Linux Mint 3.0 Cassandra and Linux Mint 3.1 Celena will reach end of life on October 19th. Both releases were based on Ubuntu 7.04 which is planned to reach end-of-life at the same date.

Repositories will remain open for another while but no more updates or security fixes will be made available for these two releases.

Users of Linux Mint 3.x are asked to upgrade to Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna or to perform a fresh installation of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa.

Announcement from Ubuntu: “Ubuntu announced the release of 7.04 almost 18 months ago, on April 19, 2007. As with the earlier releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 18 months. The support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 7.04 will reach end of life on Sunday, October 19th, 2008. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 7.04.”

Note: Linux Mint follows the Ubuntu release cycle with a new release every 6 months, a lifespan of about 1.5 years per release and 3 years per LTS release. LTS stands for Long Term Support. Linux Mint 5 is an LTS release.

* News about Mint

Lots of improvements leading up to Mint 6 Felicia

mintUpload to support FTP

mintNanny introduced – a simple tool to prevent children from accessing certain websites

Three new commands – search, apt contains and apt content.

Mint is now to be on the major distributions page on Distrowatch

* News about Linux

Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source – An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently in a decision

Michael Robertson sued over Linspires missing cash

New releases recently

Mandriva Linux 2009 and Puppy Linux 4.1

Debian Lenny was not released – What you can do for “Lenny”

Ubuntu Confirms Linux Netbook Returns Higher than Anticipated

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Mono 2.0 has been released

The Ubuntu Upstream Report

LinuxWorld will relaunch as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

Security researchers warn of new ‘clickjacking’ browser bugs The latest version of NoScript protects against this

Flash Player workaround available for “Clickjacking” issue for 9.0.124.0 and earlier

Nasty web bug descends on world’s most popular sites

Researchers uncover major IP flaw

Council sells security hole on Ebay

Hackers exploit Neosploit to booby trap BBC, US postal service

Shadowserver to Build ‘Sinkhole’ Server to Find Errant Bots

Norwegian standards body implodes over OOXML controversy

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman

Obviously the new Facebook layout is not liked by all, there are at least three groups claiming a million members

Google: Commitment to Sustainable Computing

Microsoft will move its main office for enterprise search to Norway

Microsoft gives users six months longer to flee from Vista – Buckling to OEMs?

Microsoft tries to put fear of God into scareware vendors

Venezuela orders 1 million laptops from Portugal

New trans-Pacific submarine cable completed

Japan home owners to be offered 16Gbit/s Internet connection

How Online Fraudsters Are Using SAAS in Their Networks

World’s electrical grids open to attack (not sure where to put this)

* Hardware news

AMD to split the company

Report: Fujitsu to sell hard drive business to Western Digital

New plate from BT promises broadband boost

Lightbulbs Could Replace Wi-Fi Hotspots

* Trivia and other links

Clean Energy 2030 Google’s Proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels

Introduction

MintUpload is the little tool which pops up when you right-click on a file and select “upload”. Until now mintUpload was mostly used as a way to share files by uploading them to a public place somewhere on one of Linux Mint’s servers and by sending the corresponding URL to friends and family members (or to anybody really..). Some people also bought Mint-Space accounts and were able to set up mintUpload to add an additional upload service to it. These people could then share files in a similar manner but instead of using a public storage space and being limited to 2 days, they could use their 1GB of Web space and have their files kept there indefinitely.

Some people mentioned that mintUpload was great at sharing files with others but not so much at actually “uploading” them and we got a lot of requests to add FTP support to that tool.

Initially mintUpload was designed with novice users in mind, people who wanted to share large files with each others and who didn’t know what FTP meant or where to get free web space to store them. After gathering some feedback, we’ve come to realize that mintUpload also got popular with experienced users, people who even had their own FTP accounts and wanted a quick way to upload files to it without launching an FTP client. So we added FTP support to MintUpload by defining another type of service and letting the user define his own FTP services.

Installation

To install MintUpload you need the Romeo repositories. Perform an “apt update” and an “apt install mintupload” in a terminal.

If you don’t have Romeo set up, you can grab the packages from here:

• http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/romeo/m/mintsystem/mintsystem_5.5_all.deb
• http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/romeo/m/mintupload/mintupload_2.0_all.deb

Configuration

MintUpload lets you define “upload services” by adding files in /etc/linuxmint/mintUpload/services/

Here’s an example of an FTP upload service:

type=FTP
name=My own FTP service
host=myhost.com
user=myusername
pass=mypassword
path=myuploads

The “path” is optional, it lets you define where within your FTP service you want the files to be uploaded. In this example we’re not uploading them in the root folder, but within a directory called “myuploads”.

MintUpload will use any service defined with that format and saved as a file within /etc/linuxmint/mintUpload/services/.

Translations

MintUpload 2 will be one of the featured improvements coming with Linux Mint 6 Felicia. We’re actively trying to get the community to translate this tool. If you happen to speak another language than English, please help us translate mintUpload 2 by participating to this forum thread:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=17551

Bug reports and feedback

Tell us what you think by posting a comment on this blog post. Report bugs here as well.

Note: Some people also asked for SFTP support. This won’t be in the scope for Mint 6 but we’ll work on it for future releases.

Spread the word

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