We’re currently developing a website for the Linux Mint community where you’ll be able to do the following:

• Have ideas to improve Linux Mint, comment and rate other people’s ideas (similar to a light version of “Brainstorm”)
• Register your hardware devices, find people with the same hardware as you and if it doesn’t work for you and it worked for them, see how they got their hardware to work with Linux Mint.
• Browse, rate and install software (what’s currently called “Software Portal”)
• Suggest new software
• Ask questions, answer other people’s questions, thank those who helped..etc
• Have your own mini-blog, subscribe to other people’s blogs, comment and rate articles.
• Same with tutorials.
• Message each others via an email/PM-like system
• Add other people as friends for quick access to their activities/data/profile

We’ll also introduce ranking systems and levels to make the whole thing a little fun. It’s currently in ALPHA stage and that means the following:

• We’re working on the same version of the website you’re using, so expect it to break at any moment.
• We’re quick in rejecting bug reports, if something is broken because we’re working on it, or if something’s already known to us, we’ll simply reject the bug.
• We might very well dump the database and start from scratch, so all the content you put in the website could be deleted at any moment. For instance if we decide that the structure of the database would be better this way rather than that way, and if that means emptying some tables…
• This isn’t even BETA, it’s ALPHA, when using the website you need to consider yourself a guinea pig.
• We won’t accept too many people. After having the required number we’ll simply close the registrations.

The website is available here:

• http://community.linuxmint.com

Provided you read all the above warnings you’re welcome to register an account and to start using the already implemented features.

Once you registered on the website, as an alpha-tester, you can give us your feedback here:

• http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=152&t=38074

There are links to the Launchpad’s project for this website, including bugs and blueprints. Please don’t register too much out there and use the forum topic mentioned above first.

We’ll close the registration process when we get to about 100 users.

Thanks in advance to all the guin.. hmm, sorry, to all the alpha-testers 😉 With their help we’re hoping to have a stable website for the upcoming release of Linux Mint 9.

The Fluxbox Community Edition produced releases for Linux Mint 5 “Elyssa” and Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” and it became quite popular among Linux Mint users. But in 2009, due to personal circumstances Shane Joe Lazar, the maintainer of this edition, had to focus his attention elsewhere and so the Fluxbox CE was discontinued. During the release cycle for Linux Mint 7 “Gloria”, no Fluxbox edition was released.

Kendall Weaver recently stepped up from the community and worked on a new Fluxbox edition of Linux Mint. We had a conversation and I got the opportunity to test his preliminary ISOs. Today, I’m happy to welcome him within the development team as the new maintainer of the Fluxbox Community Edition.

His vision of the Fluxbox edition is a bit different and he’s interested in replacing some of the most popular software in order to make it even lighter. He’s already started to interact with the community on the forums and he will be getting the help and support of the development team.

I’d like to thank Shane for the work he’s done on this edition and the help he’s giving at the moment. I look forward to see how this edition develops and I hope you’ll enjoy its upcoming releases.