Monthly News – July 2013

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Platinum Sponsors:
Blue Systems - Netrunner
Gold Sponsors:
Opera
VMware Cloud Hosting
Silver Sponsors:
Idera (formerly R1Soft)
ThinkPenguin.com
Bronze Sponsors:
Vault Networks *
AYKsolutions Server & Cloud Hosting
7L Networks Toronto Colocation *
Gutscheindrache.de Coupons
Community Sponsors:

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

Donations:

A total of $4285 was raised thanks to the generous contributions of 191 donors:

  • $150 (13th donation), Andreas aka “TheHowling67
  • $136.6, Jürgen H.
  • $126.47 (6th donation), Hendrik S.
  • $100 (2nd donation), Samson S.
  • $100, Simon L.
  • $100, Matthew P.
  • $100, Josef P.
  • $63.24 (2nd donation), Heinz B.
  • $63.24, Laurent C. aka “lawwon
  • $63.24, Maris D.
  • $50 (46th donation), Slavoljub aka “slw”
  • $50 (40th donation), Matthew M.
  • $50 (7th donation), Peter S. aka “Pierre”
  • $50, Thai D.
  • $50, Steven S.
  • $50, Jeff K.
  • $50, Nicholas N.
  • $50, Roy B.
  • $50, Samuele D.
  • $50, Mike J.
  • $50, Ernie J.
  • $50, Stephen C.
  • $50, Patrick C.
  • $50, Rich H.
  • $42 (2nd donation), Nikolaj P. aka “nbpetersen
  • $40 (5th donation), Engadine Cycles & Scooters aka “ECS
  • $40, Lorraine P.
  • $40, James C.
  • $40, James A.
  • $37.94 (41th donation), Olli K.
  • $37.94 (2nd donation), Massimiliano M.
  • $37.94, Roland B.
  • $37.94, Ernst V. N.
  • $35, Vaibhav G.
  • $34, AGL summer course
  • $31.62, Stefan K.
  • $31.62, Davor R.
  • $31.62, Tim R.
  • $30, Clemente L.
  • $30, Jürgen D.
  • $30, Torgny P.
  • $30, Jason S.
  • $25.3, Salvatore R.
  • $25.3, Francisco L. D. A.
  • $25.3, Thomas P.
  • $25.3, Karl-heinz B.
  • $25.3, Fabio B.
  • $25.3, Bernhard G.
  • $25 (22nd donation), Ronald W.
  • $25 (6th donation), Peter T.
  • $25 (4th donation), Daniel A.
  • $25 (2nd donation), Unlock codes from Green Republic Ltd
  • $25, John S.
  • $25, John G.
  • $25, Keith F.
  • $25, Andy McBride
  • $25, Nelson M.
  • $25, Martijn E.
  • $25, Kenneth S.
  • $25, Richard S.
  • $25, Ludwig R.
  • $25, Anthony R.
  • $25, Frank L.
  • $23.55, Praveen K.
  • $20 (28th donation), Tsuguo S.
  • $20 (5th donation), Utah B.
  • $20 (4th donation), David Kelly aka “Daveinuk”
  • $20 (2nd donation), Manuel Gonzalez.
  • $20 (2nd donation), Feroz E.
  • $20, C Ebrey
  • $20, Thomas J. K.
  • $20, Jean T. M.
  • $20, Dominic C.
  • $20, Sharon P.
  • $20, Demintha A.
  • $20, John K.
  • $20, Tristan M.
  • $20, Sergei Polischuk
  • $20, Joseph C.
  • $20, Bengt J.
  • $20, Mehmet A. H.
  • $20, Drew M
  • $20, Philip F. S.
  • $20, Clayton M.
  • $20, Novica aka “Novica”
  • $20, Christopher D.
  • $20, Peter S.
  • $20, Steve S.
  • $20, Michael S.
  • $20, Zubin P.
  • $20, Norv M. aka “norvman
