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:

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:

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:

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.

* News about Mint

Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” Fluxbox CE RC1 released!

Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” KDE CE RC1 released!

I have forgotten to mention an interesting interview with Clem (the founder of Mint) perhaps because it is in this blog a bit down

* News about Linux

Carmack: Quake Live on Mac, Linux ‘high on my priority list’

Nouveau Becomes The Default Nvidia Driver In Fedora 11

Red Hat returns to the Linux desktop

VMware, Novell hatch virtual appliance scheme

Dreamlinux  3.5 released

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

Microsoft sues TomTom over Linux and other patent claims

Note on Microsoft TomTom Suit: Calm Down, Hope for the Best, Plan for the Worst

UK government backs open source

* News about IT

Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?

Popular passwords include ‘1234′ and ‘password’

Experts sound scam threat warning for fake anti-virus websites.

Attacks prompt Microsoft to fix Excel flaw

* Hardware news

* Other news

* Comic of the week

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

* 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