Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

 

Platinum Sponsors:

Blue Systems - Netrunner

Gold Sponsors:

Opera

Dedicated Hosting Server *

Silver Sponsors:

R1Soft

Bronze Sponsors:

ThinkPenguin.com

Vault Networks *

AYKsolutions Server & Cloud Hosting

7L Networks Toronto Colocation *

Brucey99

 

Community Sponsors:

To become a sponsor or see the full list of Linux Mint sponsors, please visit: http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

Donations:

$4959 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 242 donors: http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

  • $124.52 (2nd donation), Christian M.
  • $100 (7th donation), Mohammed A.
  • $100, Ben W.
  • $100, H Grove
  • $100, Gordon B.
  • $85, Zonic System General Trading – F.Z.E
  • $62.26 (4th donation), Josue M.
  • $62.26 (2nd donation), Swante S.
  • $62.26, Antonio T.
  • $62.26, Sylvain M.
  • $62.26, Aidan M. C.
  • $62.26, Frieder H.
  • $50 (6th donation), Alex V. aka “Karashata“
  • $50 (3rd donation), Robert K. aka “usmc_bob”
  • $50 (3rd donation), James S.
  • $50, Roy B.
  • $50, Charles M.
  • $50, Andrew H.
  • $50, Daniel H.
  • $50, Andrew M.
  • $50, Brad D.
  • $50, Evan N.
  • $50, David Hrycyszyn
  • $50, Thomas N.
  • $50, Richard G.
  • $49.81, Roland S.
  • $45, Twitter Vote Report
  • $40 (38th donation), Slavoljub aka “slw”
  • $40 (3rd donation), Emil K.
  • $40, J D. G.
  • $40, Ragchew A. M. I.
  • $40, Michael B.
  • $37.36 (33rd donation), Olli K.
  • $37.36, Gerd U.
  • $37.36, Patrizio P.
  • $37.36, Barry B.
  • $35, Web Directory
  • $31.13 (2nd donation), LDW
  • $31.13, Manfred W.
  • $31, William M.
  • $30 (3rd donation), Rufus
  • $30 (2nd donation), Scott S.
  • $30, Kerry S.
  • $30, Glen G.
  • $30, Patrick C.
  • $30, Dennis H.
  • $30, Ryan J.
  • $30, Richard C.
  • $30, Reel D.
  • $30, Stephen M.
  • $30, Robert M.
  • $30, Steven S.
  • $25 (14th donation), Ronald W.
  • $25 (5th donation), Peter T.
  • $25 (3rd donation), Randy T.
  • $25 (2nd donation), Chris N.
  • $25, Eric S.
  • $25, Dany V.
  • $25, Richard P.
  • $25, Zombiedude
  • $25, Mujo A.
  • $25, Waqas S.
  • $25, William R.
  • $24.9 (4th donation), Hendrik G.
  • $24.9 (3rd donation), Lucien G.
  • $24.9 (3rd donation), Mathieu P. aka “Pyros65”
  • $24.9 (2nd donation), Geoffroy M.
  • $24.9, Michael H.
  • $24.9, Ingmar B.
  • $24.9, Iván B.
  • $24.9, Gabriele B.
  • $24.9, Antonio G.
  • $24.9, Sascha H.
  • $24.9, Antti U.
  • $24.9, Pierre L.
  • $24.9, Lukasz G.
  • $24.9, Wolfgang R.
  • $22, Arnaldo
  • $20 (21st donation), Tsuguo S.
  • $20 (6th donation), Juergen G.
  • $20 (3rd donation), Kevin B.
  • $20 (3rd donation), Danie van der Merwe aka “Danie“
  • $20 (3rd donation), Jonathan D.
  • $20 (3rd donation), Mark R.
  • $20 (3rd donation), Martin H.
  • $20 (2nd donation), Dean P.
  • $20 (2nd donation), Daniel M.
  • $20, Matthew Graybosch
  • $20, Charles P.
  • $20, Eugen S.
  • $20, Keith M.
  • $20, Armando S. R.
  • $20, Michael C.
  • $20, James H.
  • $20, Ted S.
  • $20, Peter I.
  • $20, Dor Tzur
  • $20, Øyvind S.
  • $20, Keith P.
  • $20, Madhavan N.
  • $20, Steve W.
  • $20, Sean R.
  • $20, Kyle R. C.
  • $20, Malcolm F.
  • $20, Alfredo R. R.
