Monthly Stats – February 2013

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Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Platinum Sponsors:
Blue Systems - Netrunner
Gold Sponsors:
Opera
VMware Cloud Hosting
Silver Sponsors:
Idera (formerly R1Soft)
Nothing in Particular Blog
ThinkPenguin.com
Bronze Sponsors:
Vault Networks *
AYKsolutions Server & Cloud Hosting
7L Networks Toronto Colocation *		 Community Sponsors:

To become a sponsor or to see the full list of Linux Mint sponsors, please visit: http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

Donations:

A total of $5,460 was raised thanks to the generous contributions of 213 donors:

  • $570 (9th donation), Mohammed A.
  • $321.92 (2nd donation), Richard G.
  • $257.53, Per S.
  • $100, Bob M.
  • $100, Magne L.
  • $100, Roland H.
  • $100, Shawn H.
  • $100, Jeffrey C. Drywater
  • $70, Christian G.
  • $64.38, Torben C.
  • $64.38, R L.
  • $64.38, Miguel A. A. L.
  • $64.38, Xaver G.
  • $51.51, Peter W.
  • $50 (41th donation), Slavoljub aka “slw”
  • $50 (35th donation), Matthew M.
  • $50 (4th donation), Engadine Cycles & Scooters aka “ECS“
  • $50 (2nd donation), Marcus M.
  • $50, ausmuso
  • $50, Massimo G.
  • $50, Leland O.
  • $50, Mike M.
  • $50, Konrad P.
  • $50, Federico R.
  • $50, Anthony L.
  • $50, Brett N.
  • $50, David K.
  • $50, Bruce P.
  • $40 (4th donation), Henk van C.
  • $40, xenoph
  • $40, Keith K.
  • $40, Jens M.
  • $40, C D. S. J.
  • $38.63 (36th donation), Olli K.
  • $38.63, Guillaume P.
  • $32.19 (3rd donation), Lars H.
  • $32.19 (2nd donation), Mark E.
  • $32.19 (2nd donation), Gerard V.
  • $32.19, Frank M.
  • $32.19, Bauke J. D.
  • $32.19, Aldo B.
  • $30 (3rd donation), Knut E. E. aka “Animoy”
  • $30, Philip E.
  • $25.75 (2nd donation), Oliver Anhuth
  • $25.75 (2nd donation), Iván B.
  • $25.75 (2nd donation), Ole P.
  • $25.75, Nicolas M.
  • $25.75, Niklas M.
  • $25.75, José R. L. B.
  • $25.75, Kirk J.
  • $25.75, Ikhwan H.
  • $25.75, Sergio C.
  • $25 (17th donation), Ronald W.
  • $25 (15th donation), John M.
  • $25 (3rd donation), Michael W.
  • $25 (2nd donation), Clyde D. aka “Lugh”
  • $25, Jon G.
  • $25, Lawrence Y.
  • $25, Brian M.
  • $25, Mark M.
  • $25, William E.
  • $25, Lorin Ricker
  • $25, Blake C.
  • $25, Joseph M.
  • $25, Steven S.
  • $25, Scott Anderson aka “lwarranty“
  • $25, Bryan F.
  • $25, Robert R.
  • $20 (24th donation), Tsuguo S.
  • $20 (3rd donation), Steven Campbell
  • $20 (2nd donation), Matt M.
  • $20, Christian D.
  • $20, John Bayles Pianos
  • $20, Hemant Karandikar aka “Hemant“
  • $20, Andrew I.
  • $20, Ken B.
  • $20, Frank M.
  • $20, Alan M.
  • $20, Billy M.
  • $20, Jamie L.
  • $20, KilUma
  • $20, James W.
  • $20, Tommy W.
  • $20, Jon G.
  • $20, Kurtis D.
  • $20, Antony P.
  • $20, Bryan P.
  • $19.31 (2nd donation), John Scott aka “‘Whitefort'”
  • $19.31, Daniel W.
  • $19, Istvan Sz.
  • $16.1, Maarten O.
  • $15.45, Jordi H.
  • $15 (6th donation), Geoff Perry
