Linux Mint 5 Elyssa will come with new themes. Here are two of the themes which will be included: WildMint and Lightning.

There are no plans to change the default theme so far so it should look exactly like in Daryna (It was renamed LM4 in the theme manager). If you’re into artwork you probably noticed these two themes are using Aurora (the engine used in the latest Fedora release). We’ll also have a bit of Murrine and a few extra engines available from the customization tab.

According to the Mint Connection blog, 11% of Mint users run the KDE Community Edition.

If you’re a KDE fan you probably feel left out as there certainly isn’t 11% of our news coverage or focus in general covering your favorite edition.

Also, considering KDE is (arguably but generally admitted) the most popular Linux desktop, 11% seems quite low.

If you’ve been running Linux Mint KDE CE you know this has nothing to do with its quality. Jamie “Boo” Birse is doing a marvelous job and although feedback is excellent when it comes to this edition it’s definitely not attracting users out of the Linux Mint community.

So what’s wrong with KDE CE? Well.. to make a long story short: it’s a CE and it should be more than that.

KDE fans probably prefer to run a distribution which proved a strong focus and dedication to KDE. We’re probably seen as a Gnome distribution. The KDE CE isn’t released as frequently or as fast as the Main edition. The blog doesn’t cover it very much. The user guide only covers the Main Edition. Information in the wiki is more or less targeted at the Main Edition… etc etc..

But one man decided to stand up and put a stop of this.. ok maybe I’m overdoing this a little…. Anyway, one man decided to invest himself into changing that. That man is Jaxon aka Akshunj. After talking to Boo we decided to welcome him in the team and see where to go from there.

The first thing we did was to give both Boo and Akshunj access to this blog as authors so that they could keep people updated as to how the KDE CE is doing. Get ready for more news on KDE CE as Boo and Ashkunj will be here to tell you what happens.

The second thing will be a reorganization of the Wiki. Basically as a KDE user you should be able to access some new “KDE part of the Wiki” directly from the main page and browse articles related to KDE-only.

The third thing will be a User Guide for the KDE CE. Now, for this, we rely on the Community. Neither Boo nor I have the time to guarantee this will be done. Ashkunj shall organize this work and see if people are interested in doing this from the forums.

The fourth thing is to develop QT programming in three areas: 1. KDE frontends for Mint tools, 2. KDE equivalents for eventual Gnome-specific mint tools, 3. QT development for new tools for which there is no need under Gnome. Again, the team is not planning to achieve this itself so we’ll rely on the community for this.

Now KDE CE will remain a CE but if you followed the recent development related to Firefox and the money generated by Mint you probably know we’re in the process of creating a company and generating more income. This directly translates into more development time. With Mint 5 being a long term support release we have the opportunity to make Mint KDE competitive among other KDE distros. The edition itself is already very good, all we need is to give it more focus and this is what we want to do.

As for the stable release of Daryna KDE CE, the ISO was uploaded by Boo a few days ago and is being tested at the moment by Exploder and myself. If you’re a Mint KDE fan you’re going to enjoy what’s coming up.

Of course we’re not big enough yet to guarantee the same attention to KDE as we give to the Main Edition, so don’t expect the same level of support/focus, but if we could start by making this CE a real alternative for KDE users, one which is actively maintained, covered, developped and documented then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t get more attention.  You should definitely see improvements in the coming weeks and if this is not the case don’t hesitate to remind us about this blog post 🙂

Clem.

If you’ve upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.12 you probably noticed some changes in the results brought by searches from the top-right corner Google search plugin.

Basically:

– The result page shows a Linux Mint logo instead of a Google one.
– The layout of the page is a bit different (ads are on top instead of being on the right).
– There is no access to advanced Google features (account, cached links, similar pages..etc).

The reason it is different is because instead of using the default plugin we now distribute our own and take advantage of a Google Custom Search Engine. The reason it it is different from the default Google search is because Google doesn’t offer the same features to Custom search engines as it does when searching directly from google.com. The reason we changed from default google to a custom engine is because it generates a lot of revenue and this single plugin could potentially make Linux Mint into a company which actually hires full-time employees.

The highest single source of revenue for Linux Mint isn’t the donations, it isn’t ads on the website, it is the default start page in Firefox. This simple search plugin is estimated to generated from 2 to 40 times more money than the start page itself. If this proves to be the case we’ll be in a position to grow and to achieve things we never dreamed off before. At the moment Linux Mint is maintained by me on a 2.5 hours / day basis with the help of a team of volunteers who are paid nothing. The income is similar to a single small salary. With this plugin, and although you may not enjoy the same level of comfort as when searching with the default Google layout, you contribute to making Linux Mint grow and we should soon see the day where our distribution gets maintained by a team of people working full-time on it.

For most distributions the business model is to sell associated products (Powerpack, Enterprise Desktops, Server offers) or services (Professional Support..etc). Although this allows the distributions to hire full staff employees it also takes a lot of resources and most employees end up working on these associated services/products instead of focusing on the distribution itself. If we find a way to finance ourselves by clever little changes like this one we can grow into a medium sized company with full time employees working ONLY on the distribution itself. As you can see this is a very interesting perspective.

For people used to using Google Images we included a second search engine so that they could achieve the same things as before. For people used to cached links and used to access their google account there is a workaround and it is possible to revert to the default Firefox plugin. Of course this is a pity and we don’t encourage you to do that (since this is the best way you can contribute to Mint and it costs you nothing) but it’s your desktop, not ours, and we always believed you should have a choice. So if you really want to revert back to the default plugin, follow the steps below:

Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3682
Install the addon and restart Firefox
Go to google http://www.google.com
Right click in google search bar and select “add to search bar”
Left-click arrow at left side of firefox search combo
Select “manage search engine”
You should find google at the bottom of the list
Move it to the top

By doing so your search results will use the original Google layout again (cached links, etc..) but hey everytime you make a search you could have made us grow at the same time.

It’s good to have a choice and it’s good to know why you’re going one direction or another. I’m sorry we rolled out this as an update without informing people. Hopefully this blog post will make things clearer and if you’ve been surprised by this new plugin you’ll now be able to understand how and why you want to keep it or change it back to the original plugin.

I’ll talk about Mint, as a Republic of Ireland registered company, in a separate blog post.

Clem.