The Mint Newsletter – issue 68

* News about Mint

Mint is successful but we still cannot afford to have paid staff working on the project. All team members work on Mint in their spare time. This means that family matters (like moving house) can make a team member be absent from Mint for some time. This happens to Clem, the founder of Mint, at present, and he writes about it in the blog

RC1 for the main edition is good enough to be the final with a few adjustments and wubi (in Mint LMWI) added.

Work on the KDE edition has produced some internal betas, but there is some more work to be done before a RC can be released, but it should not be long

* News about Linux

Fedora 10 is released

Is Smolt the Key to Counting Linux Users?

Red Hat Fedora Claims It’s the Leader in Linux

Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth opens up on mobility and design

Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase II – will it make the design look better?

ARM and Canonical to bring full Ubuntu desktop experience to low-power, ARM technology-based computing devices

Moonlight” ready to shine

Linux Foundation Workgroup Tackles Federal Mandate for Next-Generation Internet Protocol

16 interviews with Linux Kernel hackers

MPX, X Input 2 Not Ready For X Server 1.6

On kerneloops.org you can view statistics about kernel crashes, currently 2.6.25 seems to be the worst

The 7 Deadly Linux Commands (or don’t do this at home)

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

NASA Successfully Tests First Deep Space Internet

IBM to build computer based on human brain

Teenagers learn important social, technical skills online: study

Mozilla developers readying one more beta cycle for Firefox 3.1

Pentagon recalls USB sticks over virus fears

350 million spam mail generated 28 attempts to by. Without the use of botnets spam would not be economically viable study shows Still the profit generated is around $ 10 000 a day….

How Much Does Spam Cost You? Google Will Calculate

The amount of spam has decreased heavily after a major host for spammers was closed down and a botnet stopped stopped working

Adam Guerbuez Atlantis Blue Capital: Guerbuez fined $436.3 million for spamming Facebook

Interpol cracks down on illegal online meds (Never by medicines on line unless you like to gamble with your health – editors comment)

Brief study shows difficulty in detecting malware (We’re lucky to be on Linux)

Anti fraud site hit by a DDoS attack

Demand for Internet bandwidth will exceed supply by 2012 according to a report

Mac OS X targeted by Trojan and backdoor tool (but still hardly any viruses)

IETF: Should we ignore the Kaminsky bug?

US court orders keylogger CyberSpy to halt software sales

DOE’s Oak Ridge supercomputer now world’s fastest for open science

Adobe answers cries for 64-bit Flash on Linux

Microsoft Says over 11% of Vista Printer Driver Installs Fail

Microsoft e-mails detail internal fight over ‘Vista Capable’ changes

Yahoo sells shopping service Kelkoo at a considerable loss

* Hardware news

AMD/ATI introduces it’s counterpart to Nivida’s CUDA

Catalyst 8.12 is to enable this for Radeon HD 4000

* Trivia and other links

Rung up: Workers out for Obama cell-phone snooping

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

Home page

Blog The planet Wiki Forum

* Editors comment

As always – if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me – you can post a comment.

Enjoy life

Husse

23 comments

  1. Just to clear things up Wubi for Linux Mint is called.
    WLMI(Windows based Linux Mint Installer)since the code is from Wubi(Windows based UBuntu Installer).
    It’s in the release notes, as WLMI, for the RC 1 so calling it LMWI might confuse people.
    It’s pretty much done just need some info from clem to finish the one for the final release.

  2. I’ve been using various Linux distributions for around ten years now, and in that time I’d say I’ve become a fairy competent user of Linux. This being said, I’ve never really been particularly “impressed” straight off the bat by any distribution in particular (even Ubuntu). Then just recently I thought I’d give Linux Mint a try. I seriously just want to say thank you to all the people that work on Linux Mint. It seriously is one of the only distributions I’ve been really “wowed” out of the box with. It was quick to install, everything I need working works out of the box (media codecs and so on), and presents a working desktop to me with all the standard bells and whistles I like working immediately. To attain a similar experience on some other distributions I have to spend a few hours wandering around in configuration files changing things around and hoping that I remember exactly what I have to do. So despite the fact that I’m able to get all these things working on my own, it’s nice to have Linux Mint which takes care of all these configurations for me so I can just get going on what I need to do with my computer. A big thank you to all the Linux Mint team, I shall continue to follow (and use) Linux Mint in the future. (:

  3. This might come across as a rant, but the name “LMWI” makes my blood boil!!!!!

    Wubi is designed for newbies, and who ever named it had them in mind by coming up with a name that was cute and easy to remember. The fact that there is an acronym behind that name just tells you that they were clever in coming up with a technical name which could be reduced down to a cute, easy to remember name.

    This is a key point, it’s not that they came up with the technical name and then by coincidence found it formed a cute acronym. No. The technical name was designed from the outset to give a cute acronym.