  • $15 (3rd donation), Zonic System General Trading – F.Z.E
  • $15, Brandon J.
  • $15, Gerald G.
  • $15, Max P.
  • $15, Mathew W.
  • $15, Dan R.
  • $15, J. H.
  • $15, Indarien’s G. T.
  • $15, iPhone & iPad apps
  • $12.88 (16th donation), Jarkko K.
  • $12.88 (2nd donation), Rene S.
  • $12.88 (2nd donation), Damien G.
  • $12.88 (2nd donation), Attila S.
  • $12.88, OH2GBA
  • $12.88, David A.
  • $12.88, Andrea L.
  • $12.88, Florival J.
  • $12.88, Jörn C. R.
  • $12.88, Richard M.
  • $12.88, Daniele P.
  • $12.88, Craig C. aka “NotoriousPyro“
  • $12.88, Raminder R.
  • $12.88, Nicolas B.
  • $12.88, Pavel S.
  • $12.88, Robert F.
  • $12.88, Bolko S.
  • $12.88, Robin K.
  • $12.88, Dominik K. aka “DrSky“
  • $12.88, Nick B.
  • $12.88, David E.
  • $12.88, Andreas L.
  • $12.88, Michael M.
  • $12.88, Dmytro K.
  • $12.88, Robert K.
  • $11.59, Tamas H.
  • $10.3, Mariusz K.
  • $10 (24th donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
  • $10 (5th donation), Michelle and Daniel Grady aka “Pug Masters”
  • $10 (4th donation), Tony W.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Kazuyoshi K.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Silvio Rainoldi aka “ianaz”
  • $10, GoToGiftBaskets
  • $10, José R. F.
  • $10, Anisurahiman M.
  • $10, Christopher S.
  • $10, Akmal F.
  • $10, Alexandre A.
  • $10, Nikke J.
  • $10, Carl B.
  • $10, Купалов К.
  • $10, Andrzej W.
  • $10, Theis Hinz
  • $10, Dominik M.
  • $10, Peter T.
  • $10, Juan R.
  • $10, Daniel E.
  • $10, Robert E.
  • $10, Cody S.
  • $10, Chien C. H.
  • $10, Davide R.
  • $10, Colleen T.
  • $10, Enzo R.
  • $10, Ewnix.net IRC Network aka “phlux“
  • $10, Thomas Z.
  • $10, Scott P.
  • $10, Wired For Sound, Inc.n
  • $10, David D.
  • $10, Stefan H.
  • $10, Dan P.
  • $10, Иван Ф.
  • $10, Christopher B.
  • $10, Sivavinan S.
  • $10, William B.
  • $10, Клюшнев И.
  • $10, Dadykin A.
  • $10, Manpreet S. Dhillon
  • $10, Robert B.
  • $9.14 (4th donation), Librestickers.com
  • $7.73 (5th donation), Kevin D.
  • $6.44 (13th donation), Marco aka “Dictionary-Maker“
  • $6.44, Josef K.
  • $6.44, Daniel N.
  • $6.44, Patrick R.
  • $6.44, John T.
  • $6.44, Julio P.
  • $6.44, Armand O.
  • $6.44, Power M. aka “Batterie“
  • $6.44, Soutarson P.
  • $6.44, Marco A.
  • $5.15, Madis Veskimeister
  • $5 (5th donation), Dan Jackson
  • $5 (4th donation), Leon
  • $5 (3rd donation), L M.
  • $5, Vladimír V.
  • $5, Tri M.
  • $5, John S.
  • $5, Reborn Dolls
  • $5, Kinyua W.
  • $5, Irmantas R.
  • $5, Duta I. P. P.
  • $5, Ryan B.
  • $5, Jason G.
  • $5, Coupon Code Swap
  • $5, Aquarius Musical Enterprises
  • $5, William G.
  • $5, IT Whizz aka “kateh273“
  • $5, Jose M. D. A.
  • $5, Stefano G.
  • $3.03 (4th donation), Louis Pilfold
  • $3 (10th donation), Web Design Company
  • $2.58 (2nd donation), Thomas S.
  • $11.78 from 9 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 3801 (1st)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 6,268th

Events:

Latest development:

Development is a lot of fun and it doesn’t take much to get started. If you’re tempted to join the team, don’t hesitate to follow our development on http://github.com/linuxmint and come and chat with the developers at #linuxmint-dev (irc.spotchat.org).

This month we’re giving you a preview of one of the new tools we developed for Linux Mint 15. It’s a new Mint tool and this one is called “mintSources”.

Until now Linux Mint used the upstream “Software Properties” tool developed by Ubuntu. Although it was working fine it wasn’t adapted to Linux Mint and it was heavily patched to work with our distribution. This created “technical debt” for our project and it prevented us from implementing solutions that were needed by Linux Mint (for instance, the ability to select mirrors for both the Ubuntu base and Mint repositories).

So a new tool was developed from scratch and was designed with derivatives in mind (primarily Linux Mint, but also LMDE, and our friends at Netrunner and Snow Linux).

From the main screen you can easily enable or disable optional components and gain access to backports, unstable packages and source code:

You can also switch to a faster mirror with one click of the mouse. The tool performs a speed-test of all available mirrors for you:

MintSources also lets you manage access to PPAs, which you can add easily by simply entering the name of the PPA.

You can of course manage additional repositories…

And manage your authentication keys (that’s only there for troubleshooting, since system repositories and keys are handled automatically and PPA keys are downloaded for you when you add a new PPA)

MintSources also has a “Maintenance” section which we use to place solutions to common problems.

The tool is now fully ready it will be included in Linux Mint 15. Of course there’s still one missing piece in the puzzle if we want to completely remove software-properties and that’s drivers management. LMDE already ships with DDM, the Ubuntu Software Properties tool can be reduced and repackaged into a standalone Drivers Manager, Jockey can raise from the grave or we can look into writing our own solution from scratch. It’s too soon to say which solution will be the best yet, but whatever happens we’ll pick the best one and we’ll get it all sorted in time for Linux Mint 15.

News and summary:

  • LMDE 201303 was approved. The stable release will be out this Friday.
  • MATE 1.5 and Cinnamon 1.7 were tested in QA conditions within Linux Mint 15 ALPHA ISOs. Both environments work well and are very close to feature completion. The team is working on fixing the bugs and finding all the little things that can be improved prior to their respective 1.6 and 1.8 releases.
  • mintMenu is being ported to MATE 1.6 and gsettings. These changes are required since MATE is getting lighter and deprecated some of its components (matecomponent, matecorba, mateconf..etc). The new mintMenu will  look exactly the same as before and it might be slightly faster to load. The team also took the opportunity to give mintMenu its own keybinding handling, which means key combinations such as Control + Super_L are no longer necessary and the menu can simply be open by pressing the Super_L (Windows) key.
  • Many thanks to our sponsors, partners, donors and all the people who supported us this month and who allowed us to work on Linux Mint.

24 comments

  1. This mintSources tool looks great. PPA management may really come in handy.

    mintMenu news sound good too. I didn’t quite understand one thing though: I already use Super_L as the hotkey, and it works fine with the current mintmenu-keybinder…

    Edit by Clem: mintMenu was previously using a keybinder written for deskbar. Now, I may be wrong on this because I wrote support for this years ago… but at the time you couldn’t use Super_L on its own with that binder. That’s why the default binding for mintmenu was CTRL+Super_L. Also that binder was in binary form (the mintmenu-keybinder package) so we’re happy to see it gone from a developer point of view. Michael Webster came up with the new binder so he might have more details on this.

    Reply

  2. Second that; MintSources looks great and looks set to reduce the number of users we get on the forums that need help with MergeList problems. Awesome!

    Edit by Clem: Yes, mergelists issues are now solved by a single click. The tool also should prevent the mismatch between sources (where Mint repositories are used with Ubuntu components or vice versa) and between codenames (where a PPA is used with the Mint codename instead of the Ubuntu one). And there’s also a button there to restore things to default so it should be easier for people to recover from APT problems, or at least for people to tell them how to do it now that they have this tool.

    Reply

  3. Finally, a decent solution for software sources. This looks considerably friendlier – I can’t wait to try it. 🙂

    A very cool Linux Mint tool would be mintRescue, available on live media.

    1. at boot, scan for partitions and installed operating systems
    2. if operating systems are found, check if a consistent boot loader exists
    3. if it doesn’t exist, show the mintRescue (or System Rescue) icon on the live desktop (available in mintMenu anyway)
    4. a simple GUI will display the list of installed operating systems and allow the user to restore he boot loader and choose the default operating system to boot

    I’m sure this is not as easy as it sounds but it would be awesome to have. 🙂 Also, I hope mintInstall will get a small update when possible. I don’t know if speed-ups are possible but at least the ratings should get fixed because the four-digit-ratings are not displayed correctly – long standing bug.

    Thanks for the great news! 🙂

    Reply

  7. In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical’s Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months.The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) on 25 April.

    and mint 15?

    Reply

  8. Details like the speed test for repositories are what set Mint apart. I’d expect the main buttons to include tooltips for switching users that may not have such Linux concepts crystal clear! Same for the maintenance buttons in particular. To me those sound like chinese.

    I’m left wondering, and please pardon my ignorance… why can’t the DDM UI be integrated into this tool? Yes! (user centric thought)

    Reply

  9. Awesome :-)Superb features. Can we think of integrating Software manager with PPA’s newly added in mintSources. What I am wondering is if add a development ppa for supertuxkart, will Mint Software Manager automatically show the latest version to install?

    Reply

  10. Has Cinnamon 1.7 tackled the notification area icons issue? For e.g.

    1. Icons that blink (Pidgin, on new messages) disappear
    2. Transmission icon has extra padding on both sides
    3. Tomboy icon has a reverse L shaped gray border; the gray border is a dead zone – clicking on it doesn’t do anything.

