by ·10 Comments

* News about Mint

Preparations for the next version of Mint, Helena, is going on and as our Twitter indicates we are testing the first internal betas of Mint 8 Helena

Mint 8 – Boot sequence will be different

Monthly stats – October 2009

* News about Linux

Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, was released.

Mandriva Linux 2010 was released

GNOME 3.0 May Not Come Until September 2010

IBM and Ubuntu roll Linux for U.S desktops vs Windows 7

Is Kubuntu Caught in a Downward Spiral?

An open source version of Linux client is being developed for Skype

Security Hole in Kernel Allows Privilege Extensions – if you run ” cat /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr ” and get a vaule higher than zero you are OK. This is an old bug coming to life again

USB stick security flaw puts data at risk – the cracked operating system in this case is Linux kernel 2.6.26

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

Drupal Moves Into the White House

ApacheCon US 2009 was sponsored by Microsoft and thawte

Richard Stallman wants the European Commission to block the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle with its proposed acquisition of Sun.

Red Hat invests in the MySQL open source database competitor EnterpriseDB – this could have an impact on the Oracle – MySQL “problem”

* News about IT

A compromise was reached on the EU Telecom package and the amendment suggestion 138.

(Link to a Swedish page, but the compromise text is found in English – I have not been able to find any other good link)

CIA Buys Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Mark Shuttleworth praises “excellent” Windows 7

Cnet review of Windows 7

640,000 sites and approximately 5.8 million pages were infected in Q3’09

Facebook Wins $711 Million In Case Against ‘Spam King’

The Windows exploit Gumblar is Reloaded

Internet phone systems become the fraudster’s tool

Facebook users hit by botnet attack (When I googled this I saw that most hits were in Slavic languages)

* Hardware news

New material would allow a fingernail-sized chip store a terabyte

Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor

* Other news

Nokia “Only” Wants $200 Million From Apple In iPhone Patent Suit

Linus Torvalds gives Windows 7 thumbs up 🙂

* Comic of the week


Credit goes to xkcd

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

Home page

Blog The planet Wiki Forum Twitter Mintcast

* Editors comment

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

It’s been  while since that last newsletter, unfortunately I have too much to do to publish more often.

