Full Circle Magazine – Issue 11

Full Circle is a free monthly PDF magazine about Ubuntu. It’s always of very high quality and very nice to read. The last edition of Full Circle (Issue #11) talks about us and makes a comparison between Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Link: http://dl.fullcirclemagazine.org/issue11_en.pdf

Although the article is nice I would like to point out a few mistakes made by the author and add a few comments for the readers:

– The problem with codecs is not that they might be “illegal” in some countries, but that they might give reasons for people to make patents threats in some countries. So for instance, if you’re in the USA you’re not breaking the law by downloading the Main Edition, but if you happen to be a company or a magazine which is using or distributing Linux Mint Main Edition you’re taking a risk because patent owners can potentially make a case against you. So for this reason, we also provide another version of Linux Mint, called the Light Edition, which comes free of all patented technologies.

– MintDisk was great back in the times when distributions didn’t come with Read/Write access to NTFS. Now, it’s basically obsolete only for early Mint users to remember how great a tool it was and how unnecessary it has become. Same thing with mintConfig (although it’s still used by the XFCE Edition), it was great back in the times when Gnome didn’t have a control center… but it does now, so there’s no much need for MintConfig anymore. These tools were very popular in Bianca and Cassandra but they’re not even present in the current Daryna and they’re now discontinued as better alternatives have now been adopted. The 3 most popular Mint tools at the moment are mintMenu, mintUpdate and mintInstall.

– We’re very likely to support X86_64 in the upcoming Linux Mint 5 Elyssa. All mint tools were repackaged to be platform agnostic (http://packages.linuxmint.com/) so they should now work fine under 64bit and we’re planning to support both i386 and X86_64 in the future. The reason for this is not that we believe in better performance under X86_64 (we don’t) but simply to ensure that Linux Mint 5 (which is an LTS release) will stay compatible with most people’s hardware over the next three years… and guess how much RAM people will have in 3 years? Probably more than 4GB.

To conclude, I would like to thank Full Circle for mentioning us. It’s a very nice magazine and it’s great to see them talk about Mint.

5 comments

  1. Indeed Clem, indeed… Over the week-end, I had a chance to re-build my PC with a cheapo combo mobo+cpu+ram (Sempron 3000+)… It is an AMD64…

    I installed Debian Testing (amd64) from a netinst… I managed to install Opera & Skype with a bit of googling, and the Flash plugin was in the debian-multimedia repos, worked out-of-the-synaptic-box just fine…

    It feels faster because I now have a gig of ram (from 512 before)… But I don’t really feel any difference…

    I gave a long thought about installing any 32bit distro, but at the end, I thought I might as well learn how to deal with the amd64 challenge…

    I can’t wait to see Elyssa (élisa, élisa, élisa sautes-moi au cou…)

  2. Thanks a lot for this.
    Full Circle Magazine is really what i’ve been looking for for quite some time now.

    Concerning the Linux Mint review, while it is quite nice, i feel they don’t really make the readers _want_ to try Mint…

  3. 64 bits! LTS!

    I believe Elyssa will be the big deal for me! Ever since I started with Cassandra, I hoped you’d release a 64 bit version, because a lot of people that I recommended Linux Mint already had 4 GB of RAM and thus they did not want to try a 32 bit OS!

    Also since I started working in the IT sector in February and will begin my studies at university in october, I would really appreciate a LTS distribution for a productive system.

    Thanks so much! Perfect timing!

    Catze

  4. This looks like an okay font. Not that I have any choice you see. I can’t control the font and I cannot escape. I’m stuck in this place; able to move and think for myself, but having no control over anything. The words are not saying what I want them to say; they seem to have a mind of their own. I have visual pictures of my text; it comes out as different images. I cannot physically create the thoughts, I do it mentally. My hands motion as if typing but all I see and feel is nothingness. A great void, me as it’s epicenter; a dull-white room that is either small or vast, I cannot tell.
    —————-
    johnsmith

    Wide Circles

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