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Preparations for the next version of Mint, Helena, is going on

A new mintInstall has been presented in the blog – here, here and here

A new Mint KDE logo has been selected

* News about Linux

Good News, id Tech 5 Is Likely Coming To Linux (gaming engine for Rage and Doom)

GNOME 2.28 Released

ARM Joins The Linux Foundation

Virtualization Leader Citrix Joins The Linux Foundation

Ubuntu 10.04 : The Lucid Lynx. Shuttleworth says it won’t stink

Red Hat Reports Strong Second Quarter Results

Stallman says Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

Nokia has packaged KOffice for Maemo 5 environment (cell phones)

Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web

* News about IT

France Passes Tough Internet Piracy Bill (the toughest?)

Microsoft sues scareware scammers

New FCC “Net Neutrality” Rules

Google Chrome Frame an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer

Dell to pay $4 million in fraud case

Dell to buy Perot Systems for $3.9 billion

Palm Ditches Windows Mobile

Hacker Forum Got Hacked

Earn 43 cents every time you infect a Mac

Cisco addresses 12 individual vulnerabilities

* Hardware news

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Credit goes to xkcd

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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.

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

I’d like to thank all the people who sent us feedback during the recent development of mintInstall. We’re still happy to receive ideas and suggestions at this stage, but we’re also getting close to a usable product. Because the number of changes was so great and because I know many of you are interested in running this newer version, I decided to publish DEB packages for this beta of mintInstall.

Here’s how the interface looks:

To install this application, you first need to install a DEB package called “mintinstall-data”, and then another DEB package called “mintinstall”. Both packages can be downloaded at this address:

http://github.com/linuxmint/mintinstall/downloads

Give us your feedback, don’t hesitate to report malfunctions or ideas for further improvements.

This is already the 3rd blog post about mintInstall so we’ll move to something else after that. If we have the time, we might go down the same feedback/dev_iterations process for mintUpdate.

To tell you the truth, I had plans to work on the OEM installation and on mintBackup at this stage of the release cycle (I’m still hoping to work on these before the release of Mint 8). I thought I was done with mintInstall and I was quite happy with the improvements made so far. But the feedback I got from my initial post was good, constructive and I just couldn’t ignore it.

So I decided to make the jump and to give mintInstall the ability to install multiple applications at a time. There’s also going to be a “View” menu with the ability to choose the visible columns, and I’m also planning to make changes in the application view, but the main thing here, is the fact that you can now see what’s installed, and click apply after a series of additions/removals. The GUI is dramatically changed because of this.

So here it is:

As you can see, the little colored squares indicate the status of the application. They tend to follow the aptitude classification (“i” for installed, “p” for available). Because of the nature of the Mint files, some rare ones are “special”, which means that when you install/remove them, the change is done immediately, not when you click apply.

I’m happy with the overall look but I’m aware of the fact that certain elements can be confusing, so I’m asking for feedback once again and hopefully with your bright ideas we won’t only get these great features, but also an intuitive and elegant interface to go with it.