The Linux Mint Blog

Charles Olsen and Rothgar published another episode of the mintCast podcast. Happy listening everyone!

In this episode:

• The News (Linux Mint 6 XFCE, Ballmer: Linux bigger competitor than Apple, World of Goo, Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 May Not Be Easy)
• Main topic: Linux User Groups (LUGs)
• How to join a Linux workstation to an Active Directory domain with Likewise
• How to share a keyboard and a mouse between two computers with Synergy
• Are there too many Linux distributions to choose from?
• Website of the Week: The Linux Distribution Chooser

Direct links:

• MintCast Website
• Podcast RSS Feed
• Podcast Project Site
• Podcast [MP3]
  
• Shownotes

Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

• $100 (2nd donation), Bob Donnelly (rdonnelly – USA)
• $65, Bernd van D. (Netherlands)
• $65, Kevin D. (USA)
• $50, Jason S. (USA)
• $50 (3rd donation), Edward B. (USA)
• $50, Phillip B. (New Zealand)
• $40 (2nd donation), Arron J. (UK)
• $35 (4th donation), John Trapp (USA) – http://foggytown.com/
• $30 (2nd donation), Kurt Frank (Australia)
• $30 (2nd donation), Gordon Hilliard (ghilly – UK)
• $30, Michal G. (USA)
• $30, William S. (USA)
• $30 (2nd donation), Brian B. (USA)
• $26, Vesa L. (Finland)
• $26 (2nd donation), Wolfgang P. (Austria)
• $26, Andreas B. R. (Norway)
• $25, Bryan S. (USA)
• $25 (2nd donation), Michael C. (USA)
• $20, J. M. (USA)
• $15, Ramos-Sandoval Enterprises, LLC. (USA)
• $13, Laurent C. (France)
• $13, Valentin Z. B. (Ireland)
• $13, Jaakko T. (Finland)
• $13, Geert D. (Belgium)
• $13, Jimmy H. (Sweden)
• $10, Lynn H. (USA)
• $7, Wilken S. (Germany)
• $4, Jan V. (Czech Republic)
• $4, Bruno L. (Portugal)
• $1, Selenius (Germany)

Sponsors:

• $70, Philippe Lotz (alsaphil – France)
• $50, Linux-Onlineshop (Germany) – http://www.linux-onlineshop.de
• $45, Linux Compatible Poker (USA) – http://www.linuxcompatiblepoker.com
• $40, Az Van (newW2 – USA)
• $20, TOPIMMOBILIEN (Tim – Germany) – http://www.immobilien-es.com
• $10, Jim Rogers (USA)
• $7, Jesse Burroughs (JpBя – USA)
• $5, Dimitris Athanasiou (RHO, Greece) – http://www.speedtest.gr
• $5, Vassilis Skoullis (Greece)
• $5, linuxmint-fr.org (ludal – France) – http://www.linuxmint-fr.org
• $5, linuxmint-italia.org (Pietro Martino / prior123 – Italy) – http://www.linuxmint-italia.org
• $5, Guillermo Enrique Guglietti (Canada) – http://www.urbancsa.org
• $5, Alex P.
• $5, J. Cain (ronnoc – USA) – http://realestatepointe.blogspot.com/
• $2, Joerg Dreckmann (Germany)
• $1, Lintelligence.de. (d00p – Germany) – http://www.lintelligence.de
• $1, Linuxmint.de (d00p – Germany) – http://www.linuxmint.de
• $1, Ian Egland (Echolynx – USA)
• $1, BusinessSale – http://www.webvaluer.org
• $1, very-clever.com – http://www.very-clever.com
• $1, Busybits – http://www.busybits.com
• $1, linboo.com – http://www.linboo.com
• $0.5 Martijn van Loon (aapiethaaap – Netherlands)

Money raised in February:

* Donations: $859
* Sponsors: $286.5

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: 9.38%
• Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 26.6%
• Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 64%

Web Stats:

• Visits: 1,076,529 (+2.26%)
  
• Pageviews: 2,072,318 (+0.98%)
  
• Page impressions: 903,986
• Search queries: 2,152,600
• Forum users: 13435
• Forum posts: 126397

Rankings:

• Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1573 (3rd)
• Distrowatch (traffic share): 3.2% (2nd)
• Alexa (website ranking): 40,230th

Events:

• Linux Mint 6 Felicia x64 release: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=595
• Linux Mint 6 Felicia XFCE release: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=637
• MintCast released 2 episodes: http://www.mintcast.org
• Forums moved to a new dedicated server in Canada: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=610
• Interview published in Linux Magazine Italia: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=625
• Micro-blogging feeds set up in Twitter and Identi.ca for minor news updates: http://twitter.com/Linux_Mint and http://identi.ca/linuxmint/all

Summary:

• Linux Mint seems to be the second mostly used distribution among Distrowatch visitors. The website’s Awstats figures can’t be used to jump to formal or reliable conclusions but it’s been our best indicator for comparing the size of our user base within the Linux desktop market and being 2nd there is for us a great achievement.
• Although all our indicators are in the green (more traffic, more members, better rankings), our overall income is down 10% this month. We could observe a stagnation earlier in the previous months but it seems the global economical crisis has finally hit us. Our donations and sponsors are down, and it seems our advertising with Google has taken a huge hit. Either Google reduced our margin or more than likely a lot of advertisers went away. The income generated by our website through advertising is only half of what it once was even though our traffic kept going up.
• A large number of users migrated to the latest Linux Mint 6 Felicia but most of them came from the LTS Linux Mint 5 release… with 10% of our users still running Linux Mint 4 Daryna.