by ·6 Comments

* News about Mint

Monthly Stats – August 2009
August 2009 was the (6th consecutive) best month ever since the creation of Linux Mint.

Unfortunately Shane informed us that he will not be able to make any more Fluxbox editions, due to personal reasons
Clem may work on it instead

* News about Linux

Simon – speech activated user interface for KDE

openSUSE to default to KDE

Canonical Unveils The Ubuntu Software Store

Tuxera, the company founded by the open source NTFS project NTFS-3G, signs up with Microsoft

Slackware 13.0 released (old but alive )

Another kernel bug,  Mint users are likely (but not certain) to be safe, but if you installed Wine or Dosemu you’re at risk

Quake live also for Linux in your browser

Skype 2.1 for Linux Beta – needs Qt so it’s not for Gnome

Foresight Linux to base itself on Fedora

PySide a Nokia project for Qt

OpenShot – a new non linear Video Editor for Linux

The Linux kernel is growing fast – a report

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

Pidgin 2.6.1 adds XMPP Voice and Video support (but not on Windows yet)

* News about IT

EBay Sells Skype To Marc Andreessen

The US customs will have the right to seize any laptop, camera, mp3 player and the like “even if there’s zero evidence of illicit activities” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently announced

Bill would give the US president emergency control of Internet. How this would effect the world outside the US is unclear

Opera 10 released

IBM X-Force(R) Report Reveals Unprecedented State of Web Insecurity

New Attack Cracks Common Wi-Fi Encryption in a Minute

Pirate Bay temporarily disappeared from the internet after a court decision

BitTorrent Site Mininova Loses Copyright Ruling

Microsoft opens up for open source – The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services

Australian Federal Police “forgot” to set a password on a computer used to break up an underground hacker forum, and hackers broke into it

* Hardware news

One Billion Wi-Fi Chipsets to Ship in 2011 Alone

* Other news

Single molecule, one million times smaller than a grain of sand, pictured for first time by IBM researchers

* Comic of the week

Credit goes to xkcd

Someone asked me to use this one – I think it’s funny

* 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.

I have been working long hours lately and there’s a lot to do in the forum so this edition is much delayed

Enjoy life

Husse

by ·15 Comments

Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

  • $163, Adnan Z. (Germany)
  • $120, Nicolas B. (Germany)
  • $102, James Marsh (Australia) – http://www.engadinecycles.com.au/
  • $100, Micah Gravel aka “micahman” (USA)
  • $74 (2nd donation), David F. (Ireland)
  • $74, Badr R. (France)
  • $74, Matthias R. (France)
  • $60, Jim Duffield aka “sapperk9” (Australia)
  • $50, Andreas Rumpenhorst (Germany)
  • $50, James Donaldson (USA)
  • $50, Robert D. (United Kingdom)
  • $50, William G. (USA)
  • $50, Stefano Candotti aka “Stevewonder” (Italy)
  • $50, Eric Pate (USA) – http://www.carolinagreenpc.com
  • $50, Billy S. (USA)
  • $50, Andre D. (USA)
  • $44 (2nd donation), Wolfgang P. (Austria)
  • $44, Francisco C. C. (Spain)
  • $37, Thomas G. (Germany)
  • $37, Bernhard M. (Germany)
  • $30, Mark O’D. (World)
  • $30, David C. (USA)
  • $28, Pau Carre Cardona (Spain)
  • $27, Jeffrey K. (USA)
  • $25, Gavin Engel (USA)
  • $25, Ed D. (USA)
  • $25, Clifton Rhodes (USA)
  • $25, Sudheer S. (United Kingdom)
  • $25, Paul Bary (USA)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Dan B. (USA)
  • $20, Dalibor Saula (Australia)
  • $20, Amiel H. (Australia)
  • $20, Sven S. (Australia)
  • $20, David Brown (Canada)
  • $20, Jonathan P. (USA)
  • $20, Winston G. (USA)
  • $16, John B. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Matthew G. (USA)
  • $15, Slavoljub M. (Norway)
  • $15, Paul George (United Kingdom) – http://www.paulgeorge.me
  • $14, Patrick Baumann (Germany)
  • $14, Iain G. (United Kingdom)
  • $14, L G DE L. (Netherlands)
  • $14, Charl P. (Netherlands)
  • $14, Claudio Gabriele N. (Italy)
  • $14, Bruno M. (Italy)
  • $14, Joseph W. (United Kingdom)
  • $14, Gunter D. (Austria)
  • $13.13, Mac C. (USA)
  • $11, Mongolisch-Deutsch.de aka “rmbw” (Germany) – http://www.mongolisch-deutsch.de
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard G. (USA)
  • $10, Henry W. (USA)
  • $10, Dmitry O. (Russia)
  • $10, Ludovic G. aka “Lewdsquirrel” (Canada)
  • $10, Kevin M. (USA)
  • $10, Tom Perry (United Kingdom) – http://twitter.com/tomp83
  • $10, Ralph N. (USA)
  • $10, Bob H. (Australia)
  • $10, Christopher G. (USA)
  • $10, Anthony N. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Steinar M. (Norway)
  • $10, Donald D’A. (USA)
  • $10, MuddBuddha (USA) – http://muddbuddha.com
  • $10, John P. (Australia)
  • $10, Marcel P. (Canada)
  • $10, Chaitanya K aka “thegoodmelon” (India)
  • $10, Krzysztof J. (USA)
  • $10, Gabriel S. (World)
  • $7, Geoffroy M. (Canada)
  • $7, Marcus Wikstrom aka “mece” (Finland) – http://twitter.com/mece66
  • $5 (2nd donation), Matthew O. (Ireland)
  • $5, Malcolm B. (USA)
  • $5, Francesco Coiro (Italy)
  • $5, Apollo V. Melo aka “teflashfire” (USA) – http://militarylinuxusers.blogspot.com
  • $5, Doug Berch (USA) – http://dougberch.com
  • $5, Venkatesh B. (United Kingdom)
  • $5, Helen J. (United Kingdom)
  • $5, Peter Hope-Tindall aka “hopetindall” (Canada)
  • $5, Brandon P. (USA)
  • $4, Johan T. (Sweden)
  • $2, Remy van Elst (Netherlands) – http://relst.nl/
  • $2, PartEase (USA) – http://www.partease.com
  • $1, Viktor Semenovskiy (Russia) – http://ubuntunnru.blogspot.com/
  • $1, Pierre G. (Belgium)

