* News about Mint
Lots of improvements leading up to Mint 6 Felicia
mintUpload to support FTP
mintNanny introduced – a simple tool to prevent children from accessing certain websites
Three new commands – search, apt contains and apt content.
Mint is now to be on the major distributions page on Distrowatch
* News about Linux
Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source – An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently in a decision
Michael Robertson sued over Linspires missing cash
New releases recently
Mandriva Linux 2009 and Puppy Linux 4.1
Debian Lenny was not released – What you can do for “Lenny”
Ubuntu Confirms Linux Netbook Returns Higher than Anticipated
A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle
Mono 2.0 has been released
The Ubuntu Upstream Report
LinuxWorld will relaunch as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo
How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux
The latest news about the kernel is always found here
* News about IT
Security researchers warn of new ‘clickjacking’ browser bugs The latest version of NoScript protects against this
Flash Player workaround available for “Clickjacking” issue for 9.0.124.0 and earlier
Nasty web bug descends on world’s most popular sites
Researchers uncover major IP flaw
Council sells security hole on Ebay
Hackers exploit Neosploit to booby trap BBC, US postal service
Shadowserver to Build ‘Sinkhole’ Server to Find Errant Bots
Norwegian standards body implodes over OOXML controversy
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman
Obviously the new Facebook layout is not liked by all, there are at least three groups claiming a million members
Google: Commitment to Sustainable Computing
Microsoft will move its main office for enterprise search to Norway
Microsoft gives users six months longer to flee from Vista – Buckling to OEMs?
Microsoft tries to put fear of God into scareware vendors
Venezuela orders 1 million laptops from Portugal
New trans-Pacific submarine cable completed
Japan home owners to be offered 16Gbit/s Internet connection
How Online Fraudsters Are Using SAAS in Their Networks
World’s electrical grids open to attack (not sure where to put this)
* Hardware news
AMD to split the company
Report: Fujitsu to sell hard drive business to Western Digital
New plate from BT promises broadband boost
Lightbulbs Could Replace Wi-Fi Hotspots
* Trivia and other links
Clean Energy 2030 Google’s Proposal for reducing U.S. dependence on fossil fuels
But how to donate to support a specific CE flavor? Will this be possible at some point? (Just curious.) I’m sure many people use the KDE, XFCE or Fluxbox edition, but if 100% of the donations go to the main project only…
Thank you for this newsletter
there is a lot of good news ,
the link for ‘major distributions page’ http://http//distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major is not correctly ,
Regard
Beranger: I just answered a similar comment in the donation’s blog post. Basically 100% of the money goes to me as there is no real legal/financial difference between me and Mint. My personal focus is on the Main edition and to a lesser extent to the CEs. I also pay for services (hosting, sometimes ads..etc) and we have partnerships and deals with people linked to us for which our relationship also means money. So in other words, other people financially benefit from “working” with Mint and that guarantees a certain level of service/time-spent from them. So the big question here is, should we pay the team too? And I have to say, this is something that’s been on my mind for quite a while now. Our sysadmin Michael generates income from his activities with us, I do too obviously and I’m hoping to do more before I join the project full time, but some people invest a lot of their time with us and don’t get anything out of it: Husse, Boo, Merlwiz in particular. Now it’s obvious we can’t “afford them”. In fact we can’t “afford” anybody right now.. and as I previously mentioned my priority is to afford myself before I start looking into hiring other people. But could we “compensate” or “thank” these people nonetheless? I’d like to think so. Distrowatch gives back 10% of its income to upstream projects or distributions, maybe we could do something similar. Or maybe we could let the community decide on what to donate to. I have to be fully honest with you (I like the “trop honete pour etre poli” kinda thing anyway) paying other people is going to slow me down on moving full time to working on Mint, and this is my number 1 priority (my ambition isn’t just to develop desktop tools, I really want to make a real distribution out of Mint and I need my full 37.5+/week to achieve that). I was talking to Carlos only recently as I want to improve our website again and that involves him working on it a bit more, he constantly refuses money. With maintainers and with Husse money wasn’t mentioned yet but I’ll start a discussion on this within the team to know what their preference is in regards to that. It might be different depending on the people and the truth is the very difference between an official edition and a CE is the level of involvement given by the maintainer, and there’s no secret money helps in keeping involved, you can’t constantly dedicate all your time to a “hobby” (or maybe until you get married I don’t know..). Anyway, thanks for bringing that up Beranger, I’ll talk to the team about it to see what they think and if there’s something they’d like to change about it.
The erroneous link is fixed now – thanks for the tip
Excellent work as always, Husse. I would like to offer assistance in any way possible to the newsletter. PM me on the forums if I can be of any help. I have a few ideas I can put together and pass along. Tying in to clem’s comments, I would like to see Mint thrive as a major distribution in the emerging Linux world (maybe because I’m Irish in addition to the fact that it is a great distro). My background is business / marketing and not programming and such, but someone once said “it takes a village” or some such nonsense 🙂 Anyhow the newsletter is another tool to get the word out and to show that the Mint community, as well as the product, is second to none.