A very important bug has been found in mintAssistant 2.4 which was released as part of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa.

Explanation

When the root password is not set the root account is still active, and rather than this consequently preventing any root login, it actually means you can login as root without any password at all.

Cause

This regression is due to a change in behavior in passwd from Gutsy to Hardy and a request from the community after RC1 was released not to lock the root account (so that “sudo su -” is still possible).

Solution

– A fix has been released in mintAssistant 2.5. When you select not to use the root password, the root account is now given a randomly generated password.
– The ISO images for both the Main and Light Editions will be rebuilt to include this fix.

What you need to do

– Upgrade mintAssistant to version 2.5.
– Launch mintAssistant and choose whether you want to set a root password or not. If you choose not to, a random password will be assigned for you.

– About 12% of Mint users participated in testing Linux Mint 5 Elyssa RC1 and/or RC2.

– Two days after the stable release, 51% of Mint users are using Linux Mint 5 Elyssa, 49% are using Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna.

– Elyssa users are American (33%), German (8%), British (8%), Italian (5%), Canadian (5%), Spanish (4%), Dutch (3%), French (3%), Norwegian (3%), Brazilian (2%)… and from all around the World (27%)

– Elyssa users are particularly active in London (2%), Madrid (1%), Milan (1%), Sofia, Oslo, Berlin, Beaverton, Augusta and Sydney.

– Elyssa users connect to the Internet via DSL (35%), Cable (28%), T1 (4%), Dialup (4%).. or other means (28%).

– Elyssa users have their screen resolution set to 1280×1024 (24%), 1024×768 (21%), 1280×800 (19%), 1440×900 (11%), 1680×1050 (9%), 800×600 (4%), 1152×864 (2%), 1600×1200 (2%), 1920×1200 (2%), 1280×768 (2%).

– Assuming the proportion of people who visit distrowatch.com is the same across all distributions, Linux Mint is the 4th most used distribution behind Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSUSE and followed by Fedora, PCLinuxOS and Mandriva (The proportion of people running Gentoo/Slackware is unknown, although it is reasonnable to think it might be quite significant).

Note: Most of these statistics are available to us thanks to the default Firefox start page and its user-agent. Users using a custom start page or a different browser are not represented in these statistics. Statistics give us an idea of what the reality is, their accuracy is unknown and figures are better at measuring trends than they are at actually giving us numbers we can rely on. We do not know how large our user base is but we can compare it, via different indicators, to ones of other distributions, or measure its evolution through time.

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

Sponsors:

– $70, Philippe Lotz, MBA, International Consulting & Coaching (alsaphil – France)
– $36, Adrian Jones (todds – UK)
– $25, Az Van (newW2 – USA)
– $11, LinuxISOS.de (Germany) – http://www.linuxisos.de
– $10, Tuxdevil Outsourcing LLC http://www.tuxdevil.net
– $10, TOPIMMOBILIEN (Tim – Germany) – http://www.immobilien-es.com
– $10, MXD Internet Solutions (Filip Oscadal – Czech Republic) – http://www.mxd.biz
– $7, Panagiotis Papasaikas (Greece) – http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ppapasai/
– $5, Vassilis Skoullis (Greece)
– $5, linuxmint-italia.org (Pietro Martino / prior123 – Italy) – http://www.linuxmint-italia.org
– $5, Robert Holland
– $5, Kevin Gabbert
– $2, LinuxMint-Forum.de (Germany) – http://linuxmint-forum.de/
– $2, Khurt Williams (USA) – http://islandinthenet.com/
– $1, Lintelligence.de. (d00p – Germany) – http://www.lintelligence.de
– $1, Linuxmint.de (d00p – Germany) – http://www.linuxmint.de
– $1, Pietro Martino
– $0.5 Martijn van Loon (aapiethaaap – Netherlands)

Donors:

– $100 (3rd donation) Ronald R. (USA)
– $100 Tony Skilton (Logs_Con – UK)
– $82 Peer B. (Germany)
– $50 (2nd donation) Albert Mayse (USA)
– $50 Susan M. (USA)
– $50 Herbert L. (UK)
– $49 Jonathan D. (France)
– $41 DB. (Dick – Netherlands)
– $40 (2nd donation) Harald Gauslaa (Norway)
– $35 Leroy and Louise Haury (USA)
– $35 Alon H. (alonhzn – Israel) – http://www.magen-yehuda.com/
– $34 John M. Henry (ve2vq – Canada)
– $33 Christoph Lange (ratpertus – Germany)
– $33 Nasef K. (UK)
– $30 Iain G. (UK)
– $25 Ric D’I. (USA)
– $25 Rene de V. (Netherlands)
– $20 Vivian P. (UK)
– $20 John T. (USA)
– $20 Robert McA. (USA)
– $20 Sol H. (Australia)
– $16 Rene T. (France)
– $15 Stephen C. (USA)
– $12 Tim MacD. (Canada)
– $10 Damian T. (USA)
– $10 Christopher Artz (Lantesh – USA)
– $10 Henry W. (USA)
– $5 Andrew S. (USA)

Money raised in May:
– Donations: $970
– Sponsors: $206.5

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