps it doesn't work properly when run via sudo. The command seems to work fine when bashed directly into the terminal...
git clone git://github.com/fcostin/xmonad_and_mate.git
cd xmonad_and_mate
sudo make
The default target of the included Makefile will install xmonad packages as necessary using apt, copy the configuration files to the correct places, and recompile the xmonad settings. This will clobber any existing settings you may have if they are in place. You might want to inspect the Makefile first.
Hit alt+space to cycle through layouts. Hit alt+tab to change window. Hit alt+1 ... alt+9 to switch to workspace 1 ... 9. Hit alt+shift+1 ... alt+shift+9 to send the active window to the specified workspace. Hit alt+shift+enter to open a new mate_terminal. Hit alt+p for the run program dialog. Hit alt+shift+q to logout. Have fun.
Despite the file manager nautilus being renamed to caja, and gconftool-2 renamed to mateconftool-2, we can still issue an equivalent command to disable the desktop:
mateconftool-2 -s /apps/caja/preferences/show_desktop false --type boolean
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Spencer Janssen, for the XMonad.Config.Gnome module. You can download a .tar.gz of the source from http://xmonad.org/download.html as part of the xmonad-contrib package.
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Mark Hansen, for this blog post http://markhansen.co.nz/xmonad-ubuntu-lucid/