by ·43 Comments

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” KDE Community Edition RC1.

Quick steps:

  • Download the ISO or the torrent.
  • While it’s downloading look at the overview of the new features and make sure to quickly go through the known issues.
  • After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5.
  • Burn the ISO at low speed and enjoy testing Linux Mint 7 KDE RC1.
  • Send us your feedback and submit your bug reports in the dedicated bug thread.

Introduction to Linux Mint 7 KDE:

The KDE Community Edition aims to provide a version of Linux Mint which uses the KDE desktop.

For a detailed overview of the new features and improvements included in Linux Mint 7 KDE, please read “What’s new in Gloria KDE?“.

System requirements:

A minimum of 4GB of free space and 256MB RAM are needed. For a comfortable experience we recommended to have at least 512MB RAM and 10GB of free space.

Important information and known issues:

For a complete list of known issues read the Release Notes.

The root password is now set as the same as the one chosen during the installation.

If you’re using Mint tools in other distributions, make sure to turn off the adjustment system by editing /etc/linuxmint/mintSystem.conf.

Download Linux Mint 7 KDE RC1:

You can download the Main Edition via torrent or via HTTP:

Size: 1.1GB LiveDVD

MD5Sum: 9284040a97c6a0ebc45c68b8932a7c17

Torrent download: http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/LinuxMint-7-KDE-RC1.iso.torrent
HTTP download: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=42

Europe:

Northern America:

Rest of the World:

Upgrade instructions:

Upgrade instructions will be published with the stable release.

Feedback and bug reports:

Please report any bug you may find via the Linux Mint 7 KDE RC1 Bug Thread and give us your feedback on this release by posting a comment right here on the blog.

Enjoy!

Have a lot of fun testing this release candidate and let’s all hope it will help us make a great stable release.

by ·8 Comments

The number of donations raised to 88 last months for a total amount of $2402 given by the community. This is brilliant, as this money helps us work on Linux Mint but it also gives us the luxury to focus solely on the distribution itself without the need to engage in a support-centric business model or in other Linux-related commercial activities.

Together with advertising and sponsorships, donations represent a growing and significant income. We’ve been able to purchase everything we needed, and although we haven’t hired anyone yet, this allowed me to free 3 months from my employer this year and is now slowly giving me the independence I need to either work half of the time or even full time on the distribution in a near future.

We’re heading towards a situation where some people will work full time on the project, and where the income comes from its success and its user base. This is fantastic. It’s not easy to fund an Open Source project, especially without commercial backing, but we’re slowly getting there and this allows us to fully focus on the project itself.

So, there were 88 donors last month and as you can see that’s a lot of transactions to account for, a lot of emails to send and a lot of statistics to maintain. As the number of donations grew it was decided to process donations in batch at the end of each month. This meant that the stats on the website regarding donations were a month late, and that someone sending us money could be left without receiving an email or even a thank you note for as long as an entire month…

To address these problems, we’re going back to processing donations one by one. Donors help us a lot so it’s important that we thank them as soon as we become aware of their donation. The stats on the website are now being kept up to date and a new section on the donors page reports the donations for the current month.

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

In the background the process was automated so this also represents an improvement for us and less time spent in gathering information when it comes to publish the monthly stats in the end of each month.

We can now show more information, faster and be more responsive than before while spending less time on maintaining the stats. Donations are a very important aspect of the funding of Linux Mint and so it was necessary for us to bring these improvements.

As the leader of this project I would like to apologize to all donors who, in the past, waited for long periods of time without being thanked or in some cases without knowing that we had received their donation.

I also take the opportunity to thank all of them. This community is showing a lot of support for our project and this is extremely motivating.

