The Mint Newsletter – issue 65

* News about Mint

Linux Mint 5 Fluxbox released!

Work on Mint 6 has started and we hope to release soon after Intrepid (main and 64 bits)

* News about Linux

Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution

Ubuntu explains OpenOffice.org 3.0 decision

Why is openSUSE released on Thursdays

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

56 Arrested in DarkMarket Sting, Says FBI “Leading illegal site” was the FBI

New Data Privacy Laws Set For Firms in some states in the US

Interpol wants facial recognition database to catch suspects

UK slows down plan for sweeping electronic surveillance

Microsoft patents speech censoring

Class action suit alleges Google company profits from “typosquatting” sites

Off-grid data centre powered by tidal energy planned for Scotland

EU to stick age ratings on the Internet

Open source license violations manual published

Botnets on cell phones in 2009?

Microsoft is releasing an “emergency patch” on Thursday October 23 – must be really serious

* Hardware news

Scientists Create the Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element There seems to have been some development just recently but no link found

Scientist turns to ink-jet printer for a new heart – the previous newsletter had a similar news item – a new trend?

Via Nano Processor Proclaimed The Best CPU for Cryptography

Likely Cause of Intel e1000e Bug Discovered

* Trivia and other links

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

Home page

Blog The planet Wiki Forum

* Editors comment

As always – if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me – you can post a comment.

Enjoy life

Husse

16 comments

  1. Wow I followed the link on OOo3’s exclusion from the latest Ubuntu release. Seems like quite the controversy is a-brewing.

    Great and informative newsletter – as always.

  2. I just wonder whether it’s possible for the developing team to do anything about experience with Mint 5 – especially the frequently reported difficulties with boot failures and Busybox?

    I’ve had no trouble since the suggested amendment of the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, replacing “splash” by “all_generic_ide floppy=off irqpoll”

    It would be nice to see an explanation of this somewhere – it was suggested by Ryawn in a reply dated 16th July 2008 to my “About Busybox” in the Newbies forum. One mistake in that refers to the filename as menu.list; it is in fact menu.lst. The topic is now labelled “About Busybox – Solved”.

  3. Another one of the bees in my bonnet!

    Somewhere in the forums I’ve mentioned this: “Special ALT Characters” are very useful – see http:\\tedmontgomery.com/tutorial/ALTchrc.html.

    Any chance of this being available in Felicia? This facility includes many items which are not in Character Map.

    It’s copyright 1998 but my guess is that the author might now be happy to assign a licence for Open Source use.

  4. “I just wonder whether it’s possible for the developing team to do anything about experience with Mint 5 – especially the frequently reported difficulties with boot failures and Busybox?”

    Well, I think that if it’s solved in Ubuntu 8.10 then we won’t have to bother the team. Has anyone encountered this error in Intrepid?

  5. “I just wonder whether it’s possible for the developing team to do anything about experience with Mint 5 – especially the frequently reported difficulties with boot failures and Busybox?”

    This error still exists in Intrepid Ibex (Google says so) so I’m afraid we will have to fight with it on uor own since it hasn’t been fixed for such a long time.

  6. boot failures and Busybox
    This is a problem with the kernel and a few combinations of hardware
    To that is added some more Mint/Ubuntu specific problems with tha graphics system

  7. Thanks for limited enlightenment, Husse.

    When Felicia is ready, would it be a good idea to include advice about this in the Release Notes? Any details about particularly vulnerable hardware configurations?

    The changed kernel line (See 11 above) results in a scripted boot process which might confuse some users. Similarly Quit produces a scripted shut-down which can look quite alarming.

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