desktop choice on Fedora 17 (was Re: A Look at Fedora 18)

[Tim]

***  I'll remind people that my tangential offshoot of this
     thread is with Fedora 17.  ***


Allegedly, on or about 18 January 2013, David sent:
> You will not be offered a choice of desktops unless you have more than
> one installed. From the way you describe what you have done you do not
> have the Mate desktop installed. Just a few pieces of it. Look here.
> 
> yum grouplist

Installed Groups:
   Administration Tools
   Design Suite
   Development Tools
   Dial-up Networking Support
   Editors
   Fonts
   GNOME Desktop Environment
   Games and Entertainment
   Graphical Internet
   Graphics
   Hardware Support
   Input Methods
   Java
   Legacy Fonts
   Mail Server
   Milkymist
   Network Servers
   Office/Productivity
   Printing Support
   Robotics
   Server Configuration Tools
   Sound and Video
   System Tools
   Text-based Internet
   Window Managers
   X Window System
Available Groups:
   Authoring and Publishing
   Base
   Books and Guides
   Cloud Infrastructure
   Clustering
   DNS Name Server
   Development Libraries
   Directory Server
   Dogtag Certificate System
   Educational Software
   Electronic Lab
   Engineering and Scientific
   FTP Server
   Fedora Eclipse
   Fedora Packager
   Font design and packaging
   GNOME Software Development
   Haskell
   Java Development
   KDE Software Compilation
   KDE Software Development
   LXDE
   Legacy Network Server
   Legacy Software Development
   LibreOffice Development
   Medical Applications
   MeeGo NetBook UX Environment
   MinGW cross-compiler
   MySQL Database
   News Server
   OCaml
   Perl Development
   PostgreSQL Database
   Ruby
   Somali Support
   Sugar Desktop Environment
   Virtualization Client
   Web Development
   Web Server
   Windows File Server
   X Software Development
   XFCE Software Development
   Xfce
Done

No sign of Mate, in either list.  Nonetheless, I tried the following:

> yum groupinstall "Mate Desktop"  (note the quote marks)

And got the response I expected:

Warning: Group Mate Desktop does not exist.
No packages in any requested group available to install or update

By the way, lots of mirrors seem to be non-responsive, this morning.  It
took quite some time for either command line to complete.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.6.11-1.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Dec 17 22:16:35 UTC 2012 x86_64

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point
trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the
public lists.