by ·59 Comments

Linux Mint 6 Felicia will reach end of life on April 30, 2010. This release was based on Ubuntu 8.10 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. Users of Linux Mint 6 Felicia are asked to migrate to Linux Mint 8 Helena (which will be supported until April 2011) or to wait for the upcoming Linux Mint 9 LTS Isadora (Long Term Release which will be released in the end of May and supported until April 2013).

Announcement from Ubuntu: “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 8.10 will reach end of life on Friday, April 30, 2010. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 8.10.”

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 9 will be an LTS release.

by ·17 Comments

Donations & Sponsorships:

Many thanks to the following donors and sponsors for financially supporting Linux Mint:

Donors:

  • $500, Anonymous (Canada)
  • $200, John C. aka “BuzzKiller” (USA)
  • $200, Ronald S. (USA)
  • $143, Pascal M. (France)
  • $100, Frederick V. (USA)
  • $100, HenryW. (USA)
  • $100, Ivan Popovic (Croatia)
  • $100, Jonathan K. (USA)
  • $100, Markus R. (Switzerland)
  • $75, David K. (USA)
  • $71, Valentino V. (Italy)
  • $60, Digital Linx Hosting (Canada) – http://vpsnoc.com
  • $57 (2nd donation), Wolfgang P. (Austria)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Jonathan B H. (USA)
  • $50, Harvey Minnigh (USA)
  • $50, Scotty N. aka “tdi_ywg” (Canada)
  • $50, Edson S. (Canada)
  • $50, Mark E. (USA)
  • $50, Martin S. (Norway)
  • $50, William S. (USA)
  • $50, Martin I. (Switzerland)
  • $50, Paul A. (Canada)
  • $50, Tim B. (USA)
  • $50, Jose M. (Brazil)
  • $43, Linus Staf aka “linus191” (Finland) – http://linusstaf.com
  • $43, Grzegorz Antoniak aka “antonone” (Poland) – http://anadoxin.org/blog
  • $43, Nicholas T. (Greece)
  • $36, Pierre M. (Canada)
  • $36, Werner Palmen (Netherlands)
  • $36, Stratos Laspas aka “StratosJL” (Greece) – http://laspas.gr
  • $36, Rob van den B. (Netherlands)
  • $35, Pete Molina aka “pmolina” (USA)
  • $30, Jeff S. (Australia)
  • $29, Howard S. (Israel)
  • $28, Christopher F. (United Kingdom)
  • $28, Olli K. (Finland)
  • $28, Risto S. (Finland)
  • $28, Manuel F. (Portugal)
  • $28, Salvador T. S. (Spain)
  • $25, Joseph I. (USA)
  • $25, Michael H. (USA)
  • $25, A L A Mulders (Netherlands)
  • $25, Jeffrey W. (USA)
  • $25, Matthew A. (Canada) – http://matthewansell.com
  • $25, Michal K. (USA)
  • $25, Derek Turner aka “frderek” (United Kingdom) – http://www.cantabile.org.je
  • $25, Murali B. (USA)
  • $25, Donn Shaffer aka “donnshaffer” (USA)
  • $25, Benjamin B. (USA)
  • $21, Rikkie Neutelings (Netherlands)
  • $20, Carlos H. (USA)
  • $20, Jordan K. (USA)
  • $20, Steve Burdine aka “Highfructose327” (USA) – http://artandfoss.blogspot.com
  • $20, Thomas Begush aka “Bigsquish” (USA)
  • $20, Cornelius ter W. (Australia)
  • $20, Mark F. (USA)
  • $20, Sture K. (Norway)
  • $20, Antony Coulson (United Kingdom)
  • $20, David V. (USA)
  • $20, JerryB (USA) – http://jerryb-myblog.blogsot.com
  • $20, Slavoljub M. (Norway)
  • $20, Tracy R. S. (USA)
  • $20, Jeremy C. (USA)
  • $20, Graham R. (United Kingdom)
  • $17, Shane Kitt aka “crimsonfire” (Ireland) – http://www.shanekitt.com
  • $15, E Jonsen (United Kingdom) – http://ejsolutions.co.uk
  • $15, John J. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Anthony L. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Stephen Baker (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Tim H. (United Kingdom)
  • $15, Lizard L. aka “playful” (USA) – http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net
  • $15, aimee daniells (United Kingdom)
  • $14, Manfred Saliger aka “mintfrind” (Germany) – http://saliger.net
  • $14, Thomas K. (Sweden)
  • $14, Peter T. (Germany)
  • $14, Matthias W. (Germany)
  • $14, Miikkola Pete Sergei (Finland)
  • $14, Joachim M. (Austria)
  • $14, Zdenek III aka “kwevej” (Czech Republic) – http://www.last.fm/user/kwevej
  • $14, Zacharias P. (Cyprus) – http://www.tiankoltd.com
  • $14, Emil Pavlov aka “emil_pavlov” (Bulgaria)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard G. (USA)
  • $10, Rob Brown (Australia)
  • $10, David Adams (USA) – http://birdfight.tumblr.com
  • $10, Jaak V. (Estonia)
  • $10, Jindrich R. aka “amino” (Czech Republic)
  • $10, mr m r b. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Albert P. (Netherlands)
  • $10, Thierry Z. (Switzerland)
  • $10, Anders B. (Norway)
  • $10, Gerard Mc Cormack aka “gmacor2” (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Juan Antonio M. S. (Spain)
  • $10, Charles B. (USA)
  • $10, Thomas D. (Germany)
  • $10, Angel A. (USA)
  • $10, Robert Harper (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Clint B. (USA)
  • $10, Tom P. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, George F. (USA)
  • $10, Wojciech K. (Poland)
  • $10, Paul M. (USA)
  • $10, Tony P. (Australia)
  • $10, George R. aka “Az4x4” (USA)
  • $10, Mark B. (USA)
  • $10, Adam C E. (USA)
  • $10, Jonas Lundstedt aka “jonlun” (Sweden)
  • $10, Farshid G. (USA)
  • $10, Rob S. (United Kingdom)
  • $10, Daniel R. (Canada)
  • $10, Michael W. (USA)
  • $8, Евгений Р. (Russia)
  • $7, Angel M. D. (Spain)
  • $7, Marcos Pascual V. (Spain)
  • $7, Louis Mota aka “Luigi” (Portugal)
  • $6, Hubert M. (Austria)
  • $5, Mochammad K. (Indonesia)
  • $5, Garth L. (USA)
  • $5, Johan T. (Sweden)
  • $5, Levi H. (USA)
  • $5, Thomas W. (USA)
  • $5, Savant B.D. (USA) – http://www.allyourprices.com
  • $3, Susann W. (Germany) – http://www.biergartenblog.de
  • $2, Flavio B. (Switzerland)
  • $1, Inga Muste (Latvia) – http://inga.lv
  • $1, Mark R. (United Kingdom)
  • $1, Daniel Franic (USA) – http://www.cdkey.biz
  • $1, Anant Shrivastava (India) – http://anantshri.info

