Welcome to the Linux Mint Newsletter

A security flaw in the DNS protocol has been fixed. This is for all operating systems and every appliance connected to the internet. Probably one of the most serious threats to the internet so far. Some background here – updates already in mintUpdate, please update your system. A warning has been posted in the forum

* News about Mint

I can’t guarantee it but it seems that a release of the Elyssa KDE edition is immanent – we are testing a beta with all problems hopefully solved. It is no easy task to make a good KDE edition. I also think the XFCE edition is near a public beta

Clem has been busy and  posted a bunch of interesting info

Sections of the Mint repository

Some news about development  We had to postpone the developement of QT frontends for the Mint applications in the KDE CE.  The implications of Ubuntu 8.04.1 for development are considered

The implications of branding has been discussed. We like freedom, but not the freedom to use the Mint name and logo in any way or fashion.

Elyssa is used by 60% of the Mint users

mintInstall 4 released in Romeo (Romeo is the “unstable” branch of Mint repositories)

How should the Mint tools be named? This has wide implications and mintUpdate 2.8 will be released soon as “Update Manager”

There’s a poll for the naming here

The forum is growing and so is the interest for it from spammers. Please help keep the forum neat and report all spam you see.

The repositories were down for about half of July 7 It’s unclear if this was a hacker attack but there seems to be attempts to take the site down

* News about Linux

Linux Magazine has an article covering what they call “Spawn of Ubuntu” (which includes Mint)

GNOME hires Stormy Peters as Executive Director She has a past as an executive in HP

Xandros acquires  Linspire – this obviously happened behind the scene and was not made public until some two weeks after it took place

openSUSE Build Service 1.0 Released  The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create and maintain packages for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

ATI promises faster Linux drivers

A new version of Gentoo was released

Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel  (Youtube video)

An interview with Mark Shuttleworth

* News about IT

Samba 3.2 released

Web threats hits 12 month high

Vmware changes CEO and puts in a Microsoft veteran as CEO

The Windows version of VLC has a security flaw

As I stated in an earlier newsletter the Swedish law permitting bugging of all electronic communication that passes the country boundaries is aimed at Russia

The US congress passes amendments to the “FISA” Act which is similar to the Swedish act (Haven’t found a good link for this)

* Hardware news

Threats to the GPS system has been reported recently

The world may run out of some rare elements needed to make computer chips in a few years time

* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

You find the Wallpaper of the Week 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

The votes are in, and the winner of this weeks WOTW is…..

In The Trees by akaNed

Congratulations to akaNed for his excellent work on this wallpaper.

This is going to be the last Wallpaper Of The Week, as we are changing to a new format, Wallpaper Of The Month. I will be posting more on this, and the reasons for the change in another announcement.

The Linux Mint repositories contain all the software developed by us, imported by us or in a more general way, all the software we decided to maintain. If a particular package is in a Linux Mint repository it gets a higher priority than if it is in an Ubuntu repository, as a consequence, packages which are maintained by Linux Mint don’t directly get updates from Ubuntu, even if a newer version is put in the Ubuntu repositories. This is called APT pinning and it consists in always preferring Mint repositories over Ubuntu ones for particular packages, no matter what their respective versions are.

Linux Mint repositories are organized into different sections, which you can enable or disable based on your needs:

– main: This section contains all the software developed by Linux Mint. For example: mintUpdate, mintInstall etc…

– upstream: This section contains packages coming from upstream (in most cases from Ubuntu) which are patched, modified or repackaged by Linux Mint. For example: Firefox, Tomboy..etc

– import: This section contains software which comes from 3rd party developers and for which there are no (or outdated) upstream packages. Linux Mint packages these software applications and “imports” them into this section. Examples: Opera, Picasa, Songbird, Sunbird, Frostwire.. etc. In some cases the imported software is already packaged (some packages come from getdeb.net for instance).

– community: This section is disabled by default. We haven’t used it much so far but we’re planning to do so more and more. Sometimes, members of the community package things up and ask us to include additional software in our repositories. We’re planning to include these packages into this section.

– backport: This section is disabled by default. We haven’t used it much either, but we will use it more and more, especially with Elyssa, which is an LTS semi-rolling release. When a new version of a package becomes stable it is usually included in the repositories of the latest release. We’re also planning on porting these new versions back to Elyssa so Elyssa users can enjoy up to date desktop components until the next LTS release. The backport section is where we’ll include these new versions.

– romeo: Packages don’t stay in Romeo, they get there so we can test them and when they’re stable enough they go to another section. Linux Mint’s Romeo is like Debian’s Unstable, Mandriva Cooker or Fedora Rawhide… The only reason for you to use Romeo is to help us test new packages. For instance Romeo currently contains Flash 10 Beta 2, mintInstall 4.0 and will soon get mintUpdate 2.8. Romeo is quite unstable.. and as our stable releases carry female names we decided to give our unstable branch the name of a famous heart-breaker.

Finally, there is a website for the repository where you can see which packages and versions are in which section, where you can download debs and even source code: http://packages.linuxmint.com