Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

  • $100, Bill S. (Canada)
  • $100, Jack W. S. (Denmark)
  • $100, Richard M. (UK)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Herbert L. (UK)
  • $50, Andrew B. (USA)
  • $50, Jamie G. (UK)
  • $50, Larry B. (USA)
  • $50, Clive B. (UK)
  • $41, Andreas S. (Germany)
  • $34, Peter K. (Netherlands)
  • $34 (2nd donation), Lothar S. (Germany)
  • $30, Robert P. (USA)
  • $27, Bernard L. (Norway)
  • $25, Gary B. (USA)
  • $25, Dean Di P. (USA)
  • $25, Tim B. (USA)
  • $25, William S. (USA)
  • $25, Paul B. (USA)
  • $25 (2nd donation), Jim D. (Australia)
  • $20, Felipe M. V.  (Mexico)
  • $20, James T. (USA)
  • $20, Yance F. (USA)
  • $20 (4th donation), Jaxon L. (USA) – http://um-reloaded.blogspot.com/
  • $20, Syrinx (Canada)
  • $20, Jose D. G. (USA)
  • $20, Matthew W. (USA)
  • $20, Seth S. (USA)
  • $15 (3rd donation), Brian B.  (USA)
  • $15, Jacob S. (USA)
  • $15, Andrew M. (Australia)
  • $14, Asgeir K. (Norway)
  • $14, Eniko V. (Italy)
  • $14, Marion T. (UK)
  • $14, Germano S. (Italy)
  • $14, Robert B. (UK)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard Garrison (garrisonr – USA) – http://www.richard-garrison.com/
  • $10 (3rd donation), Henry W. (USA)
  • $10, Steven M. (USA)
  • $10, Dan B. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Jindrich Radic (Czech Republic)
  • $8, Israel V. (USA)
  • $7, All-Access Customer (USA)
  • $7, Matthias Z. (Germany)
  • $7, Frantisek Z. (Slovakia)
  • $7 (2nd donation), Wilken S. (Germany)
  • $7, Eoin S. (Ireland)
  • $7, Giuseppe P. (Germany)
  • $5, Alex K. (USA)
  • $5, Sean D. (USA)
  • $5, Timothy K. (USA)

Sponsors:

Money raised in March:

* Donations: $1256
* Sponsors: $300

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

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 7.99%
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 19.76%
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 72.24%

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 1,277,408 (+18.66%)
  • Pageviews: 2,437,531 (+17.62%)
  • Page impressions: 1,019,289
  • Search queries: 2,630,797
  • Forum users: 14266
  • Forum posts: 131709

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1482 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 2.5% (3rd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 37,932th

Events:

Summary:

  • We’ve had a really successful month. If we ignore the depreciation of the US dollar our income went up 31%. Both sponsorship and donations were up as well. Of course we’re comparing a 31 days month with a 28 days one, but still, the results are extremely good.
  • The activity also grew on the forums and the traffic got bigger on our start pages, indicating a growth of our user base.
  • Our Distrowatch rankings went down but their website only covered 2 of our releases this year. In comparison Ubuntu hit their frontpage 6 times with 4 Alphas, 1 Beta and 1 revision release. This is not a complaint and Distrowatch have explained their stand on this, but our apparent lack of activity partly explains the figures. We’ve also lost our novelty factor and if Mint is still quite new in some circles it is well known by now among Distrowatch visitors. The traffic share is at 2.5% which is very good but not accurate since it’s only based on the figures for April, which just started.
  • 20% is the share of Elyssa LTS among Linux Mint users. It is quite low. Mint 5 LTS will get updates, the latest tools and innovations, long after Mint 6 and even Mint 7 will be made obsolete. It represents the best alternative for people who don’t want to upgrade every 6 months. In fact people moving away from Linux Mint 4 Daryna, which is about to reach end of life, are typical users who do not follow Linux Mint with each new release and instead of migrating to Linux Mint 6 Felicia which will be replaced by Linux Mint 7 Gloria in a few months they would be better off opting for Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS. We made changes to our download page to put more emphasis on Mint 5 LTS and we’ll make our best to promote it more efficiently. This is a sign of a lack of communication and we’ll address it.

The team is proud to announce the immediate release of Linux Mint 2!

Linux Mint 2 is a giant step forward. Based and compatible with Windows Vista, with full DirectX support it comes with all the tools you need to start being productive: a text editor, a disk defragmenter, a command prompt, the demo of an antivirus and some 3rd party software to play the first 10 minutes of your favorite DVDs!

For as little as $299 you can get your copy of Linux Mint 2 shipped to your door step. Each copy sold comes with a certificate of “guaranteed sense of security” which protects you against our own software patents Worlwide!

Happy April fools day everyone and thanks to Shade Vortex for the idea and the artwork.

* News about Mint

mintCast – Episode 9

Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna reaches end-of-life

Linux Mint now has a forum at LinuxQuestions.org

New packages are continuously added to the community repositories – merlwiz79 has made a .deb that makes the “software-sources” application work on Mint

Twitter

* News about Linux

LINUX MASCOT: Tux to make way for Tasmanian Devil

And this is what’s new in the latest kernel 2.6.29

Gnome 2.26 released

The ext4 data loss issue (by one of the devs)

Chromium on Ubuntu ! [HOW TO]

digiKam 0.10.0 release for KDE4

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

Richard Stallman: You may be running non-free programs on your computer every day without realizing it—through your web browser.

Khronos Launches Initiative to Create Open Royalty Free Standard for Accelerated 3D on the Web

* News about IT

Microsoft, Lexmark to cross-license patents

TomTom gets allies in Microsoft Linux patent lawsuit fight

The next version of Firefox will be 3.5 not 3.1

Flaw makes Twitter vulnerable to serious viral attack

Facebook could be monitored by the UK government

Facebook defends its security and privacy tools

Songbird Bug Accidentally Wipes Users’ iPods, but the Bug Bites the Dust

Pwn2Own 2009 Day 1 – Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox Taken Down by Four Zero-Day Exploits

Safari Cracked in Seconds at Pwn2Own Hacking Competition

Researcher hacks just-launched IE8

First worm directed at home routers – infects devices which has weak username/passwords

The downadup/Conficker worm will do something on April 1st – probably no funny april fools joke

Microsoft and Yahoo talking again

Semantic Search Could Secure Google’s Future

Firewalls often do not filter ipv6 which is a major security hole (link in Swedish – sorry no good link in English)

Romanian police arrest Pentagon hack suspect

Aussie ISP pulls out of firewall trial

Pirate Bay Announces IPREDATOR Global Anonymity Service

* Hardware news

* Other news

This is a bit odd – Credit card skimming malware targeting ATMs

* Comic of the week

Credit goes to xkcd – http://xkcd.com/

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

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.

Enjoy life

Husse