Sponsors:

Money raised in March:

* Donations: $4026 (127 donors)
* Sponsors: $863.5 (72 sponsors)

http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 8 Helena: 62% (+4%)
  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 28% (-2%)
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 5% (-1%)
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 3% (-0%)
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 2% (-0%)

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 2,664,246 (+9%)
  • Unique views: 3,539,050 (+7%)
  • Pageviews: 4,582,649 (+6%)
  • Page impressions: 1,788,210
  • Search queries: 6,186,672
  • Forum users: 29,546
  • Forum posts: 249,595

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1602 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 4.4% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 18,493

Events:

Summary:

  • The Linux Mint user base grew significantly in the last few months. It’s 32% bigger than it was in November 2009. It’s still far behind Ubuntu’s but far ahead of any other Linux distribution.
  • The overall income went up 22% in March.
  • Donations and sponsorships were high. We received donations from 127 people in March for a total of $4026! The sponsorships also raised a lot of money: $863.5, from a total of 72 sponsors!
  • March was tough but rewarding. We lost one of our closest friends and the team was greatly affected by it. Then followed a period of hyper-activity as if everyone found comfort in working harder and excelling the best they could in his memory. I know that helped me personally and I know he’d be proud of what we did this month, I’m sure of it. The community gave us a new moderation team, the dev. team managed to produce 4 releases, most of the features planned for Mint 9 were implemented and 4 modules were added to the new community site.
  • We’re now fully ready for the new release cycle, and in April our attention is going to be caught by the new Ubuntu 10.04 release. We’re ahead of schedule and we’ll probably try to fit in a few more features for Mint 9. In the near future we’re going to look at how we work and restructure our editions. Community editions are going to become official, 2 of them are planning to come as both 32 and 64 bit and we’ll try to release them earlier in the cycle and hopefully for both architectures at the same time. It’s too soon to talk about this, but April is going to an un-eventful month in appearance… as we prepare everything and work hard on things behind the curtain. We’re planning to release Linux Mint 9 by the end of May with an RC release in the middle of the month. In April, we might have a few interactive sessions for the community to give us some feedback on some of the new tools such as the new mintinstall, before we integrate them in Linux Mint 9.

by ·248 Comments

We are happy to announce that Linux Mint entered in a joined partnership with Mattel and Microsoft. This partnership will result in Linux Mint being pre-installed  on a new range of computers sold throughout the World and in a number of toys and games distributors.

The partnership will introduce the following changes for our distribution:

  • All included components will be based on Mono. Technologies not using Mono will be rewritten or replaced by Mono alternatives.
  • All present editions will be discontinued. New editions will replace them, namely a “Masters of the Universe Edition” for boys, a “Barbie Edition” for girls, and a generic “Microsoft Professional Edition” for small to medium companies.
  • The default browser will be replaced by an emulation of Internet Explorer.
  • All editions will come without an office suite but with full compatibility with Microsoft Office.
  • Linux Mint won’t be available for download anymore, only through the purchase of one of these computers.
  • The system will protect users against central software sources, such as the getdeb website, APT repositories and the download of .deb formatted files.
  • APT and the .deb compatibility will be replaced with a new software manager including the latest offers from Microsoft. Users will be able to pay online for DLC without having to go to the shop to buy their favorite software.

On behalf of the team, I would like to say that I’m very excited about this. I have no doubt the community will be overjoyed by the news and I can’t wait for you all to finally see Linux Mint near you, in a retail store.

Oh… wait, it’s not going to be called Linux Mint anymore. It’s going to be called…. “April Foo OS” 😉