  • $18.97, Hans H. B.
  • $15.18 (20th donation), Jarkko K.
  • $15 (6th donation), Robert E.
  • $15 (3rd donation), GVG
  • $15 (2nd donation), Shaun I.
  • $15, Simon W.
  • $13, Piotr Ł.
  • $13, Martin J.
  • $12.65 (6th donation), Dan Jackson
  • $12.65 (5th donation), Maarten E.
  • $12.65 (4th donation), Nicolas B.
  • $12.65 (4th donation), Hannes G.
  • $12.65 (3rd donation), Chris W.
  • $12.65 (2nd donation), Isak S.
  • $12.65 (2nd donation), Marco A.
  • $12.65, Erik G.
  • $12.65, Enrico N.
  • $12.65, Gerard M. Cormick aka “gmacor2”
  • $12.65, Jens-uwe R.
  • $12.65, Nikola Y.
  • $12.65, Dino M.
  • $12.65, Etienne D.
  • $12.65, Marcel S.
  • $12.65, Alberto B.
  • $12.65, Harm R.
  • $12.65, Daan V. E.
  • $12.65, Gabriele I.
  • $12.65, Juan C. S. A.
  • $12.65, P J. D.
  • $12.65, aka “dogbite”
  • $12.65, Salvador Coin aka “Johnny”
  • $12.65, Todor S.
  • $12, John McKinney
  • $10 (29th donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
  • $10 (5th donation), Charles P.
  • $10 (2nd donation), John B.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Javier Guijarro aka “chejofan
  • $10 (2nd donation), Larry I.
  • $10 (2nd donation), Andrew K.
  • $10, Timoteo T. R.
  • $10, Tyler Y
  • $10, William I.
  • $10, Kristian O.
  • $10, Douglas C.
  • $10, Kyle T.
  • $10, James Human aka “Uncle Jim”
  • $10, Ravi P. P.
  • $10, Carsten A.
  • $10, Allan D.
  • $10, Habershon H.
  • $10, Garrick S.
  • $10, Tristan B.
  • $10, Gerald S.
  • $9.65 (3rd donation), Randolph K.
  • $9.2 (10th donation), Matt R. aka “kiswa”
  • $9 (2nd donation), Kevin M.
  • $7.5, Simon W.
  • $7.02, Peter H.
  • $6.5 (2nd donation), Francesco Galgani
  • $6.32 (5th donation), Jean-michel A.
  • $6.32 (4th donation), Jean-michel A.
  • $6.32 (2nd donation), Dirk S.
  • $6.32, Etienne N.
  • $6.32, Saraplv aka “Sara”
  • $6.32, Rasmus B.
  • $6, Michael H.
  • $5.06, Antti A.
  • $5 (22nd donation), Antonio M. M. aka “zantaz
  • $5 (21st donation), Antonio M. M. aka “zantaz
  • $5 (20th donation), Antonio M. M. aka “zantaz
  • $5 (19th donation), Antonio M. M. aka “zantaz
  • $5 (18th donation), Antonio M. M. aka “zantaz
  • $5 (6th donation), Jose M. D. A.
  • $5 (4th donation), Özgür ILGIN
  • $5 (3rd donation), Jose A. Ruiz
  • $5, Anton O.
  • $5, James F.
  • $5, Steven S.
  • $5, GXJ
  • $5, Dominique P.
  • $5, iNETH :: 24HORASONLINE :: NETH
  • $5, Stuart A.
  • $5, Fabrizio O.
  • $5, Jarad S.
  • $5, Toni P.
  • $3.9, Clive T.
  • $3.79, Christoph D.
  • $3.79, anonymous
  • $3 (4th donation), Marc D.
  • $3 (3rd donation), Marc D.
  • $3, Hostuner Web Hosting aka “Faisal Sani
  • $3, Stacey D.
  • $7.56 from 8 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 3563 (1st)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 7992

