We’ve changed a few things on the IRC and we hope you’ll like it.

The Linux Mint IRC channel isn’t dedicated to provide community support anymore. The forums do that much better. Of course users are still welcome to ask questions but we would like the channel to become an active place where users can chill out, have fun, meet other users and talk about just anything they want. #linuxmint is becoming a social thing, a community chat room.

Now, the only thing you can’t do in #linuxmint is to offense others (bad language, offensive comments/topics…etc). Linux Mint is an operating system and anybody can launch XChat-Gnome or Konversation and be directly connected to the chat room. We want to keep the place safe and nice. Some users are under 18 and others don’t necessarily want to see rude talks. So for people who don’t want to have to watch their language we made #pimpmymint. In this channel you won’t have to excuse your French, you can swear as much as you like and we know you do (especially while playing the Quizz).

Xchat-Gnome and Konversation connect directly to #linuxmint where people can have nice and polite talks.

#pimpmymint is also available for people who want to play the Quizz or who don’t want to have to watch their language.

Here are a few commands for people who are new to the IRC:

/nick john (changes your name to john)
/nick john_away (changes your name to john_away, people usually do that to show they’re not here but stay connected so they can see what happened when they come back)
/join #pimpmymint (joins the channel #pimpmymint)
hello (writes “hello” in the chatroom)

And here are a few commands if you play the Quizz (on #pimpmymint, 18+ please):

!ask (starts the quizz)
!revolt (skip to next question)
!rank (show the score of the current game)
!allstars (show the all star table = people who won games)
mona lisa (submits “mona lisa” as an answer)

You can also register your name with the IRC server so your nickname is then owned by you:

/msg nickserv register john 12345titi (registers the nikname John with the password “12345titi”)
/msg nickserv identify john 12345titi (identifies as John using the password “12345titi”)

Questions and comments are welcome.
By the way, don’t hesitate to leave your IRC client run in the background and stay connected even if there’s no one or no activity. The chat room comes to life when 2 people start chatting and sometimes it can be quite interesting. You can set your IRC client to blink when things happen so it stays in the system tray until the chat room comes to life .

Have fun and see you on the IRC!

Clem

In Linux Mint 5 Elyssa mintInstall will gain support for APT and the GetDeb portal. MintMenu will also support quick uninstallation of applications directly from the Gnome menu. As Linux Mint 5 will be based on an LTS Ubuntu release focus is on consolidating what’s already working and we’re being quite conservative in terms of new innovations. However, plans are starting to emerge for Linux Mint 6, which should come in about 7 or 8 months. In particular, mintInstall should gain the following features:

– CNR support
– simplification of the .mint protocol (in particular, when a .mint only refers to one .deb)
– Graphical interface for browsing the catalogue directly from the desktop, and for voting, commenting and basically doing what’s already possible online at linuxmint.com/software
– Support for uninstalling applications
– Support for “requesting” new applications

We’ll talk about this again and you’ll probably hear more and more about this after Linux Mint 5 was released. As for Linux Mint 5 itself, mintInstall is almost ready for it and at this stage all it’s missing is an eventual QT frontend to replace the GTK one under KDE.

Ideas and comments are welcome 🙂

One of the big components of the Mint desktop is Firefox. In the upcoming Linux Mint 5 Elyssa, Firefox 3 will be installed by default. Of course, this new version of the popular browser will bring many new features and a better looking interface, but did you know it was using far less memory than the current version?

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/