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Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

  • $200, Terry Mansfield aka “tmansfield” (USA)
  • $140, Hans G. (Germany)
  • $71, Alfred A. (Germany)
  • $60, Kitchener-Waterloo LUG (Canada) – http://www.kwlug.org
  • $57, Philip D. aka “phd7” (Ireland)
  • $50 (3rd donation), Mike G. aka “subslug” (USA)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Jonathan B H. (USA)
  • $50, Digital Linx Hosting (Canada) – http://vpsnoc.com
  • $50, Richard H. (USA)
  • $50, Louis P. aka “BikeLouP” (USA)
  • $50, Stephen B. (USA)
  • $50, James J. (USA)
  • $50, Nathan B. (USA)
  • $40, Pete Molina aka “pmolina” (USA)
  • $40, Rod McLaren aka “Ambertone” (Australia) – http://www.ambertone.com.au
  • $35, Andrew M. (Australia)
  • $35, Andreas S. (Germany)
  • $35, Marcus Norrgard (Finland) – http://www.hanken.fi/staff/manorrga
  • $30, James P. (United Kingdom)
  • $30, Bill R. (USA)
  • $28 (3rd donation), Marco R. (Italy)
  • $28, Mark R. (United Kingdom)
  • $28, Frank Schmidt (Germany)
  • $28, Lee B. (United Kingdom)
  • $28, Philippe Camus (France)
  • $28, Manuel F. (Portugal)
  • $28, Sven B. (Sweden)
  • $25, Aleksander S. (Norway)
  • $25, Peter B. (Australia)
  • $25, Brad Little aka “thelynx” (United Arab Emirates)
  • $25, Norman H. (USA)
  • $25, Tony R. aka “tonyric” (USA) – http://www.ournuthut.net
  • $25, Jens K. (Germany)
  • $25, Happy Nerds Workshop (USA)
  • $25, Glenn W. (Canada)
  • $25, Steve T. (Canada)
  • $21 (2nd donation), Antonio Gemelli aka “Antowen” (Italy)
  • $21, Francisco C. C. (Spain)
  • $21, Jose Luis S. M. (Sweden)
  • $21, Michael Krusch aka “MAD” (Germany)
  • $21, Hugh Crooke (United Kingdom)
  • $20, Edward H. (USA)
  • $20, Ludovic G. aka “Lewdsquirrel” (Canada)
  • $20, Sergio T. (USA)
  • $20, Jene W. (USA)
  • $20, David T. (USA)
  • $20, Bernardo Dias (Brazil)
  • $20, Peter C. (United Kingdom)
  • $20, Anthony S. (USA)
  • $20, Danielle S. (USA)
  • $20, David Tomlin (USA)
  • $20, Terry D. (Australia)
  • $20, Richard L. (United Kingdom)
  • $20, Anthony D. (United Kingdom)
  • $20, Mark E. aka “engram” (USA)
  • $20, Barry W. (USA)
  • $20, Samuel L. (USA)
  • $20, Anthony B. (USA)
  • $20, Beom K. (Australia)
  • $15, Darren K. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Jacques St-O. (Canada)
  • $15, Darryl S. (USA)
  • $15, Slavoljub M. (Norway)
  • $15, Tobias S. (Germany)
  • $14, David Holstein (United Kingdom) – http://www.davyhulme.net
  • $14, Kevin Dermott (United Kingdom)
  • $14, Thomas S. (Austria)
  • $14, Michel A. (France)
  • $14, Antonis M. (Greece)
  • $14, Uwe M. (Germany)
  • $14, Emil Pavlov aka “emil_pavlov” (Bulgaria)
  • $14, Frank Dominik L. (Germany)
  • $10, D.Snyder aka “capt” (USA)
  • $10, Michael N. (USA)
  • $10, Salim Farah aka “Verix” (USA)
  • $10, Trey H. aka “Ubuntaur” (USA)
  • $10, Barron R. (USA)
  • $10, Alexander G. (USA)
  • $10, Paul V. (Canada)
  • $10, Apollo V. Melo aka “teflashfire” (USA) – http://militarylinuxusers.blogspot.com
  • $10, David E. (USA)
  • $10, Marcus Hui (USA) – http://marcushui.blog.co.uk
  • $10, Shofi A. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, George R. aka “Az4x4” (USA)
  • $10, Fyodor K. (Denmark)
  • $10, Desmond W. (USA)
  • $7, Rienk D. (Netherlands)
  • $7, Roberto T. (Italy)
  • $7, Alessio C. (Italy)
  • $7, Paulo Bartolomeu aka “bartmanpt” (Portugal) – http://pt.linkedin.com/in/paulobartolomeu
  • $7, Michael Klitschka (Germany)
  • $5, Thomas B. (USA)
  • $5, Donald McL. (USA)
  • $5, Eric W T. (USA)
  • $5, Dennis B. (Australia)
  • $5, Savant B.D. (USA) – http://www.allyourprices.com
  • $5, Matt G. (USA)
  • $5, Muhammad B. (Indonesia)
  • $4, Jackie R. (USA)
  • $3, Leo Ryan (Philippines) – http://websitesvalue.net
  • $3, Salvatore D. (Italy)
  • $2, Robert M. (Austria)
  • $2, Dominique Lemieux (Canada)
  • $1, Sylvestre Burgos aka “sylvestre” (France) – http://burgos.sourceforge.net
  • $1, Stefan B. (Germany)
  • $1, Rafal Kudlinski (Poland)
  • $1, Rovshan P. (Azerbaijan)
  • $1, Timothy G. (USA)
  • $1, Michael Falk (Germany) – http://wi.uni-giessen.de