Sponsors:

Money raised in August:

* Donations: $2162.13 (85 donors)
* Sponsors: $775.5 (42 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: 75% (+7%)
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 15% (-5%)
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 7% (-1%)
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 3% (-1%)

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 1,874,462 (+12%)
  • Pageviews: 3,341,385 (+10%)
  • Page impressions: 1,381,550
  • Search queries: 4,131,663
  • Forum users:20,272
  • Forum posts:175,325

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1279 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 4.2% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 28,272nd

Events:

Summary:

  • August 2009 was the (6th consecutive) best month ever since the creation of Linux Mint.
  • The overall income is up 24%.
  • Our user base is the second largest in the desktop Linux market.
  • The community support is outstanding: 85 people donated last month for a total of $2162 and our sponsors raised $775.

by ·9 Comments

* News about Mint

Mint 7: Flash in full screen with Firefox 3.5.x – a fix

Clem has commented on a review of the Gloria KDE edition

* News about Linux

Security flaw in the kernel discovered, it’s in all kernels for the last 8 years, but it is only local, it cannot be used remotely

This is the second flaw discovered in about a month (previous one here Standard Mint does not have a kernel that is at risk for this one) Patches exist for both

Several vulnerabilities regarding the parsing of XML data have been found – this affects some libraries in Mint, check the link to see which

Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes

Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer — “I’ve Had Enough” – and Linus Torvalds starts programming TTY

Microsoft Acknowledges Competition from Linux

Dell: Linux v Windows netbook returns a ‘non-issue’

Novell – More Support for the openSUSE Project (not so long ago Novell fired developers for openSUSE)

openSUSE Cuts Maintenance Cycle to 18 Months

Moonlight 2.0 goes Beta

A possible change of direction for Foresight Linux

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

KDE 4.3.0 released

Khronos Releases OpenGL 3.2 with easier portability of Direct3D applications.

Nokia says Qt is the best framework, and is to drop Symbian and makes Qt a subdomain of Nokia.com (no more Trolltech or qtsoftware) Qt is used by KDE

* News about IT

Twitter DOS attack targeted Georgian blogger

Twitter-based Botnet Command Channel

Zeus botnet’s Real Host cut off from the internet (Zeus is alleged to be the world’s biggest cybercrime botnet)

Three indicted in largest U.S. identity theft scheme, according to some sources it was simple: Theft Of 130 Million Credit Card Numbers Didn’t Take Much

Researchers hijack computer during software update

OpenDNSSEC Launched to Help Drive Adoption of DNSSEC

Researchers find insecure BIOS ‘rootkit’ pre-loaded in laptops

Bootkit bypasses hard disk encryption

Microsoft at a loss in Word patent case?

Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard Efforts

Microsoft IE 8 shines in Web browser security test paid for by Microsoft

* Hardware news

eXtreme Power Suppply Calculator Helps Accurately Select a PSU – more important than you may think

* Other news

Microsoft and Nokia announce close cooperation, Office Mobile comes to Nokia smartphones – could this cooperation “kill” Windows Mobile?

* 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.

Enjoy life

Husse