The Linux Mint Blog – Page 270 – News from the Mint Team

* News about Mint

mintInstall 5 was released in Romeo (the unstable branch of our repositories)

Clem states in the announcement for mintInstall that the Elyssa KDE CE should be released anytime now.

* News about Linux

Security alert:

Adobe Flash ads launching clipboard hijack attack – this works on Windows, Mac and Linux

Better MSN support in Pidgin

Linux popularity across the globe

The final release of Zenwalk Linux 5.2 “GNOME” edition

MEPIS released of antiX MEPIS 7.5 designed to run on computers with older or limited hardware

At approximately the same time as our server was hacked Red Hat / Fedora experienced a more severe intrusion

Link for Fedora (this is the message from Fedora published by IDG.se – the best link I found).

This is now resolved but some packages were signed by the intruder

Microsoft to pay Novell $100 mln more for Linux support

openSUSE to Add SELinux Basic Enablement in 11.1

10 Most Beautiful Plasma Themes for KDE 4 Desktop – more beautiful than Mint KDE 🙂 ? (Mint still don’t use KDE 4)

* News about IT

SecondLife rolls out Mono-powered servers

Thousands of UK file-sharers face legal action

Comcast to “throttle down” “bandwidth hogs”

UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on “snooping silo”. This is very similar to a controversial Swedish act.

A rather technical article on security when you log in to your bank, for those who want a deep background. More here – about PCI-DSS

A growing list of name-brand websites are accused of exposing its readers to dangerous ads.

OSU Open Source Lab gets $300,000 from Google

US presidential candidate John McCain is a pirate

As a result of some skilful phishing 1.5m spam emails was sent from compromised University accounts

Scammers replace credit card readers in Irish stores

Groups urge states to tackle more cybercrime

* Hardware news

IBM and AMD first at 22 nm, challenge Intel’s manufacturing lead

Intel shows off solid-state drive road maps

Security flaw in Nokia cell phones – did they pay to get the information?
* Trivia and other links

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

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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 here

Enjoy life

Husse

One of the new features planned for the upcoming Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” is the ability to browse the Software Portal (http://www.linuxmint.com/software) and to install applications directly from the desktop. This feature is now ready and we’d like you to give us a hand in testing it.

We extended the scope of mintInstall and we developed a new frontend which downloads all the relevant data from the Software Portal so you can browse applications and install them without having to use the portal at all. We also defined how the portal and the frontend communicate with each others and formalized the data structure in XML. The frontend itself supports multiple portals (we’ll be talking to tuxsoftware.com for instance, hopefully getdeb.net too, and we’ll eventually publish documentation about this) so although you can only use it to browse the Linux Mint Software Portal right now, it’s only a matter of time before others portals become available.

Here’s a screenshot:

MintInstall 5 is available in Romeo. If you don’t have Romeo enabled you can get the debs from here:

Let us know what you think, report any bug you may find and have a lot of fun with this brand new mintInstall.

To translate mintInstall 5 into your own language, use this forum thread: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=16242

Note: There was a lot I wanted to say about this but I’ll save it for the release notes. KDE CE is coming out soon, I need to work on x64 and there are still major developments I want to get done before Mint 6 (an upgrade tool for instance). To keep it short, MintInstall 5 is one of the new features planned for Mint 6 but it will also become available as an upgrade for Mint 5. It will stay in Romeo until we’re happy to consider it stable.. so we’re waiting on your feedback 🙂

Changelog:

5.0: Initial release

Weekly Newsletter – Issue 58

August 19, 2008 by Clem·5 Comments

* News about Mint

Our server was hacked with downtime as a consequence. This was by a “bot” that scanned the net for vulnerabilities. We have now sealed the hole that made this SQL injection possible. We thank all that alerted us to what happened.

The 64 bit edition is advancing

I had hoped that a new beta (even final) of the XFCE edition would have been released. We are still plagued by an odd problem with log in/out so ….

* News about Linux

Canonical joins the Linux Foundation

Xandros acquired Linspire – now Linspire is no more

Dell’s “eee-killer” to have Ubuntu

Linus Torvalds fed up with “the security circus”

* News about IT

Dutch police and the FBI stops large botnet

Gmail and Google apps have crashed several times in the las week or so

Google has released Keyczar, billed as a “Toolkit for safe and simple cryptography”, under an Apache 2.0 open source license.

Important ruling in court in favour of open source

Loss of customer data spurs closure of online storage service ‘The Linkup’

Rat brained robots

Spam down 40% in second quarter of 2008 (Unfortunately only a swedish link – I can’t find the english link)

* Hardware news

AMD offers Linux drivers for new Radeon HD 4870 X2 at the same time the card is released

VIA quits motherboard chipset business

Materials that can make things invisible developed. Could improve computer hardware

A cheap way to replace copper in existing cables

* Trivia and other links