Sponsors:

Money raised in February:

* Donations: $2518 (110 donors)
* Sponsors: $777 (56 sponsors)

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

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 8 Helena: 58% (+6%)
  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 30% (-7%)
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 6% (-0%)
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 3% (-0%)
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 2% (-0%)

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 2,439,390 (+2%)
  • Unique views: 3,317,827 (+3%)
  • Pageviews: 4,330,486 (+3%)
  • Page impressions: 1,805,045
  • Search queries: 5,470,848
  • Forum users: 28,078
  • Forum posts: 237,158

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1595 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 4.6% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 18,142

Events:

Summary:

  • The overall income is up again, by 3% in February. This is particularly good considering there were only 28 days that month as opposed to 31 the month before.
  • Donations decreased. From $4,000 in December they’re down to $2,500 in February.
  • February was a very busy month for the team. 3 stable releases were out.
  • Although the most important Distrowatch indicator is down (traffic share: 4.6%), the distribution started to get more coverage in the press and in the media.
  • Development started on Linux Mint 9.
  • March should see the releases of the Xfce and LXDE editions.

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Kendall Weaver worked on an LXDE edition of Linux Mint and his latest ISO was approved for a release by Exploder. It’s currently waiting my approval and the team and I are discussing what our strategy should be in regards to “Community Editions”. These editions are tested and released in the exact same way as the main edition and they meet the same quality requirements. According to reviews and the general feedback we’re getting about them they’re quite popular. The label “community” undermines them though, not that “community” is pejorative or anything, but it makes them look “non-official”. The only significant difference between the main edition and the community editions is simply the fact that their maintainers are benevolent volunteers who work on them in their spare time. As a consequence they’re often released late in the release cycle and sometimes they may not be released at all (The Fluxbox edition for instance missed the Linux Mint 7 cycle). There are different things we can do about this, we can introduce money within the team, we can prioritize some editions and define our strategy in terms of how late an edition can and should be… and I’m sure we’ll come with improvements, but the important thing at this stage is that we’re aware of the problem and we’re trying to strip these editions from their “community” label. So a big reflexion about this is ongoing and if we decide to go ahead with an LXDE edition, it should come out pretty quickly.

Merlwiz79 submitted a version of Linux Mint 8 Xfce to the team and it just got approved for a release by Exploder. You can expect this edition to be released this week.

Development started on Linux Mint 9. The menu will allow you to edit the shortcuts directly, to add them to the panel and to add them to the desktop. An option was also added to make the menu always start with the favorites. The update manager is getting new icons (the locks are replaced with white shields), it doesn’t consider it an error when it’s unable to know the availability of updates (the broken lock appearing when another APT application was open, or when connection to the Internet was lost, was irritating a lot of people) and it generally feels less intrusive. The software manager is being completely rewritten. It’s taking the best features of mintinstall, Ubuntu Software Center and Gnome App Installer. The graphical interface looks much slicker, using webkit to render HTML parts, a single-click navigation and a navigation bar. It also uses an APT daemon to queue up installation and removal of applications in real time. Your actions can be monitored as you go along, canceled, and you can close and open the software manager at any stage without any incidence on the queue. We’re abandoning .mint files to go back to raw  .deb support and as a consequence the software manager won’t deal with 300+ applications, but about 30,000.

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The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 8 “Helena” KDE64 Community Edition.

Quick steps:

Introduction to Linux Mint 8 KDE64:

This KDE64 edition of Linux Mint 8 is identical to the KDE Edition but compiled for 64 bit processors (Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad, AMD Athlon X2 64 and all x86-64 compliant processors). It comes with all the improvements featured in Linux Mint 8 Helena KDE Edition.

For a detailed overview of the new features and improvements included in Linux Mint 8 KDE, please read “What’s new in Helena KDE?“.

System requirements:

An X86_64 64 bit processor (Intel Core 2, AMD X2 64, etc…) .

A minimum of 4GB of free space and 256MB RAM are needed. For a comfortable experience we recommended to have at least 512MB RAM and 10GB of free space.

Important information and known issues:

For a complete list of known issues read the Release Notes.

Download Linux Mint 8 KDE64:

You can download Linux Mint 8 KDE64 via torrent or via HTTP:

Size: 1.2GB LiveDVD
MD5Sum:  98f5c5fa0fa358053a4debfabca115af

Torrent download: http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/LinuxMint-8-KDE64.iso.torrent
 HTTP download: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=49

Asia:

Europe:

Northern America:

Rest of the World:

Enjoy!

Have a lot of fun with this edition and let us know what you think. Reviews will be answered and your feedback will be used to improve the distribution before the next release. We hope you enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it and we wish you a very nice experience with Linux Mint.