    It is totally stupid therefore, to follow the same naming formula if it results in just a set of 4 random letters that are hard to remember and don’t roll off the tongue. If it was a case that changing a couple of the letters made an equally cute name then fair enough. But 4 random letters is just terrible, terrible terrible!

    How is a newbie supposed to remember WLMI or what it is? In fact, because the acronym is so terrible (failing to roll off the tongue in the slightest) you are basically forcing people to learn what the acronym stands for just to be able to remember it’s name! I can’t stress how bad that is.

    I go back to the point that the original wubi acronym was clearly designed to give the cute name. Why can’t we do the same? Why can’t we come up with a name that isn’t just 4 hard to remember letters?

    Hell, if you really don’t want to break the previous acronym’s naming rules by just calling it Mubi or something then why not ignore them all together? Why not give it a new name that has zero bearing to Wubi at all? It’s not like anyone can take a glance at WMLI and see that it is obviously the Mint version of Wubi, the names already seem completely different.

    This stuff makes my blood boil because it is yet again another example of Linux shooting itself in foot. Even the biggest, best funded distros like Ubuntu are always doing dumb stuff that frankly even the janitor at Apple would know not to do, but that linux geeks don’t seem to appreciate is wrong.

    If you want to encourage people to switch to Mint from Windows and other OS then you need names for your technologies which are at least two, if not all 3 of the following things:

    1. Easy to remember
    2. Don’t sound overly technical
    3. Tell you what it does without prior knowledge

    WLMI fails on all 3 counts and is a terrible name.

    If it was down to me I would just call it Wubi still.

    Why?

    Because that’s what everyone already calls the technology, so rebranding our own version of it doesn’t really do anything except add extra confusion. To go all business sounding, Wubi is a brand name that Mint can tap into. People keep posting and asking us when Wubi is going to work with Mint. It’s all about the wubi so why not just call it Wubi?

    Plus, its not like people see it as an acronym anyway; Wubi is always written lowercase as Wubi rather than WUBI. Only linux geeks know it might stand for something and this is not a product aimed at geeks.

  4. @ Belovedmonster
    Point taken
    However there is a considerable differense between wubi and the Mint one.
    Perhaps wubi for Mint?
    I’ll at least suggest it 🙂

  5. The name of the WLMI gets compiled in the software and becomes the name of the executable.
    It can’t have spaces or it won’t compile.
    Also it’ll be on the disc and be automatically ran, when put in a pc runing Windows.(except ME)

    It can’t be called Wubi since it’s officially supported by Ubuntu and also would cause them to get bug reports from our users.
    It really doesn’t matter what name it is, as long at it’s not Wubi or have any spaces.
    I’ll just spend about 5 min, changing all the info in the source.

  6. How about:

    WinMi (Windows based Mint Installation)
    MoWi (Mint on Windows Installation)
    MotoWi (Mint on top of Windows installation)
    MoaOS (Mint on another OS)

    /2p

  7. a few suggetions to rename LMWI to:

    mintiwin: (MINT Installer for WINdows)
    mint4win: (MINT 4(for) WINdows)
    miow: (Mint Installer On Windows) pronounced My Oh

    i agree with belovedmonster, it has to have a cute name or it wont be remembered. (i think i like miow the best).

  8. Clem says he like mint4win, seems easy enough to remember.
    Just for people how don’t now what it does.
    It is an installer just for the boot menu, that windows uses, and the virtual hard drives Linux Mint will be installed on.
    It makes 2 virtual hard drives on the ntfs hard drive you select.
    Then uses the user name, language, virtual hard drives and password for automatic ubiquity.
    You reboot into the automatic ubiquity and it does everything automatic.
    Then it reboots the system when done.
    Once you select the Linux Mint edition you installed it from the Windows boot manager it boots off of the virtual hard drives.

    If you want to remove it from your hard drive you just go to Add or remove programs in Windows and uninstall.

    It will delete the virtual hard drives and you will have that space back.
    Also it removes the entry in window boot manager.

    Since it uses virtual hard drives the system will be a little slower than using a real hard drive.

  9. It sounds very clever, maybe it should be called; “VCTFLMTDCSADNHANECAOBDMLGAWHLOP” (very clever thing for linux mint that does cool stuff and does not have a name everyone can agree on but does make life good and will help lots of people)

    well?

  10. @ Belovedmonster and Husse;

    Why not “Minti” (Mint Installer). It puns off the common Mint community term of “minty” to describe the Mint “flavor” of this distro, it’s easy to remember, and it describes what it does.

    Just a thought.

  11. Merlwiz, I am having a problem with both Wubi and Mint For Windows. They don’t seem to leave any space behind. (I am to install that on my Some ProgS Drive to use that much better). I can’t ask in the forum as Mum doesnt want to look.

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