    Will mintSources make it into Mint 13?

    Reply

  11. Unfortunately, something seems to be severely wrong with the 32bit Cinnamon version’s Desktop.
    Running the Live-CD on muy Athlon XP-M based laptop with ATI RS100 (Radeon IGP320M), according to inxi -G: GLX Renderer Gallium 0.4 on softpipe GLX version 2.1 Mesa 8.04)) seems to be hogging CPU cycles like crazy. The cooling fan is running at full speed while the CPU still sweats at 81+̉̉̉°C and everything on the Desktop is as viscous as molasses.
    Typing something in a terminal windoe, clicking an icon or un/checking an option in a settings menu has a 5+ sec delay before anything at all happens.
    Switching to a console, things are normalizuing, with the fan slowing down and the CPU temp coming down to some 60°C.

    I also can’t manage to open the Network Settings from the panel icon in order to choose the WiFi router to connect to.

    This unfortunately once more shatters my hopes for Cinnamon to finally being usable for the first time on this laptop 🙁

    Reply

  12. @OS2User: Gallium 0.4 on softpipe? Isn’t that a software mode, w/o 3D acceleration? It’s alright for that mode to hog resources because of the heavy load on the CPU (and this CPU is weak by itself). I suggest trying some lighter desktop environment instead of Cinnamon.

    Reply

  13. I’m switching from Fedora, because the latest release has some heavy bugs with my installation – still I remain a Fedora and Gnome fan.
    Nevertheless ‘m pretty much impressed with Cinnamon, it’s really getting there!
    I was wondering where Mint could be heading in the future, if current Gnome apps in use become too much dependent on Gnome technology (like Totem, Brasero, Gedit and the impending dual menu paradigm, which is a good idea in itself for Gnome-Shell, but might end up weird in Cinnamon), as well as if Ubuntu components become more Ubuntu dependent? Have you considered to fork and mashup Totem+Parole, Brasero+Xfburn, Eog+Viewnior (ok, I know the latter has not been too active for the past year), etc?
    What will happen to LMDE after Wheezy gets released and later the new Testing branch becomes a minefield? Have you considered to have a look at “stabilizing tricks” like those used in Siduction?
    Oh, and LUKS+LVM would be great in LMDE. Have you considered implementing it?

    Anyway, keep up with the great work, and all the best! 🙂

    Reply

  15. @Monsta: afaik they use some scripts and enhanced packages to make a Sid-based distribution more stable (not as in rock-solid though, but still).

    Reply

  16. @zsolt: Ah, that’s probably something that’s needed for a constantly updated distro (as it’s Sid-based). LMDE already has Update Packs to provide stability (to some degree, of course).

    Reply

  19. @Guillermo P (cmt#8): Yes, DDM functionality can be integrated. However, DDM was created on LMDE (Debian base). Integration into LM 15 (Ubuntu base) would take additional programming and a bunch of testing. If I’m not mistaken, some progress in this area has been done (but obviously Clem is still deciding which is the best route to go). Also DDM (and DPM) are upstream.

    Hmm, in rereading your comment, I see that you are asking about the UI…which is a design choice…

    Reply

  20. @OS2User: this is not enough, actually. Almost every video card now supports 3D acceleration to some extent, but not every one supports the features needed by Cinnamon. And so it falls back to the software mode.
    Your card is 11 years old… and the CPU is from that era too. Unfortunately, I can only repeat my suggestion about trying a lighter desktop environment.

    Reply

  21. I was wondering if hot corner would best be turned off out of the box. While new users would have problems discovering the feature, lots of people in fact are clumsy, therefore are having problems with it. Furthermore, it seems the workspace switcher will out-of-the-box be switched off from Ubuntu 13.04 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/868423). This change in default settings brings credence to the idea of having the hot corner turned off on fresh installs.

    It is not just dad or grandma which are having problem with the feature being enabled, it is every other user for example aiming for the File menu, although opening workspace elements without for it having been wished in the prior.

    Reply

  22. Many a times, users add ppa’s or change the type (numbering) they need to suit a specific purpose.

    Adding ppa’s especially is often done to install some software not in the repo’s or to get updated versions, also for themes and icon packs.

    These accumulate in the other software section under software sources preferences. They might not go away if the ppa’s are not removed even when software is uninstalled and cause mintupdate to take time and have many failed entries.

    Also, a layman might not remember what he/she added.

    Please keep a button in the software sources to reset it to the initial installation. Would be helpful, especially for not so new newbies.

    If possible, it could also be a ‘Clear unused PPA’s’ if losing out on updates is a concern.

    I had posted this as an idea and was suggested to also post it here on the blog for @Clem, hence doing the same.

    Thanks

    Reply

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