Themes:

The decision was taken not to change the theme or the icons in Linux Mint 9 Isadora, making it look similar to the previously released Linux Mint 7 Gloria and Linux Mint 8 Helena.

We looked into the making of a metallic looking theme, it was even mentioned publicly and I’m sorry to disappoint. Widgets had to use background pictures to achieve that effect and although it looked really nice on the desktop it was significantly impacting the performance of the system. We’ll still look into this and into ways of achieving this effect without making the system slower in the future, but it will not happen for Linux Mint 9.

Buttons layout:

The window buttons in the title bar will remain on the right. The “Desktop settings” tool (mintdesktop) was rewritten and, among other new features, now allows you to set the layout of these buttons. I’m personally curious as to why people would place their buttons that close to the window menu, but who knows, maybe Ubuntu’s bold move in that direction can actually seduce people and start a new trend? So if it does convince you and you feel like placing your buttons on the left side, whether it’s Mac or Ubuntu style, the tool will help you do that.

Desktop background:

The default background for Linux Mint 9 wasn’t chosen yet.

The following 4 backgrounds came from the community and look like good candidates:

– Zwopper’s: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=44898
– Black leather: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=36185
– Emotion: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=40198
– AirMint: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=27439

The Black leather background uses licensed artwork, so if it is chosen we’ll have to acquire the rights from its author (who doesn’t seem to be reachable at the moment).

To give ourselves more choice we also outsourced the task of creating a background for Linux Mint 9. A contest was started on 99designs.com and a few backgrounds were submitted already:

http://99designs.com/other-design-tasks/contests/desktop-background-linux-mint-42399

I also started a debate on the forums to make sure this contest wasn’t interpreted the wrong way by the artists in our community and to talk about the relations between outsourcing and community in general, if you’re interested in this debate, please visit the following link:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=46243

Linux Mint 9 will feature a brand new version of mintBackup, the “Backup Tool”, rewritten from scratch by a newcomer in the development team, somebody people on the IRC and the forums know quite well: Ikey.

The new tool comes with the following features:

• It can backup and restore files and directories
• It can backup and restore your software selection
• It can check differences in files and perform incremental backups/restorations
• It can check the integrity of the files after it copies them
• It can backup straight to an archive and compress it on the fly

Being written in Python, it’s not as fast as copying files directly or using rsync (unless you turn off the integrity checks and the checksum verifications) but it’s quite robust and it’s extremely easy to use. The software selection backup/restoration is also very intuitive and will be of tremendous help for people upgrading to a newer version of Linux Mint.

With this tool, comes an entire tutorial on how to upgrade your system, the philosophy behind it, the risks, the method and answers to the most frequently asked questions.

This answers a need that many people have and something that was lacking in our distribution. It’s another stance taken by our project and another philosophical difference between us and most other operating systems. Our lack of confidence in package upgrades, our policy of prevention when it comes to potential regressions and our recommendations to always perform fresh installations… all of this had to be backed by an alternative solution that would be easy and reliable to use. With this guide and this new tool we finally have what was missing.

The tool was developed for Linux Mint 9 Isadora but also tested on Linux Mint 8 Helena. Together with the tutorial it will replace the traditional “Upgrade instructions” associated with each release and end the development of our in-house, yet not recommended, mintupgrader tool.

As the support on Linux Mint 6 is coming to an end, many people will probably be happy to get access to this new solution.

Link to the tutorial: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

The forums and the community website were down yesterday. The downtime lasted for about a day.

After investigation, it turned out the motherboard on the server had to be replaced. I would like to give credit to our host, SevenL, for helping us in that matter.

SevenL is a Canadian hosting company. Our forums have been hosted by them for about a year now and we rarely experienced downtime. Not only that but to promote Open Source and Linux projects, they provide this server to us for free.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank the hosting companies which are providing us with free servers around the World:

• SevenL in Toronto, Canada
• Vault Networks in the Miami, FL, USA
• Goscomb Technologies in London, UK
• NuTime in Berlin, Germany

Apologies to everyone for the downtime yesterday and thanks again to hour host for the fantastic work done to fix the issue.