by ·10 Comments

Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

  • $116, Oscar T. (UK)
  • $100 (2nd donation), John Ritchie (Aging Technogeek) (USA)
  • $100, Douglas M. (USA)
  • $100, Terry M. (USA)
  • $100, Egyirba H. (USA)
  • $72 (5th donation), Theodore T. (UK)
  • $72 (2nd donation), Carlos C. (Portugal)
  • $72, Emil D. (Ireland)
  • $72, Patrick L. (Switzerland)
  • $72, Bjorn A. (Sweden)
  • $72, Muharem H. (Germany)
  • $58, Giovanni S. (Italy)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Jonathan B. H. (USA)
  • $50, Robert P. (Australia)
  • $50, Protecting Our Future (USA)
  • $50, Anthony F H. (USA)
  • $50, William R. (USA)
  • $50, John W. (USA)
  • $43 (8th donation), Temel B. (Germany)
  • $40 (4th donation), Philippe W. (Switzerland)
  • $36, Andreas H. (Germany)
  • $35, Adam S. (USA)
  • $30, Gabe G. (USA)
  • $30, Krzysztof K. (Poland)
  • $29 (2nd donation), DB. (Dick) (Netherlands)
  • $29, Emmanouil P. (Greece)
  • $29, Robert S. (UK)
  • $29, Aldo R. (Italy)
  • $25, Eddie F. (Australia)
  • $25, William S. (USA)
  • $25, Majestic Combined Services [MCS] (USA)
  • $25 (3rd donation), Gordon Hilliard (ghilly) (UK)
  • $25 (3rd donation), Michael G. (subslug) (USA)
  • $21, Julio S. (Portugal)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Douglas S. (USA)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Colin C. (Canada)
  • $20, John A. (USA)
  • $20, Glenn E. (USA)
  • $20, Nebojsa R. (Canada)
  • $20, Curtis O. (USA)
  • $20, David F. (USA)
  • $20, Harreson S. (Canada)
  • $20, Juha A. (Finland)
  • $20, Craig B. (Australia)
  • $20, Douglas T. (USA)
  • $20, Donald P. (USA)
  • $20, Brian G. (Canada)
  • $15 (4th donation), Kevin S. (kevinrs) (UK)
  • $15, Jonathan R. (Canada)
  • $14 (2nd donation), HeLikesMint (Germany)
  • $14, Pablo P. (Belgium)
  • $14, Morten F. H. (Denmark)
  • $14, Subtlekiss (UK)
  • $14, Fernando C. P. (Spain)
  • $14, Slavoljub M. (Norway)
  • $10 (5th donation), Henry W. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Dan B. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard G. (USA)
  • $10, Matko G. (Croatia)
  • $10, Jorn L. (Norway)
  • $10, Edward F. (Australia)
  • $10, Michael S. (UK)
  • $10, John P. (Australia)
  • $10, Mairin C. (Ireland)
  • $10, Andrew M. (USA)
  • $10, Charles E. (UK)
  • $10, John D. (UK)
  • $10, Joseph G. (USA)
  • $10, Robert David J. (UK)
  • $10, Maurice R. (Canada)
  • $10, John R. (USA)
  • $8, Dag Eirik A. (Norway)
  • $7 (3rd donation), Jindrich R. (Czech Republic)
  • $7, Socrates D. (Greece)
  • $7, Andre J. (Germany)
  • $7, Rowena J. (UK)
  • $7, Stanislav G. (Germany)
  • $6, John H. (UK)
  • $6, Sergey P. (Russia)
  • $5.5, Stephen M. (USA)
  • $5.25, Aneesh A. (India)
  • $5, Hamed K. (USA)
  • $5, Mark S. (UK)
  • $5, Arvind D. (Mauritius)
  • $3, Luca M. B. (Italy)
  • $2, Tomas H. (Slovakia)
  • $1, Shane L. (USA)

Sponsors:

Money raised in June:

* Donations: $2402
* Sponsors: $498.5

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

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 60%
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 26%
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 9%
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 4%

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 1,559,894 (+13.17%)
  • Pageviews: 2,939,104 (+9.17%)
  • Page impressions: 1,303,421
  • Search queries: 3,250,028
  • Forum users: 17,862
  • Forum posts: 156,267

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1350 (4th)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 4% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 29,001th

Events:

Summary:

  • The community continues to strongly support the distribution. 88 people donated money in June for a total of $2402.
  • The amount of money received from our sponsors grew to $498.5.
  • All indicators show that the release of Linux Mint 7 created a boom in the size of our user base and that its growth is now getting back to normal.
  • On Distrowatch, Linux Mint is slowly loosing its popularity as the novelty factor isn’t there anymore and the news related to the distribution aren’t relayed in the press and on Linux related websites. Linux Mint isn’t new anymore, but it isn’t as established as other distributions yet and de facto not considered a “major” within the Linux community even though the size of its user base can in times be as much as two to three times larger than the ones of projects like SUSE, Fedora or Mandriva.
  • The Overall income is up 29%, and June 2009 was the (4th consecutive) best month ever since the start of the distribution.
  • In brief: Finances have never been so good, Linux Mint sits in a very comfortable position on the Linux home desktop market second only to Ubuntu, its user base continues to grow but the distribution needs to engage in marketing, ads and/or promotion campaigns to get the attention of the medias. Now that Linux Mint is known to most Linux users and that it gathers the second biggest share on the market, it needs to get itself known to others and to compete with other desktops such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS.