by ·10 Comments

Donations & Sponsorships:

Many thanks to the following donors and sponsors for financially supporting Linux Mint:

Donors:

  • $200 (3rd donation), Terry Mansfield aka “tmansfield” (USA)
  • $127, Thomas L. (Germany)
  • $127, funkajja (Germany)
  • $101 (4th donation), Robert D B. (USA)
  • $100 (2nd donation), Andrew Grace aka “crushedbyadwarf” (USA)
  • $100 (2nd donation), Richard M. (Canada)
  • $100, About Canada (Canada) – http://www.aboutcanada.ca
  • $100, Mogens Andersen (Sweden)
  • $100, Josep B. A. (Spain)
  • $100, Richard Z. (USA)
  • $100, Stefan G. (Norway)
  • $100, Bjorn N. (Norway)
  • $100, Wei-chien H. (USA)
  • $100, Robin C. (USA)
  • $63 (4th donation), Eric H. (Germany)
  • $63 (3rd donation), Frans Van O. (Netherlands)
  • $60, Trenton Isaacson aka “Mr_Shifty” (USA) – http://linuxcritic.wordpress.com
  • $50 (6th donation), Jonathan B H. (USA)
  • $50 (3rd donation), Barry Patterson (United Kingdom) – http://www.redsandstonehill.net
  • $50 (2nd donation), Eugene C. (USA)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Andrew Grace aka “crushedbyadwarf” (USA)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Mark B. (Australia)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Peter S. (Australia)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Gary M. (USA)
  • $50, Malcolm B. (USA)
  • $50, Mark A. (USA)
  • $50, Nora Elisabeth F. (Norway)
  • $50, Anthony L. (Australia)
  • $50, Nathan H. (United Kingdom)
  • $50, Adrian S. (United Kingdom)
  • $50, David W. (USA)
  • $50, James L Bowen (USA)
  • $50, Christian Porter (USA)
  • $50, Nyan W. (South Africa)
  • $50, Bruce R. (United Kingdom)
  • $50, Victor Skovorodnikov aka “victorsk” (Canada) – http://www.victorskovorodnikov.com
  • $50, Louis P. (USA)
  • $50, F. Reinbold Translations (Spain)
  • $38, Richard C. (Germany)
  • $38, Jan S. (Denmark)
  • $32 (6th donation), Philippe W. (Switzerland)
  • $32, Nils G. (Belgium)
  • $32, Graham C. (United Kingdom)
  • $32, Holger H. (Germany)
  • $30 (7th donation), Pete Molina aka “pmolina” (USA)
  • $30 (2nd donation), Bevan Hay (Australia)
  • $30, David deSouza-Kirby (United Kingdom) – http://www.g3vfp.org
  • $30, Dominic M. (USA)
  • $27 (3rd donation), Olli K. (Finland)
  • $25 (10th donation), Manuel F. (Portugal)
  • $25 (8th donation), Francisco C. C. (Spain)
  • $25 (5th donation), Dan B. (USA)
  • $25 (2nd donation), Tim B. (USA)
  • $25 (2nd donation), John M. (USA)
  • $25 (2nd donation), Happy Nerds Workshop (USA)
  • $25 (2nd donation), Dominik H. (Germany)
  • $25, John Abbott aka “FewClues” (USA)
  • $25, John S. (USA)
  • $25, James S. (USA)
  • $25, Terry H. (USA)
  • $25, Sergi S. S. (Spain)
  • $25, Eric J. (France)
  • $25, Charlene Craig (USA)
  • $25, John S. (USA)
  • $25, Julian D. (USA)
  • $25, Georg B. (Belgium)
  • $25, Jozef M. (United Kingdom)
  • $25, Michael D. (Canada)
  • $25, Jonathan B Alden aka “briggs_1978” (USA)
  • $25, Ian Dunn (United Kingdom) – http://www.salutus-solutions.com
  • $25, Jack H. (USA)
  • $25, Pascual S. (USA)
  • $20 (4th donation), Phillip H. (Australia)
  • $20 (3rd donation), Bernard S. (Netherlands)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Henry W. (USA)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Sebastian C. (Australia)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Matthew M. (USA)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Graham C. aka “gee7” (United Kingdom)
  • $20, Tim D. (USA)
  • $20, Stephen V. (USA)
  • $20, Christopher Y. (USA)
  • $20, Javier G. M. (Mexico)
  • $20, Reiner K. (Germany)
  • $20, Paul T. (USA)
  • $20, Steven Heidel aka “stevenheidel” (Canada) – http://www.livingskyweb.ca
  • $20, mitch (France)
  • $20, Vance R. aka “helmsdeeper” (USA)
  • $20, James T. (USA)
  • $20, Abraar S. (United Kingdom)
  • $20, James K. (USA)
  • $20, Morten H. (Norway)
  • $20, Stuart H. (United Kingdom)
  • $20, Darryl E. (USA)
  • $20, Bill Goebel (USA)
  • $19, C J van den B. (Netherlands)
  • $19, Raymond T. (United Kingdom)
  • $19, Mark Wolstenholme aka “markfiend” (United Kingdom)
  • $19, David R. (United Kingdom)
  • $19, Mike S. (Germany)
  • $19, Neal Quincey (United Kingdom)
