by ·74 Comments

Linux Mint 9 will feature a brand new version of mintBackup, the “Backup Tool”, rewritten from scratch by a newcomer in the development team, somebody people on the IRC and the forums know quite well: Ikey.

The new tool comes with the following features:

  • It can backup and restore files and directories
  • It can backup and restore your software selection
  • It can check differences in files and perform incremental backups/restorations
  • It can check the integrity of the files after it copies them
  • It can backup straight to an archive and compress it on the fly

Being written in Python, it’s not as fast as copying files directly or using rsync (unless you turn off the integrity checks and the checksum verifications) but it’s quite robust and it’s extremely easy to use. The software selection backup/restoration is also very intuitive and will be of tremendous help for people upgrading to a newer version of Linux Mint.

With this tool, comes an entire tutorial on how to upgrade your system, the philosophy behind it, the risks, the method and answers to the most frequently asked questions.

This answers a need that many people have and something that was lacking in our distribution. It’s another stance taken by our project and another philosophical difference between us and most other operating systems. Our lack of confidence in package upgrades, our policy of prevention when it comes to potential regressions and our recommendations to always perform fresh installations… all of this had to be backed by an alternative solution that would be easy and reliable to use. With this guide and this new tool we finally have what was missing.

The tool was developed for Linux Mint 9 Isadora but also tested on Linux Mint 8 Helena. Together with the tutorial it will replace the traditional “Upgrade instructions” associated with each release and end the development of our in-house, yet not recommended, mintupgrader tool.

As the support on Linux Mint 6 is coming to an end, many people will probably be happy to get access to this new solution.

Link to the tutorial: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

by ·12 Comments

The forums and the community website were down yesterday. The downtime lasted for about a day.

After investigation, it turned out the motherboard on the server had to be replaced. I would like to give credit to our host, SevenL, for helping us in that matter.

SevenL is a Canadian hosting company. Our forums have been hosted by them for about a year now and we rarely experienced downtime. Not only that but to promote Open Source and Linux projects, they provide this server to us for free.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank the hosting companies which are providing us with free servers around the World:

Apologies to everyone for the downtime yesterday and thanks again to hour host for the fantastic work done to fix the issue.

by ·27 Comments

The Community website is now in BETA:

http://community.linuxmint.com

A new “tutorials” module was added, which allows you to write tutorials, to vote and to comment them. The module hosts a WISIWIG editor to make editing easier. To illustrate this, let me link to a tutorial I wrote on how to upgrade Linux Mint:

http://community.linuxmint.com/index.php/tutorial/view/2

This module will allow the community not only to help produce good documentation, but also to rate it and to discuss it. In the long term this will fully replace the Wiki.

Bugs are also now accepted in Launchpad.

At this stage, the website is fully functional and hosts the following modules:

  • Hardware database
  • Software portal
  • Idea pool
  • Tutorials library
  • Lesser modules: Users, countries, editions, releases, friends, messaging, subscriptions, notifications, chatroom.