A new website, similar to gnome-look.org and maintained by the people behind opendesktop.org, was made available for us, for our artists and for our community, to gather icons, wallpapers, splash screens and artwork in general specific to our distribution. This new website is LinuxMint-Art.org and it’s available here: http://www.linuxmint-art.org

I would like to thank McLovin, from the MintArt project, thanks to whom this was made possible and I would like to encourage everybody to participate in making this website an excellent resource for our community.

Note: The BETA for today’s “potential/eventual” (as it needs approval from Exploder first) release is already built, but I will make sure to add this website as a predefined Firefox bookmark before Mint 5 goes final.

I’ll go through the details later on but I can already confirm that there will be a second BETA release for the Main Edition of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa. If things go as planned and provided Exploder agrees to release it, I’m hoping to have it ready and available for download on Monday the 26th of May.

A huge number of changes were made since BETA 032 so we couldn’t afford to go towards a stable release without having a second BETA release tested by the community.

Among the major changes:

– Firefox 3 upgraded to RC1.
– A lot of bugfixes (I’ll detail these in a later post)
– A lot of changes in the package base (I’ll detail this as well).

I’ve also cleaned a lot of things and the ISO is currently 630MB… Of course it will get bigger as we approach the BETA release as there are things I also want to add (spell checkers for instance).

Welcome to the Linux Mint Newsletter

Bear with me this is  the first edition in the blog and I have not found a preview option

* News about Mint

Beta 032 of Elyssa (main edition) has been out some time now. There seems to be few serious bugs, but of course there is always something found in a beta. There will probably be another beta, Clem has to fill in the details on that. I have found this beta very good except for problems with Firefox so I’m convinced the final version will be a smash hit

Security flaw in the handling of SSL. This would effect Mint editions from Cassandra onwards. Please update your systems http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-612-1

The latest “Wallpaper of the week” http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12474

* News about Linux

Wine 1.0-rc1 was released on May 9  http://www.winehq.org/

Warning for brute force SSH attacks http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11518

Mark Shuttleworth talks about the Ubuntu release cycle and a possible collaboration with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146

Fedora 9 has been released http://fedoraproject.org/

Mono has reached a milestone and releases Moonlight http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/May-13-1.html

* News about IT

HP buys EDS in for 13.9 billion dollars http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9942681-7.html

The battle between Microsoft and Yahoo goes on (and on) No link needed

CBS buys Cnet http://valleywag.com/390709/cbs-buys-cnet-networks-for-18-billion

New data highlights botnets http://www.marshal.com/trace/traceitem.asp?article=637

Paypal is vulnerable to XSS http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/16/paypal_page_succumbs_to_xss/

* Hardware news

ASUS is to ship motherboards with a built in Linux so you don’t have to start the computer (fully) to do simple tasks http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/05/prweb942944.htm

* Editors comment

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