  • $19, Intars Students aka “mobix” (Latvia) – http://intarstudents.lv
  • $15 (11th donation), Slavoljub M. (Norway)
  • $15 (3rd donation), George R. aka “Az4x4” (USA)
  • $15 (2nd donation), Aleksander S. (Norway)
  • $15, George D. (USA)
  • $15, James Masek aka “vineyardtechie” (USA) – http://www.sculpturebyjamesmasek.com
  • $15, German Heberto Duran (Mexico)
  • $15, Fabio Baratti (Italy)
  • $15, Dennis T. (Brazil)
  • $15, David M. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Jason R. (USA)
  • $13 (7th donation), Emil Pavlov aka “emil_pavlov” (Bulgaria)
  • $13, Henk Oegema aka “henkoegema” (Belgium)
  • $13, Mark L. (United Kingdom)
  • $12 (8th donation), Marco R. (Italy)
  • $12 (3rd donation), Miguel Cunha Duarte aka “mcduarte2000” (Portugal) – http://www.miguelduarte.net
  • $12 (3rd donation), Samuel M. aka “vtired” (Italy) – http://it.ismico.org
  • $12, Philippe S. (Luxembourg)
  • $12, Adrian Gudas (Canada)
  • $12, Anonymous aka “MrNiceGaay” (Netherlands)
  • $12, Jens C. (Germany)
  • $12, Peter Portin (Finland)
  • $12, Alexandru L. (Italy)
  • $12, Damian H. (Spain)
  • $12, Gernot W. (Italy)
  • $12, Jose Luis F. M. (Spain)
  • $12, Gisbert H. (Germany)
  • $12, Giacomo from Ripon (United Kingdom)
  • $10 (4th donation), Jennifer McBride (Canada) – http://www.only-green.ca
  • $10 (3rd donation), Juergen G. (Canada)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Jeff Reid aka “jlr1701” (USA) – http://channelsforthelight.com
  • $10 (2nd donation), John Minear aka “sparky51” (United Kingdom)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Clemens N. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Paul V. (Canada)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Platypus Products (USA)
  • $10, Jose A. (USA)
  • $10, Mansour K. (USA)
  • $10, Wyramuttu N. (Canada)
  • $10, BJ S. (USA)
  • $10, Luis D. (Brazil)
  • $10, Jon F. (USA)
  • $10, bwjpg (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Nicolas J. (Belgium)
  • $10, Алексей Калюкин (Russia)
  • $10, John P. (USA)
  • $10, Ben Barnes (USA) – http://www.e-lectiostore.com/store.html
  • $10, Michael Meehan aka “uirusu.ningen” (New Zealand)
  • $10, Magnus Olsson aka “XeroXer” (Sweden) – http://www.xeroxer.com
  • $10, Steven K. (USA)
  • $10, Francois H. (Canada)
  • $10, Mary F. (USA)
  • $10, Ashish S. (USA)
  • $10, Jonathan T. (Singapore)
  • $10, Stephen T. (Australia)
  • $9, Richard L. aka “rlindsey0” (USA)
  • $8, Divyesh K. (Canada)
  • $7 (3rd donation), Johan T. (Sweden)
  • $7, Pedro Almeida (Portugal)
  • $7, Lukas E. (Germany)
  • $6, Joao E. (Portugal)
  • $6, Stuart C. (United Kingdom)
  • $6, Christopher D. (United Kingdom)
  • $6, Marcin Skiba aka “marcinski” (United Kingdom)
  • $6, Sylwia Bialczak (Finland)
  • $6, Daniel an der B. (Germany)
  • $6, Tolga K E. (Australia)
  • $6, Goran K. (Croatia)
  • $5 (6th donation), Savant B.D. (USA) – http://www.allyourprices.com
  • $5 (4th donation), Dan Jackson (United Kingdom)
  • $5 (2nd donation), Tauras G. (Lithuania)
  • $5 (2nd donation), Michael G. (Germany)
  • $5, Micko C. (Ireland)
  • $5, Lee S. (New Zealand)
  • $5, Alejandro Q. H. (Mexico)
  • $5, Jacob M. (USA)
  • $5, Redouane B. S. (Spain)
  • $5, Ciglet (United Kingdom)
  • $5, Sascha H. (Germany)
  • $5, Tyra K. (USA)
  • $5, David Wands (United Kingdom)
  • $5, Martin F. H. (USA)
  • $5, Cagatay C. (Turkey)
  • $5, Normunds Mazurs (Latvia) – http://mazurs.livejournal.com
  • $5, Mr Steven J Murray aka “mintymintminty” (United Kingdom)
  • $5, Craig Stock aka “craig10x” (USA)
  • $4, Mark F. (USA)
  • $4, Richard Cross aka “blip” (United Kingdom) – http://www.printeng.co.uk
  • $3 (4th donation), Inga Muste (Latvia) – http://inga.lv
  • $3, Kollar K. (Hungary)
  • $2.5, Le T. (Vietnam)
  • $2 (2nd donation), Carl K. (USA)
  • $2 (2nd donation), Carl K. (USA)
  • $2, Evgeny D. (Russia)
  • $2, Nandor T. (Hungary)
  • $2, Yu Tor Ho (Malaysia)
  • $2, Rini D. (Indonesia)
  • $1 (2nd donation), Ryan C. (Philippines) – http://wartrolreviews.info
  • $1, Ahmad K. (Indonesia) – http://feedvillages.com
  • $1, Kevin K. (Norway)
  • $1, Islam C.I. (Turkey)
  • $1, Louis G. (USA)
  • $1, Kevin Naidoo (South Africa)

