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One of the new features planned for the upcoming Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” is the ability to browse the Software Portal (http://www.linuxmint.com/software) and to install applications directly from the desktop. This feature is now ready and we’d like you to give us a hand in testing it.

We extended the scope of mintInstall and we developed a new frontend which downloads all the relevant data from the Software Portal so you can browse applications and install them without having to use the portal at all. We also defined how the portal and the frontend communicate with each others and formalized the data structure in XML. The frontend itself supports multiple portals (we’ll be talking to tuxsoftware.com for instance, hopefully getdeb.net too, and we’ll eventually publish documentation about this) so although you can only use it to browse the Linux Mint Software Portal right now, it’s only a matter of time before others portals become available.

Here’s a screenshot:

MintInstall 5 is available in Romeo. If you don’t have Romeo enabled you can get the debs from here:

Let us know what you think, report any bug you may find and have a lot of fun with this brand new mintInstall.

To translate mintInstall 5 into your own language, use this forum thread:  http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=16242

Note: There was a lot I wanted to say about this but I’ll save it for the release notes. KDE CE is coming out soon, I need to work on x64 and there are still major developments I want to get done before Mint 6 (an upgrade tool for instance). To keep it short, MintInstall 5 is one of the new features planned for Mint 6 but it will also become available as an upgrade for Mint 5.  It will stay in Romeo until we’re happy to consider it stable.. so we’re waiting on your feedback 🙂

Changelog:

  • 5.0: Initial release

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* News about Mint

Our server was hacked with downtime as a consequence. This was by a “bot” that scanned the net for vulnerabilities. We have now sealed the hole that made this SQL injection possible. We thank all that alerted us to what happened.

The 64 bit edition is advancing

I had hoped that a new beta (even final) of the XFCE edition would have been released. We are still plagued by an odd problem with log in/out so ….

* News about Linux

Canonical joins the Linux Foundation

Xandros acquired Linspire – now Linspire is no more

Dell’s “eee-killer” to have Ubuntu

Linus Torvalds fed up with “the security circus”

* News about IT

Dutch police and the FBI stops large botnet

Gmail and Google apps have crashed several times in the las week or so

Google has released Keyczar, billed as a “Toolkit for safe and simple cryptography”, under an Apache 2.0 open source license.

Important ruling in court in favour of open source

Loss of customer data spurs closure of online storage service ‘The Linkup’

Rat brained robots

Spam down 40% in second quarter of 2008 (Unfortunately only a swedish link – I can’t find the english link)

* Hardware news

AMD offers Linux drivers for new Radeon HD 4870 X2 at the same time the card is released

VIA quits motherboard chipset business

Materials that can make things invisible developed. Could improve computer hardware

A cheap way to replace copper in existing cables

* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

Home page

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* 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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The PC market is in an interesting situation at the moment. Almost all the computers that are sold today come with 64 bit processors, which obviously support the AMD64 architecture but also i386. Owners of these computers are faced with a choice: running a 64bit operating system (AMD64) or a 32bit one (i386). The reality is that most of the software available at present is available for i386 and not always for AMD64. The older architecture is also more stable and is still seen as a reference by editors and developers. Last but not least, very few applications actually take advantage of the improvements of the new architecture so running an AMD64 operating system may actually not be faster than running an i386 one, and in some cases it could even be slower…

… so here is a new architecture which is ready, which a lot of people have the hardware for, but still… the software world doesn’t seem to be ready for it. I386 is still the predominant reference in the market and people will need a strong reason to change. That strong reason is the amount of RAM i386 can support: 4GB RAM. A budget computer (low to middle-range) now comes with 2GB of RAM and the upper market has already reached 4GB. No matter the performances, many users won’t run an operating system which doesn’t recognize all their memory. So we need to get ready and the same way we’ll have to support i386 after AMD64 becomes the reference architecture, we have to support AMD64 now even though it’s not fully on par with i386 yet.

I started working on the x64 Edition and I’m planning to make it as similar as the Main Edition as possible. Eventually I’d like to replicate all changes made to Main to x64 so that I can maintain both editions and release them at the same time. I’ve asked Chris (known as “lakehousetech” on the forums) to perform a benchmark and he compared the performance of Elyssa R1, Hardy i386 and Hardy AMD64. His results are available here:

http://upload.linuxmint.com/blog/p236/elyssa_hardy_x64_benchmark.ods

As you can see, none of the three systems clearly outperformed the two others. So based on this benchmark performance wouldn’t be a reason for you to switch to the upcoming x64 Edition, not yet anyway. A real objective reason to make the switch  would be if you already had more than 4GB RAM. Other than that we’d recommend you stick to what we do best and what receives most of our attention: The Main Edition.

This is also the reason why we’re considering this an edition rather than declining Main into two architectures. Every 6 months and with each release we’ll of course reconsider our position and re-assess the readiness of this architecture until it comes to par with i386 and we give it the same exposure as our main product.

x64 will start as a separate edition, one for enthusiasts and high spec computers. We’ll put all our efforts into it as it will eventually become our main product but for now we still consider it an alternative edition.

Comments and questions are welcome (I’m sure we’ll get a lot on this topic :)).

Note: It’s hard to say when this edition will be ready. The goal for Mint 5 was to start this edition and have an x64 version of Elyssa. We’re still aiming for this and this is receiving as much attention as ongoing development for Mint 6 (new mintUpdate, Application Manager (new mintInstall frontend), OEM support, Upgrade Manager). Once this edition is in place we’ll want to work on both architectures at the same time so there won’t be any delay between their respective releases.