Events:

News and summary:

  • Many thanks to all the people who donated during the summer and all our sponsors. This is helping us a lot.
  • On the business side of things, our sponsorship agreement with Blue Systems is coming to and end. That’s not to say cooperation will stop between Mint KDE and Netrunner, but we’ll soon be looking for a new Platinum sponsor to step in.
  • We’ve been relatively quiet here on the blog and also on Segfault during June and July but a lot of exciting things happened. Our partnership with CompuLab continued with the upcoming release of the MintBox 2. The Xfce and KDE editions of Linux Mint 15 were released and some really exciting new features landed in Cinnamon 2.0 (in preparation for Linux Mint 16 “Petra”): Window snapping and brand new user management applets and configuration modules.
  • As planned, Cinnamon 2.0 will use its own backend and act as an independent desktop environment. The work on the new cinnamon-session and cinnamon-settings-daemon modules is almost complete.
  • The team is focused on Linux Mint 16, planned for November 2013. August, September and October should bring a lot of exciting improvements.

21 comments

  1. Unfortunately no news about UP7, i hope it is not delayed till after LM16 at the end of the year.
    What is the point of having a rolling distrubition if it doesn’t roll?

    Edit by Clem: The next update pack was prepared this week and should arrive into incoming next week. We also took the opportunity to upgrade MATE to 1.6, Firefox to 23 and Thunderbird to 17.0.8. Regarding the “rolling” aspect of LMDE, no, it is not “rolling”. It uses snapshots and emphasizes stability over updates. If you were to follow Debian Testing for instance, you’d break Cinnamon 1.8 with the gjs 1.36 update… Update Packs were designed precisely so you don’t have to worry about things like that.

  2. I’ve been running the Cinnamon nightly PPA for the last two version of Linux Mint/Cinnamon and I noticed with the latest set of updates that the “cinnamon-control-center” package was removed and that “gnome-control-center” and “gnome-control-center-data” was reinstalled for some reason. But I also saw that the “libcinnamon-control-center1” package was installed as well which probably explains why Cinnamon’s “System Settings” still works as it should. It also seems to follow the usual way that Cinnamon works (eg: “libmuffin” installed instead of “muffin”

    It’s rather entertaining watching the evolution of the Cinnamon desktop on a day to day basis. It’s not something that I’d ever recommend for those who need a stable system but watching the new features come in and be improved upon has been a enjoyable experience.

    Edit by Clem: Hi Kirk. I can’t really say for the PPA, maybe glebihan can give us more details here. But I can confirm that Cinnamon 2.0 uses cinnamon-control-center and that gnome-control-center doesn’t need to be installed. Developing Cinnamon is a lot of fun. 20 pull requests were merged today. Talking about cinnamon-control-center, dalcde revamped the Display configuration module so you can now specify which monitor is the primary one. I also took the opportunity to change the color of the monitors from pink to green 🙂 A lot is happening around nemo as well. I’m not sure this blog is the best place to talk about development though, I’ll post about all this on http://segfault.linuxmint.com instead.

  3. Thanks, Clem, for info! But I have one more question – is new LMDE iso with UP7 planned? Or new iso release only with UP8?

    Edit by Clem: Hi Thomas, new ISOs will come post-Mint 16 (also likely with a new UP8). Our priority with UP7 is to update the base for existing users. When the time comes to work on new ISOs, we want to put in them all the things we’re currently working in.. so the improvements featured in Mint 16, as well as MATE 1.8 and Cinnamon 2.0, we want to have all of that in the next ISOs. From a technical point of view Cinnamon 2.0 is also important to LMDE because it uses its own backend and its own Javascript interpreter. The situation in UP7 isn’t ideal as both Gnome Shell and Cinnamon depend on gjs and they need different versions of it… I’ll explain more about this problem (there’s a workaround for it, but it’s not ideal) in the UP release notes.