  • $20, J K.
  • $20, Alexander F.
  • $19.99, Rama Polefka
  • $18.68, Hamilton B.
  • $18.68, Artur D.
  • $18.68, Norbert H.
  • $15 (20th donation), John A.
  • $15, Howard S.
  • $15, David J. S.
  • $15, Rafael F.
  • $15, Anders K.
  • $15, Jailson S.
  • $15, Maria R. D. Z.
  • $14.94 (14th donation), Jarkko K.
  • $12.45 (13th donation), Ronald Trip
  • $12.45 (5th donation), Bo J.
  • $12.45 (3rd donation), Siegfried H.
  • $12.45 (3rd donation), Nicholas S.
  • $12.45 (3rd donation), Jean-michel A.
  • $12.45 (2nd donation), Manuel P.
  • $12.45 (2nd donation), Demosthenes Koptsis
  • $12.45, Kevin S.
  • $12.45, Thomas W.
  • $12.45, Viktor F.
  • $12.45, Paul F.
  • $12.45, Rudolf B.
  • $12.45, Vincent P.
  • $12.45, Sergio M.
  • $12.45, Daniel C.
  • $12.45, Jakob K. B.
  • $12.45, Christian L.
  • $12.45, Stéphane A. L.
  • $12.45, David H.
  • $12.45, Jesús O. M.
  • $12.45, Severin F.
  • $12.45, Riccardo P.
  • $12.45, Georg P.
  • $12.45, Erik D. K.
  • $12.45, Alan H.
  • $12 (21st donation), John A.
  • $10 (21st donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
  • $10 (7th donation), Charlie Robinson
  • $10 (6th donation), Jose P.
  • $10 (3rd donation), Tony W.
  • $10 (3rd donation), Volker K.
  • $10 (2nd donation), T. Lennon
  • $10 (2nd donation), Edilbert N.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Johan L.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Jamie D.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Tim MacD.
  • $10, Johan D. K.
  • $10, Quintin H.
  • $10, Wayne L.
  • $10, Actiecode.nl
  • $10, Dan E.
  • $10, Литвинов Д.
  • $10, Jan P.
  • $10, Nikolaus S.
  • $10, Martin M.
  • $10, Rene Y.
  • $10, Simon R.
  • $10, Patrick R.
  • $10, Bryan W.
  • $10, Joel K.
  • $10, Paulus/laudaka
  • $10, Tom T.
  • $10, Jonathan Vasquez aka “FearedBliss“
  • $10, Nathan Y.
  • $10, Kristóf H.
  • $10, Diego H.
  • $10, Colin M.
  • $10, Aimen RAISSI
  • $10, Matt F.
  • $10, Michail Schwab
  • $10, Michael P.
  • $10, Leonardo D. C.
  • $10, Tsvetomir D.
  • $10, Rodrigo C. C.
  • $9.96, Jon Bjarkan
  • $9 (22nd donation), John A.
  • $8.9, Klaus T.
  • $8.72, Aleksandr L.
  • $8, Marcus F.
  • $7.1 (3rd donation), Librestickers.com
  • $6.23 (9th donation), Marco aka “Dictionary-Maker“
  • $6.23 (3rd donation), Robert K.
  • $6.23 (3rd donation), Mark W.
  • $6.23 (2nd donation), Segundo -zenairenet-
  • $6.23, Marcus F.
  • $6.23, Nico E.
  • $6.23, Jarkko Y.
  • $6.23, Piotr G.
  • $6.23, Simon Legouge
  • $6.23, Philip B.
  • $6.22, Radoslaw R.
  • $5 (4th donation), Michelle and Daniel Grady aka “Pug Masters”
  • $5 (2nd donation), Michal N.
  • $5 (2nd donation), Guy B.
  • $5, Slim Rijeka aka “Slim“
  • $5, Ovidiu N.
  • $5, Jehanzeb R.
  • $5, Ratanak K.
  • $5, Nicolas B.
  • $5, Loi T.
  • $5, Dexviajiboy aka “dexviajiboy”
  • $5, Árpád T. M.
  • $5, Andrew F.
  • $5, Jon V.
  • $5, Guy M.
  • $5, Adam C.
  • $5, Salem G.
  • $5, Marko V.
  • $5, Shirokih P.
  • $5, Grant Gordon aka “Puffy”
  • $5, Brent W.
  • $5, Alan K.
  • $5, Daniel H.
  • $5, Steve W.
  • $4.15 (10th donation), Sylwia Bialczak
  • $4, Luiz Enciso
  • $3 (7th donation), Web Design Company
  • $3, Klaus T.
  • $2.49, Tomas V.
  • $17.49 from 14 smaller donations