Enjoy life

Husse

by ·30 Comments

Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

  • $461, Einar Orn Eidsson (Iceland)
  • $182, Jonas K. (France)
  • $117, Gwa Cobbett (United Kingdom) – http://gwa.tumblr.com
  • $101, Kevin W. (USA)
  • $100, Philip C. Freytag aka “phil” (Canada)
  • $100, J.-Yves Lortie aka “amadeus128” (Canada)
  • $100, Charles P Poltrock aka “chuckpo” (USA)
  • $92, Dusan P. (Slovenia)
  • $75, Uwe T. (Germany)
  • $53, Mikael J. (Sweden)
  • $51, Suyog B. (Australia)
  • $50, John Mason aka “merc68k” (Canada)
  • $50, Edward Comer aka “celem” (USA)
  • $50, gazza (Australia)
  • $50, Campbell M (United Kingdom)
  • $50, G. Sheffield (USA)
  • $50, Ernest G. (USA)
  • $50, Enderle P. (USA)
  • $46, Anthony H. aka “anthony2010” (United Kingdom)
  • $46, Richard Cail (United Kingdom)
  • $38, Manuel F. (Portugal)
  • $38, Antonino T. (Italy)
  • $38, Michael Krusch aka “MAD” (Germany)
  • $30 (3rd donation), Marco R. (Italy)
  • $30 (2nd donation), Jonathan B H. (USA)
  • $30, Barrie M R. (Australia)
  • $30, Volker Schulz-von der G. (Germany)
  • $30, Francisco P. (USA)
  • $30, Josef K. (Czech Republic)
  • $30, Russ S. (USA)
  • $30, Abraham L. (USA) – http://www.eggsinthemorning.com
  • $30, Roberto P. (Italy)
  • $30, Jan de G. (Netherlands)
  • $30, Daniel W. (World) – http://www.downloadstube.net
  • $30, Christ L. (Greece)
  • $28, Alison R. (United Kingdom)
  • $28, Philip Watson aka “Eraph” (United Kingdom) – http://www.rakhama.com
  • $28, Nadege Austin aka “nadglobtrotter” (France)
  • $28, Ruben Z. (Netherlands)
  • $25, Anthony S. (USA)
  • $25, Matthew Hancock aka “mwhancock” (USA)
  • $25, Martin Colville aka “colvillem” (Australia)
  • $25, Daniel B. (USA)
  • $25, Sheffoy F. (USA)
  • $25, Philip S. (United Kingdom)
  • $25, Stephen B. (USA)
  • $25, Keith Templeman aka “mansfields1964” (United Kingdom)
  • $25, Michael F. (USA)
  • $25, Donald D’A. (USA)
  • $25, Rod McLaren aka “Ambertone” (Australia) – http://www.ambertone.com.au
  • $23, Cong-Truc T. (France)
  • $23, Massimo Campanini aka “campamax” (Italy)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Blaine R. (USA)
  • $20, Worawit W. (Thailand)
  • $20, Michael H. (USA)
  • $20, Justin Johansson (Australia)
  • $20, Gerald E. (USA)
  • $20, Kazuhiko T. (Japan)
  • $20, William R. (USA)
  • $20, Victor W. (USA)
  • $20, Michael Nordmark (Sweden)
  • $20, Sammasati Enterprises (USA)
  • $20, Tomislav Pintaric (Canada)
  • $20, Ricardo Calimanis aka “ricardo.calimanis” (Brazil) – http://goetti.blogspot.com
  • $20, Mario Castro (Spain)
  • $20, Chris Jones (USA) – http://caringcompy.blogspot.com
  • $20, Juan Carlos C. (USA)
  • $20, Michael D.-M. (Canada)
  • $19, Olivier B. (France)
  • $18, Lee Sturman aka “Hammerlee” (United Kingdom)
  • $15 (2nd donation), Colin Casey (Canada)
  • $15, Dimitris C. (Greece)
  • $15, Joachim W. (Germany)
  • $15, Russell Aldrich aka “Russman” (USA) – http://www.myspace.com/rockinroll69
  • $15, Philip S. (USA)
  • $15, Greg Dawes aka “Greg-NZ” (New Zealand)
  • $15, Nikos K. (Greece)
  • $15, Royden L. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Jason S. (Canada)
  • $15, Allen B. (USA)
  • $15, Mark C. aka “geekman” (USA)
  • $15, Paul E. (United Kingdom)
  • $14, Francisco C. C. (Spain)
  • $14, Charl P. (Netherlands)
  • $14, Nico W. (Austria)
  • $14, Justin Braime (United Kingdom)
  • $12, Pavel Gelnar aka “wil-m” (Czech Republic) – http://www.brblal.net
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard G. (USA)
  • $10, Shiva L. (India)
  • $10, Clocktower Arts Monthly (USA)
  • $10, Technadicts (USA)
  • $10, Damon Catling (Australia)
  • $10, Raimond L. (Lithuania)
  • $10, Tom Cordina aka “4Foot” (Canada)
  • $10, Suleyman B. (Turkey)
  • $10, Andrzej W. (USA)
  • $10, Senad S. (USA)
  • $10, Sedat C. (Turkey)
  • $10, Anthony G. (USA)
  • $10, Jeff Walker (USA)
  • $10, Christopher De R. (USA)
  • $10, http://billstoolstore.co.uk (United Kingdom)
  • $10, jmkent aka “Burton” (USA)
  • $10, Ed W. (USA)
  • $10, Paul Thomas aka “liassic” (United Kingdom) – http://www.south-wales.org
  • $10, Ernest L. (USA)
  • $10, Anders B. (Norway)
  • $10, Travis T. (USA)
  • $10, Gavin F. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, MartinF aka “badwolf9” (Switzerland)
  • $10, Kevin B. (Canada)
  • $10, 室津 恵三 (Japan)
  • $10, Daniel C J. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Priyantha T. (Norway)
  • $8, Dino G. (Italy)
  • $8, Lazaros S. (Greece)
  • $8, Kai P. (Germany)
  • $7, Dave G. (USA)
  • $7, Lukas M. (Czech Republic)
  • $7, Robert M. (United Kingdom)
  • $7, Kostas P. (Greece)
  • $5, Thomas C. (USA)
  • $5, Donna Fontenot aka “DonnaFontenot – DazzlinDonna” (USA) – http://www.dazzlindonna.com
  • $5, Michael K. (USA)
  • $5, Aaron R. (USA)
  • $5, Jim H. (United Kingdom)
  • $5, George238 (Portugal)
  • $5, Chuck W. (USA)
  • $5, Jens Stenneken (Germany) – http://www.stenneken.de
  • $5, Freddy W. (USA)
  • $5, Richard K. (USA)
  • $5, Todd J. (USA)
  • $5, Salvatore D. (Italy)
  • $5, tvardy (Poland)
  • $5, Enrico Galli (Italy) – http://www.egw.it
  • $5, Matthew L. (USA)
  • $4, Patrik R. (Sweden)
  • $4, Kyle H. (USA)
  • $4, Romel S. (USA)
  • $3, Danny J. (United Kingdom)
  • $3, Diego C. (Italy)
  • $3, Remy van Elst (Netherlands) – http://relst.nl/
  • $2, Adam S. (USA)
  • $1, Rain Clark aka “Melon Bread” (USA) – http://otaku-unlimited.net/Forums/index.php
  • $1, Fredrik G. (Sweden)
  • $0.02, Samuel L. M. (Chile)

