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* News about Mint

Lots of improvements leading up to Mint 6 Felicia

mintUpload to support FTP

mintNanny introduced – a simple tool to prevent children from accessing certain websites

Three new commands – search, apt contains and apt content.

Mint is now to be on the major distributions page on Distrowatch

* News about Linux

Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source – An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently in a decision

Michael Robertson sued over Linspires missing cash

New releases recently

Mandriva Linux 2009 and Puppy Linux 4.1

Debian Lenny was not released – What you can do for “Lenny”

Ubuntu Confirms Linux Netbook Returns Higher than Anticipated

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Mono 2.0 has been released

The Ubuntu Upstream Report

LinuxWorld will relaunch as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

Security researchers warn of new ‘clickjacking’ browser bugs The latest version of NoScript protects against this

Flash Player workaround available for “Clickjacking” issue for 9.0.124.0 and earlier

Nasty web bug descends on world’s most popular sites

Researchers uncover major IP flaw

Council sells security hole on Ebay

Hackers exploit Neosploit to booby trap BBC, US postal service

Shadowserver to Build ‘Sinkhole’ Server to Find Errant Bots

Norwegian standards body implodes over OOXML controversy

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

Obviously the new Facebook layout is not liked by all, there are at least three groups claiming a million members

Google: Commitment to Sustainable Computing

Microsoft will move its main office for enterprise search to Norway

Microsoft gives users six months longer to flee from Vista – Buckling to OEMs?

Microsoft tries to put fear of God into scareware vendors

Venezuela orders 1 million laptops from Portugal

New trans-Pacific submarine cable completed

Japan home owners to be offered 16Gbit/s Internet connection

How Online Fraudsters Are Using SAAS in Their Networks

World’s electrical grids open to attack (not sure where to put this)

* Hardware news

AMD to split the company

Report: Fujitsu to sell hard drive business to Western Digital

New plate from BT promises broadband boost

Lightbulbs Could Replace Wi-Fi Hotspots

* Trivia and other links

Clean Energy 2030 Google’s Proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels

* 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 here

Enjoy life

Husse

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Introduction

MintUpload is the little tool which pops up when you right-click on a file and select “upload”. Until now mintUpload was mostly used as a way to share files by uploading them to a public place somewhere on one of Linux Mint’s servers and by sending the corresponding URL to friends and family members (or to anybody really..). Some people also bought Mint-Space accounts and were able to set up mintUpload to add an additional upload service to it. These people could then share files in a similar manner but instead of using a public storage space and being limited to 2 days, they could use their 1GB of Web space and have their files kept there indefinitely.

Some people mentioned that mintUpload was great at sharing files with others but not so much at actually “uploading” them and we got a lot of requests to add FTP support to that tool.

Initially mintUpload was designed with novice users in mind, people who wanted to share large files with each others and who didn’t know what FTP meant or where to get free web space to store them. After gathering some feedback, we’ve come to realize that mintUpload also got popular with experienced users, people who even had their own FTP accounts and wanted a quick way to upload files to it without launching an FTP client. So we added FTP support to MintUpload by defining another type of service and letting the user define his own FTP services.

Installation

To install MintUpload you need the Romeo repositories. Perform an “apt update” and an “apt install mintupload” in a terminal.

If you don’t have Romeo set up, you can grab the packages from here:

Configuration

MintUpload lets you define “upload services” by adding files in /etc/linuxmint/mintUpload/services/

Here’s an example of an FTP upload service:

type=FTP
name=My own FTP service
host=myhost.com
user=myusername
pass=mypassword
path=myuploads

The “path” is optional, it lets you define where within your FTP service you want the files to be uploaded. In this example we’re not uploading them in the root folder, but within a directory called “myuploads”.

MintUpload will use any service defined with that format and saved as a file within /etc/linuxmint/mintUpload/services/.

Translations

MintUpload 2 will be one of the featured improvements coming with Linux Mint 6 Felicia. We’re actively trying to get the community to translate this tool. If you happen to speak another language than English, please help us translate mintUpload 2 by participating to this forum thread:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=17551

Bug reports and feedback

Tell us what you think by posting a comment on this blog post. Report bugs here as well.

Note: Some people also asked for SFTP support. This won’t be in the scope for Mint 6 but we’ll work on it for future releases.

Spread the word

We’re trying to raise people’s awareness about the Mint project and we’ve added a Digg plugin to this blog. If you find this blog post interesting, please help us spread the word by submitting it as a Digg story or by digging it if it’s already submitted.

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Introduction

One of the features Mint has been lacking as a family desktop is the ability for parents to prevent their children from accessing certain websites. Parental control is easy to set up in Microsoft Windows and we got a lot of feedback from people who migrated to Linux and who missed this feature. Of course one could install DansGuardian and a few other packages but it’s not easy, it usually requires the use of a proxy and it’s also quite complex to configure. For Linux Mint 6 we came with a compromise and we decided to implement a minimal set of features but to make it as trivial to use as possible. So here comes mintNanny.

MintNanny is a small graphical interface which lets you “block” domain names. You can’t block domains for particular users or particular programs, the block is for everyone on the computer and for any protocol. When you “block” a domain in mintNanny it basically adds an entry to your /etc/hosts file and defines that domain’s IP address as being 0.0.0.0. This results in your computer not being able to communicate with the domain anymore. So if there are domains you really don’t want your children to have anything to do with, put them in mintNanny.

Remember that mintNanny blocks domain names, not IP addresses so if your children are smart enough to ping the domain from another computer they’ll be able to access it via its IP address.

Certain domains use subdomains and redirect to them so you might have to block them to. For instance if you want to block somewebsite.com you might also have to block www.somewebsite.com. As a rule of thumb try to access the website after you block it to see if your block was efficient enough.

Firefox caches DNS resolutions to speed things up. This means that it remembers where a website is until you close it. In other words, after you block a website, you’ll have to restart Firefox.

Installation

To install MintNanny you need the Romeo repositories. Perform an “apt update” and an “apt install mintnanny-gnome” in a terminal (or “apt install mintnanny-kde” if you run KDE).

If you don’t have Romeo set up, you can grab the packages from here:

Translations

MintNanny will be one of the featured improvements coming with Linux Mint 6 Felicia. We’re actively trying to get the community to translate this tool. If you happen to speak another language than English, please help us translate mintNanny by participating to this forum thread:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=17552

Bug reports and feedback

Tell us what you think by posting a comment on this blog post. Report bugs here as well.