Sponsors:

Money raised in May:

* Donations: $5117.5 (202 donors)
* Sponsors: $658 (72 sponsors)

http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 9 Isadora: 39% (-26%)
  • Linux Mint 8 Helena: 35% (+35%)
  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 18% (-8%)
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 3% (-2%)
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 2% (-1%)
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 2% (-0%)

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 2,940,652 (+20%)
  • Unique views: 4,035,597 (+26%)
  • Pageviews: 5,255,355 (+27%)
  • Page impressions: 2,605,594
  • Search queries: 6,066,755
  • Forum users: 32,150
  • Forum posts: 270,743

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1599 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 5% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 17,239

Events:

Summary:

  • May was marked by the release of Linux Mint 9. There was a significant increase in traffic on the website (about 25%) and the user base grew by 6%. As with every release, we’re expecting the numbers to drop a little bit next month.
  • We received more donations than ever before. 202 people supported us this month, for a total of $5,117. Whether this was in appreciation of the latest release or in reaction to the poor results the project got in April, it’s really appreciated. It is often said that Linux Mint doesn’t benefit from corporate funding, but we’ve got such a strong community. There aren’t many projects like ours with that level of support from their community. This is really inspiring. Many thanks to everyone involved in helping us.
  • The overall income went up by 24%. May 2010 was the best month for the project since its creation in 2006.
  • June 2010 should see the releases of two additional editions: LXDE and KDE.

by ·87 Comments

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 9 LXDE RC.


Linux Mint 9 LXDE

New features at a glance:

For a complete overview and to see screenshots of the new features, visit: “What’s new in Linux Mint 9 LXDE“.

Known problems:

  • Splash screen resolution
  • Windows installer
  • Moonlight
  • Menu localization
  • Applications in the file manager
  • Menu launcher color
  • Upstream issues

To get more information about these problems and their solution, read the “Known problems” section of the release notes

System requirements:

  • x86 processor
  • 192 MB of system memory (RAM)
  • 3 GB of disk space for installation
  • Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
  • CD-ROM drive or USB port

Bug reports:

Please report any bug you may find in Launchpad.

