The Linux Mint Blog

* News about Mint

mintUpdate 3 released!

Even 3.2 has been released. Quite a few new features, including better proxy  support.

Distrowatch donates $400 to Linux Mint

Work is going on on the final versions (hopefully) 🙂 of  the KDE and XFCE editions. There are only a few problems left to solve, but they seem reluctant to disappear

* News about Linux

IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide An alliance has formed

IBM Contributes Key Open-Source Code for Linux Supercomputers

KDE 4 update  Any similarity in that topic with slashdot is probably no coincidence 🙂

Ubuntu goes enterprise

VMware joins Linux Foundation

Google more and more involved in Linux

Reiser4 Update

* News about IT

German hackers poke hole in great firewall of China

Hackers steal 40 million credit card numbers

‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes

Vista’s Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit

* Hardware news

AMD ditches Close-To-Metal, focuses on DX11 and OpenCL

* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

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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.

Introduction

We made a very controversial decision when we released Linux Mint 3.1 Celena. We decided to remove the Ubuntu update manager and a lot of people criticized us for doing that. As it turns out it was one of the best decisions we ever made (arguably and according to us.. of course). MintUpdate came right in time for the release of Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna and since then it regularly got updated to become one of the best update managers.

Today we’re going to rise the bar even higher with the release of mintUpdate 3 and we’ll be introducing yet another innovative idea: The ability to view the history of applied updates. The reason why mintUpdate was developed in the first place was to avoid uneducated updates but even with our 5 levels of filtering most users still blindly apply level 3 updates. With this new feature, after their system is damaged not only will they still be able to cry, but they’ll be able to tell us what updates they applied.. so we can in turn get a better idea of which level 3 packages should get a level 4 or 5.

New GUI

The graphical user interface was changed to look less minty (I know.. some people won’t approve and get emotional here) and more like other Linux tools.  This is also to encourage other distributions to adopt what we think is now the best update manager on the market.

New features

All updates applied via mintUpdate are noted. The tool remembers the package name, the old and new versions, the level and the date of the update. From the view menu, you can now see the history of applied updates. The idea is to clear that list after you made sure everything was fine. This way, in case problems occur after you’ve applied updates you can narrow down the cause of the problems by identifying which update caused the regression.

MintUpdate runs in both user and root mode. Under Gnome, the proxy settings don’t always apply to root sessions so we introduced Proxy support. This will also make it easier for KDE users.

Improvements

• Log files are now saved in /tmp so they don’t take unnecessary space in /usr/lib and in /home anymore.
• The Internet detection was improved and the domain used for the ping is now configurable.
• The routine which checks for the updates (called checkAPT) was improved as were its ties with mintUpdate itself.
• The status reporting was improved. Logs are now clearer and show more information. In the GUI, status is now also reported via a status bar.
• The configuration moved from /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintUpdate/config to /etc/linuxmint/mintUpdate.conf and is now persistent (it won’t be affected by package updates).

Package and notes

Version numbers: We’re changing the way we assign version numbers to our tools in order to make it easier for them to be translated. The major revision number will change everytime the GUI is affected and a new set of translations is needed. All other changes will make the minor revision to be incremented.

MintUpdate 3 is availabe in the Romeo repository: deb http://packages.linuxmint.com elyssa romeo

The current version is v3.1 and is available here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/romeo/m/mintupdate/mintupdate_3.1_all.deb

Non-Mint users will also need: http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/m/mintupdate-gnome/mintupdate-gnome_1.0_all.deb or http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/m/mintupdate-kde/mintupdate-kde_1.0_all.deb

Translations

mintUpdate 3 is currently supporting English and French. Please help us translate it by following the instructions written on this forum thread: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=15695&p=95945

Feedback and bugs

Please post comments here on the blog if you find bugs in mintUpdate 3. Give us feedback also if you like it and if everything’s fine so we can eventually consider it stable and move it down to stable repositories.

Changelog

• 3.0: Initial release
• 3.1: Fixes a typo in the translation file.
• 3.2:
  • Creates /etc/linuxmint if it’s not present (handy for non-Elyssa systems)
  • If ping fails, tries to read google.com. This improves Internet detection on systems where ping is sometimes too slow.
  • New translations: Italian, Catalan, Swedish, Czech, Japanese, Slovak, Norwegian-Bokmal, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugual & Brazil variations).