* News about Mint

Linux Mint 5 Elyssa KDE Community Edition is released

If you have RC1 (aka beta045) you don’t need to do anything. The difference between the two is that a bug that duplicated some folders in home is fixed

Linux Mint 5 Elyssa Fluxbox Community Edition RC1 is released

Keep your eyes open – more news soon.

* News about Linux

The next Ubuntu is to be called Jaunty Jackalope (let’s hope it becomes more than a myth…)

The talks at Ubuntu Developer Week are found here

Ubuntu puts all man pages on the internet

Mark Shuttleworth on design, user experience and development

Lenovo denies ditching Linux

The spread of the Linux virus Linux/Rst-B according to Sophos (quite a few root infected boxes out there)

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

The invaluable NoScript for Firefox plug-in just got a tad better.

A new version of VLC

ZoooS takes OpenOffice to web

Google to have data center at sea?

HP is trying to make Windows better

The Association of National Advertisers (US) wants the pact between Google and Yahoo stopped

Google-backed satellite project aims to give 3 billion more people Net access

Google closes hole in Single Sign-On service

Language of text messages can give you away

French oppose sinister government database

The major Internet outages so far in 2008

Phishing Cyber Gang Upgrades to Fast-Flux Botnet

Study: Weak Passwords Still Main Security Defense

San Francisco hunts for mystery device on city network

Threat From DNS Bug Isn’t Over, Experts Say

* Hardware news

Cisco pushes ‘network memory‘ to alleviate high-speed bottlenecks

Intel vPro and the future of tech support

Ultrasound to give feel to games

Startup introduces ‘unclonable’ chip technology

USB-stick with hardware AES-encryption has been cracked
* Trivia and other links

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider (because of the risk of creating black holes) and it has already been hacked.

VMware Fusion Helps CERN Physicists Analyze Data From Coolest Place on Earth

phonet

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

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* Editors comment

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

Enjoy life

Husse

Linux Mint just received a donation of $400. This is the single biggest donation the project received since it was started in 2006. The donation came from Distrowatch in association with LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com.

Distrowatch is known to donate a part of its income to upstream projects and distributions on a monthly basis. This single donation of $400 makes it the second biggest Linux Mint donor.  By the past Distrowatch donated a total of $18,183 to the following projects:

* 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF – Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
* 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NdisWrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
* 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a Powerpack competition), Digikam ($408) and SabayonLinux ($450)
* 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400), FreeNAS ($350), lighttpd ($400), Damn Small Linux ($350), NimbleX ($450), MEPIS Linux ($300), Zenwalk Linux ($300)
* 2008: VLC ($350), Frugalware Linux ($340), cURL ($300), GSPCA (Linux webcam support) ($400), FileZilla ($400), MythDora ($500)

As you can see Distrowatch isn’t only one of the most popular websites about Linux, it’s also one of the biggest financial supporter of small distributions and upstream projects.  On behalf of the Linux Mint distribution I would like to thank Distrowatch, and in particular Ladislav Bodnar, for this donation and for all they’ve done for our project. Linux Mint is a successful distribution but it wouldn’t have been as popular if it wasn’t for websites like Distrowatch which allowed users to know about it in the first place. Today, we’re receiving the biggest donation since we started Mint. I feel really grateful. Thank you Distrowatch, Ladislav, and also thanks to LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com for being part of this.

Many thanks for supporting us,

Clem.

Welcome to the Linux Mint Newsletter

A security flaw in the DNS protocol has been fixed. This is for all operating systems and every appliance connected to the internet. Probably one of the most serious threats to the internet so far. Some background hereupdates already in mintUpdate, please update your system. A warning has been posted in the forum

* News about Mint

I can’t guarantee it but it seems that a release of the Elyssa KDE edition is immanent – we are testing a beta with all problems hopefully solved. It is no easy task to make a good KDE edition. I also think the XFCE edition is near a public beta

Clem has been busy and  posted a bunch of interesting info

Sections of the Mint repository

Some news about development  We had to postpone the developement of QT frontends for the Mint applications in the KDE CE.  The implications of Ubuntu 8.04.1 for development are considered

The implications of branding has been discussed. We like freedom, but not the freedom to use the Mint name and logo in any way or fashion.

Elyssa is used by 60% of the Mint users

mintInstall 4 released in Romeo (Romeo is the “unstable” branch of Mint repositories)

How should the Mint tools be named? This has wide implications and mintUpdate 2.8 will be released soon as “Update Manager”

There’s a poll for the naming here

The forum is growing and so is the interest for it from spammers. Please help keep the forum neat and report all spam you see.

The repositories were down for about half of July 7 It’s unclear if this was a hacker attack but there seems to be attempts to take the site down

* News about Linux

Linux Magazine has an article covering what they call “Spawn of Ubuntu” (which includes Mint)

GNOME hires Stormy Peters as Executive Director She has a past as an executive in HP

Xandros acquires  Linspire – this obviously happened behind the scene and was not made public until some two weeks after it took place

openSUSE Build Service 1.0 Released  The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create and maintain packages for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

ATI promises faster Linux drivers

A new version of Gentoo was released

Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel  (Youtube video)

An interview with Mark Shuttleworth

* News about IT

Samba 3.2 released

Web threats hits 12 month high

Vmware changes CEO and puts in a Microsoft veteran as CEO

The Windows version of VLC has a security flaw

As I stated in an earlier newsletter the Swedish law permitting bugging of all electronic communication that passes the country boundaries is aimed at Russia

The US congress passes amendments to the “FISA” Act which is similar to the Swedish act (Haven’t found a good link for this)

* Hardware news

Threats to the GPS system has been reported recently

The world may run out of some rare elements needed to make computer chips in a few years time

* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

You find the Wallpaper of the Week in the Blog

Home page

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* Editors comment

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

Enjoy life

Husse