Welcome to the Linux Mint Newsletter

* News about Mint

* Beta testing goes on – lots of interesting points but no showstopper found yet

* Latest wallpaper of the week

* Behind the scenes work is going on with the KDE, XFCE and Fluxbox editions of Elyssa (will take time to get them ready for release though)

* News about Linux

Open Suse 11 RC1 released

* News about IT

There will be a RC2 of Firefox 3

Security flaw in Samba – this has already been announced in the forum

Microsoft opens up a Web services protocol it developed for Vista.

Microsoft’s CAPTCHA successfully broken

* Hardware news

Wifi could be much faster

A desktop supercomputer for 4,000 Euro – the power of the GPU

* Trivia and other links

Some tips

* Editors comment

I have had problems finding good links for a few things I wanted to include in this newsletter, so its not there.

As always – if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me – you can post a comment here

And the last days have been warm, not to say hot, so I may be more confused than normally / husse

After a whole month of tough competition here’s what the All Stars table looks like for May 2008:

1         Kronophage  — 2.395 pts, 19 games. * Congrats! *
2          MeansWell  — 1.702 pts, 14 games.
3          BlakeBird  — 0.684 pts,  6 games.
4               clem  — 0.387 pts,  4 games.
5                oOp  — 0.379 pts,  4 games.
6              mocap  — 0.130 pts,  1 games.
7              ar3ac  — 0.122 pts,  1 games.
8              yoz-y  — 0.115 pts,  1 games.
9                oop  — 0.108 pts,  1 games.
10            mark-mc  — 0.104 pts,  1 games.
There were 14 users playing 56 games.

Congratulations to Kronophage who’s been at the top of the table for 2 months now.

If you haven’t joined the Quizz yet, it’s very easy:

– In Linux Mint: open up Xchat-Gnome (or Konversation) then when it’s connected join the #pimpmymint channel.
– On other platforms: Launch your favorite IRC client, connect to the irc.spotchat.org server and join the #pimpmymint channel.

Note: Make sure to register your nickname with Nickserv so that the Quizz bot can remember you the next time you log in.

1. How do I upgrade to Elyssa?

The RC (Public BETA) releases are not meant to be “used”, they’re meant to be “tested”. Of course, people have been waiting for Elyssa for a long time and I can understand why they can’t wait for the Stable release and why they replace their main OS with these RCs. This is OK, it’s possible but it’s not “recommended”. The reason we publish these RC releases is for people to test them and for us to fix as many bugs as possible before the release becomes stable. The proper way to test an RC is to install it, this way you test the liveCD, the installer and the system is fresh. By upgrading to it instead of installing it, you’re not helping us test it.. you might in fact report problems that are related not to the release itself but to the way you performed the upgrade… Also, until the branch is actually stable, we are not in a position to publish upgrade instructions since these might still change.

So we’re hoping you keep Daryna as your main OS and test these RCs for us, to report bugs and help us out, on a separate partition or a virtual machine.

When Elyssa is stable we will publish upgrade instructions and you will be able to upgrade to it from Daryna stable, Elyssa RC1 (beta 032) and Elyssa RC2 (beta 048). Again, if you’re running RC1 or RC2 we strongly recommend you perform a fresh install when Stable comes out.

2. When are the other editions coming?

The KDE CE is being tested by the team. Boo has given Exploder 2 ISOs already. QT frontends for all the mint tools are planned but still missing.

Work on the X86_64 edition will begin as soon as Elyssa stable is out.

3. What happens if Elyssa doesn’t work for me?

Ubuntu is a great base but it’s also an innovative and adventurous distribution… like us actually, so the problem with this is.. where do we get stability and consistency between releases? How do we ensure there are no regressions? To be honest, we don’t. So there might be a few people for whom Daryna worked great and who won’t be as lucky with Elyssa. Don’t despair.. we’re planning on backporting all the mint tools to Daryna. So whether you run Elyssa or keep Daryna in the future you will be able to enjoy all the fixes and improvements we’ve made within the Mint tools.

I’ll talk about this more in details later as we start backporting applications into Daryna.

4. Where is the User Guide for Elyssa?

It will be made available as we’re getting close to the stable release.

5. I can’t find application X in the Elyssa Software Portal, where is it?

We’re still adding applications to it. For instance Skype and Google Earth were added yesterday along with 109 other applications… as we’re getting close to the stable release the portal will be containing more and more software. If it’s missing something after the Stable release is out, please let us know by posting about it in the forums.

6. I found a bug in Elyssa RC2, where can I report it?

Here: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=12853

Make sure you also read the release notes, because:

– They might answer some of your questions
– They might show you features you didn’t know about (check the section called “What’s new in Elyssa?”)
– They might mention limitations/issues we already know about.

The release notes are available here: http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_elyssa.php

7. Where is the torrent for Elyssa?

Here: http://www.linuxmint.de/downloads.html

8. Other questions?

Anyone?