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LMDE:

  • We’re currently addressing the “Black Screen of Death” bug and re-spinning the 32-bit ISO which is likely to be released sometime this week as “201101” to avoid confusion with the current ISO. This bug is preventing many people from running the live CD.

Servers:

  • The forums were moved to a new Cloud Server running Debian in 64-bit. Among other advantages, this allows us to “resize” the server and add or remove RAM to it remotely in less than 10 minutes. We’re currently experimenting for 3 days with different amounts of RAM to decide how much to allocate to the server and to reach the perfect balance between performance and cost. The servers were running successfully with 8GB RAM yesterday. They’re running with only 2GB RAM today and they’ll be using 4GB RAM tomorrow.
  • The Community Website is now running on its own in our Canadian server in Toronto.
  • We lost our development and testing server in London.
  • A second Cloud Server was allocated to host our public archive (which was previously in London).

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Linux Mint Debian (201012/201101)

What a better time than Christmas to bring all the best from 2010 into an updated release of Linux Mint Debian.

  • All Mint 10 features
  • 64-bit support
  • Performance boost (using cgroup, the notorious “4 lines of code better than 200” in user-space)
  • Installer improvements (multiple HDDs, grub install on partitions, swap allocation, btrfs support)
  • Better fonts (Using Ubuntu’s libcairo, fontconfig and Ubuntu Font Family) and language support (ttf-wqy-microhei, ttf-sazanami-mincho, ttf-sazanami-gothic installed by default)
  • Better connectivity and hardware support (pppoe, pppoeconf, gnome-ppp, pppconfig, libgl1-mesa-dri, libgl1-mesa-glx, libgl1-mesa-dev, mesa-utils installed by default)
  • Better sound support (addressing conflicts between Pulse Audio and Flash)
  • Updated software and packages

If you’re new to LMDE, welcome to Linux Mint Debian. Enjoy the release, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone!

Important links

LMDE in brief

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a rolling distribution based on Debian Testing.
  • It’s available in both 32 and 64-bit as a live DVD with a Gnome desktop.
  • The purpose of LMDE is to look identical to the main edition and to provide the same functionality while using Debian as a base.

FAQ

1. Is LMDE compatible with Ubuntu-based Linux Mint editions?

No, it is not. LMDE is compatible with Debian, which isn’t compatible with Ubuntu.

2. Is LMDE fully compatible with Debian?

Yes, 100%. LMDE is compatible with repositories designed for Debian Testing or Debian Squeeze.

3. What is a rolling distribution?

LMDE constantly receives updates. Its ISO images are updated now and then but users do not require to re-install it on their systems.

4. How does LMDE compare to the Ubuntu-based editions?

Pros:

  • You don’t need to ever re-install the system. New versions of software and updates are continuously brought to you.
  • It’s faster and more responsive than Ubuntu-based editions.

Cons:

  • Although it’s using Romeo for unstable packages, LMDE continuously changes as it receives updates and new software. Compared to a frozen version of Linux Mint which changes very little once it’s publicly released, it’s not as stable. Things are likely to break more often but fixes can also come quicker. For this reason, LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT.
  • Debian is a less user-friendly/desktop-ready base than Ubuntu. Expect some rough edges.
5. Will it come with KDE or other desktops?

The decision wasn’t made yet. When it’s fully on par with the Main Edition and if there is a demand for it, further editions will come for LMDE.

Additional notes:

  • About the installer: The live installer is developed from scratch with Debian in mind. It’s configurable and it can be re-used by other Debian-based distributions. We noticed a lack in live technologies and in live Debian installers, so we’re happy to take the lead on this. If you’re a developer and you’re interested in using it, have a look at its source repository and don’t hesitate to contact us so we can help you fork it and merge upcoming changes between our two projects.
  • About bugs: Please use Launchpad for bug reports.
  • About the media: It comes as a liveDVD. Locales work differently in Debian and the package base requires more space. We made LMDE compatible with unetbootin though, so you can install it using a USB stick.
  • Dedicated chat room: #linuxmint-debian is open to LMDE users on irc.spotchat.org.

Download links:

Our forums go down regularly these days due to an increase in traffic and activity within the community. Our servers couldn’t deal at all with the recent release of Linux Mint 10 and this made it hard for many people to download the ISO files the day of the release. If you can’t access the website, please use the links below to get access to our HTTP download mirrors and torrent files.

Md5 sum:

  • 32-bit*:  daeabb182b016cd62bfced5483441b5a
  • 64-bit:  1284feca2dff0ec76c6be6825a71f9b7

Torrents:

HTTP Mirrors for the 32-bit ISO*:

HTTP Mirrors for the 64-bit ISO:

* An issue was addressed in the 32-bit ISO and a new re-spin was made available under the name “201101”. For more information about this re-spin please read this blog post.

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Our server in Canada was fine-tuned for the database to allow more connections and use larger buffers. The connection timeout was also reduced to a value of 60 seconds and multiple indexes were added to our database schema. This should make the forums and community website more reliable than before and prevent them from going down as they did recently. The performance should be relatively the same, but any query taking longer than 60 seconds will now be dropped with a timeout.We appreciate the feedback. If you experience any problems with the community website and forums in the upcoming days, please do let us know.

On an unrelated note, I’ve been invited to talk on the Linux Link Tech Show tonight. I really enjoyed it the last time around but I’m always a little nervous when it comes to being on a podcast, especially as this one is Live. It’s a great opportunity to chat about Linux and Linux Mint in particular though, so if you’re around at 8:30pm EST, don’t hesitate to tune in. Then it’s up to you really if you want to cheer me up or throw really hard questions at me. Coming up next, late 2010-early 2011, I’ll also be talking on mintCast and FLOSS Weekly. Here’s the live streaming and IRC information for tonight’s show: http://www.tllts.org/livestreaminfo.php