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I briefly mentioned mintCast in my previous post but I think it deserves a little more attention.

MintCast is a brand new podcast “by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux”. It’s hosted by Charles Olsen, whom I’m sure you’ll get to know very well, and it’s currently aiming at releasing on a biweekly schedule.

In Episode 1:

  • Introduction to the podcast
  • SCO loses again
  • Linux Mint 6 RC 1 available
  • Installing software in Linux — it’s easier than installing in Windows
  • Setting up Samba

To subscribe to this podcast use the following address: http://mintcast.org/podcasts-only/rss2.aspx

For more information about this podcast please visit http://mintcast.org/

If you want to contribute to the podcast or join their mailing list, please visit https://launchpad.net/~linuxmint-podcast-project

Note: mintCast is looking for a new logo. If you think you can help don’t hesitate to contact them.

by ·23 Comments

* News about Mint

Mint is successful but we still cannot afford to have paid staff working on the project. All team members work on Mint in their spare time. This means that family matters (like moving house) can make a team member be absent from Mint for some time. This happens to Clem, the founder of Mint, at present, and he writes about it in the blog

RC1 for the main edition is good enough to be the final with a few adjustments and wubi (in Mint LMWI) added.

Work on the KDE edition has produced some internal betas, but there is some more work to be done before a RC can be released, but it should not be long

* News about Linux

Fedora 10 is released

Is Smolt the Key to Counting Linux Users?

Red Hat Fedora Claims It’s the Leader in Linux

Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth opens up on mobility and design

Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase II – will it make the design look better?

ARM and Canonical to bring full Ubuntu desktop experience to low-power, ARM technology-based computing devices

“Moonlight” ready to shine

Linux Foundation Workgroup Tackles Federal Mandate for Next-Generation Internet Protocol

16 interviews with Linux Kernel hackers

MPX, X Input 2 Not Ready For X Server 1.6

On kerneloops.org you can view statistics about kernel crashes, currently 2.6.25 seems to be the worst

The 7 Deadly Linux Commands (or don’t do this at home)

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

NASA Successfully Tests First Deep Space Internet

IBM to build computer based on human brain

Teenagers learn important social, technical skills online: study

Mozilla developers readying one more beta cycle for Firefox 3.1

Pentagon recalls USB sticks over virus fears

350 million spam mail generated 28 attempts to by. Without the use of botnets spam would not be economically viable study shows Still the profit generated is around $ 10 000 a day….

How Much Does Spam Cost You? Google Will Calculate

The amount of spam has decreased heavily after a major host for spammers was closed down and a botnet stopped stopped working

Adam Guerbuez Atlantis Blue Capital: Guerbuez fined $436.3 million for spamming Facebook

Interpol cracks down on illegal online meds (Never by medicines on line unless you like to gamble with your health – editors comment)

Brief study shows difficulty in detecting malware (We’re lucky to be on Linux)

Anti fraud site hit by a DDoS attack

Demand for Internet bandwidth will exceed supply by 2012 according to a report

Mac OS X targeted by Trojan and backdoor tool (but still hardly any viruses)

IETF: Should we ignore the Kaminsky bug?

US court orders keylogger CyberSpy to halt software sales

DOE’s Oak Ridge supercomputer now world’s fastest for open science

Adobe answers cries for 64-bit Flash on Linux

Microsoft Says over 11% of Vista Printer Driver Installs Fail

Microsoft e-mails detail internal fight over ‘Vista Capable’ changes

Yahoo sells shopping service Kelkoo at a considerable loss

* Hardware news

AMD/ATI introduces it’s counterpart to Nivida’s CUDA

Catalyst 8.12 is to enable this for Radeon HD 4000

* Trivia and other links

Rung up: Workers out for Obama cell-phone snooping

* 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

by ·85 Comments

It’s been a little more than two weeks and you’re probably wondering where exactly is the stable release of Linux Mint 6 Felicia.

I was away for two weeks in Florida (great country by the way, I had never been to the US before) and I only got back last week. Then something came up and we got an opportunity to move closer to where our house will be built in the future, so I’m now moving house and I’m looking at between 1 and 2 weeks without an Internet connection…

Of course this is all a bit personal but as you may know Linux Mint isn’t maintained by a company hiring paid full-time employees, it’s still something the team does in their spare time and as you can see it can get impacted by personal events.

We’re now in December and Linux Mint traditionally release in the end of November, so although we don’t stick to a fixed schedule we’re considering ourselves a bit late. Having said that I’ve already started analysing the feedback the community gave since the release of RC1 and it looks like the quality of the RC release was very good. It’s missing Wubi support and there probably will be a few bug fixes between RC1 and the stable release but I’m confident both release will be quite similar and there’s still a possibility RC1 users might not need to upgrade (in other words, if most changes affect the CD itself, RC1 could be considered fit for usage).

Until I get broadband again, I’ll be setting up a temporary office for myself where I can work on Linux Mint and I can be connected to the Internet. Hopefully that will be enough to wrap things up for Linux Mint 6 and maybe even to develop the upgrade tool we mentioned before.

At home I received new equipment, a new desktop, some KVM switches and a 24″ screen for the sole purpose of working on both Main and x64 editions at the same time. Due to the trip to Florida and now to moving houses I’m not only getting late in releasing Mint 6, I’m also missing an opportunity to release Main and x64 editions at the same time, but don’t be mistaken, this is still my ambition and I’m confident both architectures will receive the same level of attention.

Another piece of good news is that we’ve worked hard before I left and a lot of people continued to work hard while I was away… so things should be moving fast in the months coming. I’ve seen the team upload a few CE ISOs and I don’t know if you remember my call for setting up a podcast team a few weeks back? Well someone stepped up and a team formed around him. Our new podcast is called “mintCast”, hosted by Charles Olsen and the very first episode is ready to be downloaded right here: http://www.mintcast.org/

Again I would like to apologize for the delay and the lack of news. Things happened quite fast and both this trip and moving to a new house were actually decided at the last minute. It had to happen in November and of course this was the worst timing ever for me and for Linux Mint 6.

Note: I might not answer emails for a little while as my number #1 priority is to get to a stable release for Mint 6. Things should get back to normal in about 2 weeks… 😉 I’ll keep everyone posted as to how things go.

Edit #1: All the furnitures are in place, the phone line is working and the DSL ordered. It’ll be another 10 days before broadband is ready but I got a 3G dongle so I can connect to the net in the meantime. It’s not ideal, but it means I can start working again. I catalogued all the bugs the community reported and I’m now in the process of reproducing/fixing them.