Sponsors:

Money raised in October:

* Donations: $3828.02 (147 donors)
* Sponsors: $349.9 (39 sponsors)

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

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 81% (+3%)
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 11% (-3%)
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 5% (-1%)
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 3% (-0%)

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 2,150,333 (+8%)
  • Pageviews: 3,655,481 (+7%)
  • Page impressions: 1,414,004
  • Search queries: 4,817,791
  • Forum users: 22,485
  • Forum posts: 193,513

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1328 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 3.9% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 25,039th

Events:

  • No releases this month.
  • The LXDE and Fluxbox editions of Linux Mint 7 were cancelled.
  • Clem is now working full time for the distribution.
  • mintCast released 2 episodes of their podcast: http://mintcast.org/

Summary:

  • October 2009 was the (8th consecutive) best month ever since the creation of Linux Mint.
  • The overall income is up 8%.
  • Our user base is the second largest in the desktop Linux market.
  • The community support has never been so big. 147 people gathered to send us more than $3,800! We also got a single donation of $461 from Einar Orn Eidsson (Iceland). This has never been so high.
  • In terms of events this was a very quiet month. We’ve been working hard on the new upcoming release though and there will be plenty of reasons for people to get excited about Linux Mint 8. November will be eventful and I hope this will please the community, especially after seeing how much it’s been supporting our project. Many thanks to all the donors and sponsors behing Linux Mint and congratulations to them, to us and to this project for another fantastic month.

by ·94 Comments

There’s good and bad news about the boot sequence in the upcoming Linux Mint 8.

The Ubuntu developers implemented a new splash technology called xsplash which I find much more powerful than the older usplash. There’s a lot of underlying reasons involved in using xsplash but in this blog post I’d like to focus on the graphical part. The visuals produced by xsplash are nice-looking and it’s now easy to produce good-looking animations.

The problem in Ubuntu 9.10 and Linux Mint 8 though is that it is not possible to rely solely on xsplash and so it has to be used in combination with usplash. So when you boot the system you’ll see usplash, then xsplash, then GDM, then xsplash and then finally the desktop. We’ve made our usplash, xsplash and GDM artwork coherent and so did Ubuntu so even though the whole thing could be more integrated, that’s not a big problem for now and it still looks better than in the previous releases of both distributions.

The real problem is for users who like to customize their system. Xsplash isn’t a mature technology yet and it simply doesn’t take any configuration. It’s easy to tweak but it’s not themeable. To modify its looks you’ll have to modify the system files it uses and tell mintUpdate to ignore xsplash related package updates (this is a new feature in mintUpdate coming in Mint 8, so thankfully that’s quite easy to do).

Grub 2 replaces Grub and just as Grub wasn’t complete without its gfx-boot patch, Grub 2 isn’t complete without its new gfxmenu patch. According to some of the Grub developers though the patch is considered for inclusion and likely to be integrated soon. So the decision is for Linux Mint 8 to use Grub 2 and to wait for it to support gfx-menu.

That basically means our Grub menu will look more like this:

Than like this:

I know we got people used to nice boot menus in the previous releases and most of you will probably miss grub-gfxboot, but at this stage it makes more sense to stick to the official Grub branch and to patiently wait for them to support this feature.

GDM also comes with a lot of changes.

In brief, the boot sequence in Mint 8 is going to radically different than in Mint 7, with pros and cons compared to it, but overall with a general feeling of improvement. I hope most of you will appreciate it, if you’ve tried the RC of Ubuntu 9.10 you probably have an idea of what’s coming up. Unlike previous releases of Linux Mint, we’ll use the same technology than Ubuntu this time around and we’ll make our best to produce nice artwork for it.