  4. What is the best eye candy linux for work under virtualbox on WIN7 machine?

    please recommend me one or two, based on your experience

    Thank you in advance
    Dan

  5. Hi Clem,

    Since you said you’ve already prepared the next UP, that means the version of apt is about 0.9.9, and mintUpdate is affected by this bug:

    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=719263
    http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=198&t=141697

    I just thought you may want to replace get_indexes calls with something else (like it was done in SolydXK’s update manager) to work around the bug. It’s not that major, but I think the message about authentication may scare some users.

    I wasn’t sure about whether to post it on github or here (it’s not really a bug in mintUpdate after all). 🙂

    Edit by Clem: Thanks Monsta!

  6. As KirK M says, even i was wondering about gnome-control-center getting installed vide PPA.

    Edit by Clem: Hi, it definitely shouldn’t. Either it’s a case of “recommends”, or we forgot to remove it somewhere in the dependencies. In any case, gnome-control-center should not be needed to run Cinnamon 1.8 or later.

  7. I don’t know what LMDE UP7 will bring, but the recommended AMD (proprietary) driver in UP6 taints Xorg.

    http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=191&t=143768

    I installed the AMD’s latest drivers and those work, but anything that states “(recommended)” in the Device Driver Manager should work, not render the system useless.

    Edit by Clem: Hi Kneekoo, flgrx was pinned for UP6 simply because it was broken upstream in Debian Testing at the time. In UP7 we’ll default back to the Debian driver.

  8. Yes really looking forward to news about LMDE UP7… it has been a long time and I’d really need a new libc version.

    Otherwise I’d probably have to switch again, which would be sad – I really liked LMDE so far.

  9. Thanks for posting news! I was starting to get worried! I’m much more interested in mate news. Any updates to mate? Version 15 mate edition is the best OS I’ve used, ever…

  10. Interesting news and updates as usual. I’m really interested in what’s coming up with Linux Mint 16, although I’m thinking of switching to Debian Edition so I don’t have to reinstall everytime a new version comes out.

    I love Cinnamon, and find that no other desktop interface can beat it for me. KDE’s alright, but Cinnamon is so fast, smooth, beautiful and intuitive that it’s my personal favorite.

    Honestly, if any form of Desktop Linux ever took off with consumers, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Linux Mint. Especially with Cinnamon.

    Edit by Clem: Hi Brian, you can follow the development news more closely at http://segfault.linuxmint.com/.

  11. hello clem, Well it’s been about a month since i loaded mint 15 and i have to say it has ran well. i had the usual broadcom wifi driver search to do, but afterwords (no issues).. worked on and have computers that are very much older than most the programmers on this project 😉 (pre-dos stuff). now days just want it to work, been away from config files for alot of years.
    what i found in most all distros was the fact that even though they ran well, they all had something missing that kept them from being a fully functional OS. W/full multimedia support Linuxmint 15 is the first distro that with alittle savy a person can load and go, if you want to watch a dvd IE do everything a computer can do, you can do this practically out of the box..
    (BEST CAN OF MS DISINFECTANT I’VE FOUND)
    keep up the good work 😉

  12. I’m excited for MintBox 2 to be released. Do you have an estimate for how soon this might happen? (Days? Weeks? Months?) Back in July, Clem said “probably this summer”…

    Edit by Clem: Hi Kohl. CompuLab are planning to announce it next week. Note: I think the European price will be slightly higher than the one I mentioned in my preview due to unforeseen charges from Amazon.de.

  13. Hello
    I am user of Linux mint for over 3 years. When I started my journey with mint, I have to do lots of research. Nothing was in one place. Of course there was forum but I always have to wait for answer, it’s was just difficult. So I decided to gather all useful information into one place, that place was my “text” file 🙂 Now I decided to share it all with all mint users, it’s available here http://www.mintnext.blogspot.com , hope you appreciate my effort i spend on it.
    Cheers

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