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 3377 (1st)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 6,789th

Events:

Developer of the month:

Each month we feature one developer and explain his contributions to the community. Development is a lot of fun and it doesn’t take much to get started. If you’re tempted to join the team, don’t hesitate to follow our development on http://github.com/linuxmint and come and chat with the developers at #linuxmint-dev (irc.spotchat.org).

This month’s “developer of the month” is…. well, we’ve got 2!

  • Will Rouesnel (wrouesnel) for his attention to detail
  • Michael Webster (mtwebster ), again, for working so hard on Nemo

Will joined us this month and immediately started helping us by looking at the various projects we had to see if he could contribute improvements. He authored a couple of commits on Muffin, Cinnamon and Nemo and if you’re running Linux Mint 14, you probably noticed the improvements he made to the Mint-X theme.

Theme legibility improvement by Will Rouesnel

 

As for Michael, it’s the second time he gets the title of “developer of the month”, and it’s still for the same reason: His outstanding work on Nemo.

Both Cinnamon and Nemo entered the next release cycle in terms of development (i.e. they’re getting a lot of new features in preparation for Mint 15 and are now considered “unstable”). Michael recently added space indicators into the sidebar which allow you to quickly assess the amount of free space left on all your mounted devices.

Free space indicators in Nemo’s sidebar by Michael Webster

He’s also working on adding features which are available in Caja and missing in Nemo (sidebar selection combo, zoom buttons, dedicated path bar).

News and summary:

  • Many thanks to our sponsors, partners and donors. As always we received a fantastic amount of support from you!
  • We’re back in a situation where we control our environment and we’re able to improve incrementally. Linux Mint 13 was an excellent release and its LTS support lasts until 2017. Linux Mint 14 brought 6 months of development and numerous improvements. The feedback was really good, and whether people’s hardware work better with one or the other, we now rely on two really strong releases both featuring the latest MATE and Cinnamon environments.
  • Development started ahead of schedule on Mint 15. Cinnamon and Nemo in particular already received a lot of improvements.
  • We’re also ahead of schedule on Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition and Linux Mint 14 Xfce Edition. They both passed QA and were approved for an RC release. They should be announced in the coming days.
  • In LMDE, Update Pack 6 is almost ready to enter the “incoming” repository. The packaging for Firefox and Thunderbird was automated so LMDE users should receive updates for these two applications more often than before.
  • Going forward, LMDE ISOs will be released in two versions: MATE and Cinnamon. The decision was taken not to maintain a KDE version of LMDE and to stop maintaining the Xfce version. This was a painful decision to make considering the quality of LMDE Xfce and unofficial LMDE KDE, but one that made sense for Linux Mint since LMDE Xfce represented only 4% of the Linux Mint audience. This is also consistent with our strategy to focus on what we do best, to do less and do it better and to invest less time in maintaining editions and more time in developing the core technology that they use. It was a tough call at the time when Linux Mint lost its Fluxbox and LXDE editions. They were great but they only appealed to a minority of our users and we can see the benefits of this decision now, we can release all our editions and switch to focusing entirely on the development of the next iteration much faster in our release cycle. Whether it’s Cinnamon, MDM, the Software Manager, the Mint tools, the LMDE live-installer or even new projects such as a Driver Manager or R&D plans related to the installation and/or base underneath Linux Mint, development is extremely important to us.

The ISO images for Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” were updated and labelled “14.1”. All the links were updated on the website and in the announcements to point to the new ISOs.

If you’re already running Linux Mint 14, you don’t need to reinstall.

The new ISO images provide fixes for the following issues:

High CPU usage, low performance on Intel GPU

This was caused by a race condition between Plymouth and Xorg and affected owners of Intel cards in particular. Rather than using the “intel” driver, Xorg was randomly using “modesetting” or “fbdev” and the desktop was rendered by the CPU rather than the GPU using LLVMPIPE software rendering.

This issue was fixed in MDM 1.0.8 which is available as an update in Maya backports and in Nadia and which is installed by default on the new ISOs.

No DNS resolution, Internet not working in virtual machine

Linux Mint now uses OpenDNS as a fallback for DNS resolution. If the system fails to connect to a DNS server, the resolution is done via OpenDNS. This guarantees better out of the box connectivity especially in virtual machines.

Installer fails to install grub-efi

A bug was fixed and the installer now successfully installs the grub-efi packages in EFI installations. You still need to disable Secure Boot and depending on the implementation of EFI on your system you might have to specify the location of the EFI boot file (EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi).

Introduction

The most significant improvements in Nadia are being backported to Maya.

Among other things, this gives Linux Mint 13 LTS users access to the following packages:

  • MDM 1.0.7
  • Cinnamon 1.6.7 (with Nemo 1.1.2 and Muffin 1.1.2)
  • MATE 1.4

How to

To enable the backports in Linux Mint 13, follow the steps below:

1. Open the “Software Sources” tool from “Menu -> Preferences -> Software Sources”
2. Click on the “Backported packages (backports)” checkbox as illustrated in the picture below

3. Launch the “Update Manager” from “Menu->Administration->Update Manager”
4. Select all level 1 and level 2 updates
5. Click on “Install Updates”

Once you’re finished installing the updates, restart your computer.

Enjoy 😉

FAQ

– Why isn’t this happening automatically via the “main” components of the repositories?

It’s an opt-in. Some people are interested in getting the latest features (and they can follow the easy steps described above). Others prefer not to change what already works. By using the backports component of the repositories, which are disabled by default, people have the choice to upgrade these components or to keep them from being upgraded.

As with every upgrade and new version of software, there is a risk of regression. These upgrades have been thoroughly tested in Nadia and are known to work in Maya, but the decision to stick with the current versions or to upgrade to the newer ones is entirely yours. Note that both versions are available in the Linux Mint 13 repositories (via main and backports) and that although the process is a bit tedious, it is possible to downgrade all or some packages back to their original versions.

– Will these backports also find their way into LMDE?

Yes, they should do so in the coming days. Unlike Linux Mint 13 though, the upgrade in LMDE will be automatic since LMDE isn’t a frozen but a semi-rolling distribution.