Download:

Linux Mint 9 LXDE RC is available as a 32-bit liveCD, via Torrent and HTTP download:

Enjoy!

We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun testing the release candidate!

by ·70 Comments

A new version of the Software Manager is available in the repository. You can use the Update Manager to upgrade to it.

The Software Manager was rewritten from scratch in Linux Mint 9. It’s a very complex application, and it can be improved in many ways. Today we tackled the time it takes for the application to start. Basically it needs to process some 30,000 packages, a growing number of comments (we’re receiving about 200 comments per day at the moment) and match all that in categories and do some other fancy processing… Because of all this, it’s far from being immediate.

On the machine it’s developed on, during the Linux Mint 9 RC, the Software Manager used to take a rough 10 seconds to start. Improvements were released with the version that came with Linux Mint 9, and the startup was reduced to a rough 5 seconds. Today we managed to further reduce that time to roughly 2 seconds.

Results on various machines:

Of course, 2 seconds on a 4GB RAM Quad-Core workstation isn’t going to be 2 seconds on a 256MB RAM single-core laptop… but the speed improvements will be significant for all of us.

With the help of some of the users in the IRC chat room, we quickly ran the test and got the following results:

Clem:

  • 7.1.4: 5224.497 ms
  • 7.1.5: 1948.185 ms
  • CPU[-Quad core Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (SMP) clocked at 2399.858 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-21-generic x86_64-] Up[-1 day-] Mem[-1077.6/3964.8MB-] HDD[-1499.6GB(30.3% used)-] Procs[-202-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]

Remington:

  • 7.1.4: 5691.338 ms
  • 7.1.5: 1767.438 ms
  • CPU[-Dual core AMD Athlon 7750 (SMP) clocked at 2700.357 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.34-020634-generic x86_64-] Up[-25 min-] Mem[-1002.6/3964.3MB-] HDD[-2078.5GB(79.1% used)-] Procs[-205-] Client[-X-Chat 2.8.6-] inxi[-1.3.2-]

Suhana:

  • 7.1.4: 7937.545 ms
  • 7.1.5: 3166.507 ms
  • CPU[-Single core AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (UP) clocked at 2412.406 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-21-generic i686-] Up[-5:06-] Mem[-210.1/485.5MB-] HDD[-8.6GB(36.3% used)-] Procs[-135-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]

Artz:

  • 7.1.4: 12687.454 ms
  • 7.1.5: 7655.063 ms
  • CPU[-Single core AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (UP) clocked at 1000.000 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-22-generic x86_64-] Up[-5:20-] Mem[-172.1/494.0MB-] HDD[-80.0GB(27.7% used)-] Procs[-127-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]

On your machine:

You can run your current version of the Software Manager from the terminal by typing “mintinstall”, you should see something like that:

add_categories took 1.169 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.189 ms
add_packages took 1862.525 ms
add_reviews took 3111.200 ms
__init__ took 5224.497 ms

The “__init__” line represents the overall startup time in milliseconds. If your reviews are out of date it will call “update_reviews”, if that’s the case, run “minstall” again to get a more accurate measure.

You can then upgrade to the latest version of mintinstall using the Update Manager, and run the test again to see how much faster it is on your computer.

What next?

Well, if you look at Artz’s results, it stills takes him about 8 seconds to start the Startup Manager. This means we’re not finished. Either we’ll manage to further reduce the startup time or we’ll come up with alternative ways of starting the application. Some possibilities include showing the application while the loading is happening in the background (in a way similar to the Update Manager), showing a splash screen before the application, or loading packages one after the other and letting the user browse and use the Software Manager while the applications and comments are still loading…

There’s also concerns with the delay it takes when you click the “install” or “remove” buttons. And finally, there’s a performance issue with clicking on some large categories, especially the “All packages” category, which features more than 30,000 packages. We might use paging for this or lazy-loading techniques.

Note about a regression in this update:

This update also removes the “Other” category and renames the previously called “System packages” to “All packages”. This last string is new, and it isn’t translated yet, so it will appear in English for all users. The translation template was updated in Launchpad and we’ll update the mint-translations package to fix this issue as soon as translations for this new string are made available by the community.