The Linux Mint web server was down for periods of time today and yesterday. I would like to apologize for this. The first problem occured after a library update broke the bindings used by Apache and we had to recompile the HTTP server. I personally blame Gentoo for this although Michael K. (the server admin) disagrees with me on this one. The second problem occured after I decided to add news on the start page. With every visit on this page trigerring a PHP generated RSS request and consequently database connections the server went down pretty fast. We found 33GB of logs had been generated overnight… Michael reminded me I hadn’t been very smart on this one and the news on the start page are now generated by a separated script.

It can be quite worrying for Mint users when linuxmint.com goes down as not only do the website, the forums, the software portal and the wiki go down, but that also breaks the start page, the repositories and mintUpdate from working correctly. Starting with Elyssa the repositories and mintUpdate will migrate to the file server. A company website will also be available and distinct from linuxmint.com so users have a place to go and to find news in case downtimes happen again.

Sorry for the downtime and let’s hope it won’t happen again anytime soon.

In Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna the mint tools were only in English. We’ve worked on this and internationalized these tools. The community then translated them and we’re now in a position to say that Linux Mint 5 Elyssa will fully support the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, “Brazilian” (as in pt_BR), Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

10 other languages (Bulgarian, Danish, Greek, Irish (gaelic), Norwegian “no”, Norwegian “nb”, Dutch, Portuguese (pt_PT), Slovak and Serbian) are also partially supported. For these languages some of the tools were not translated yet.

Other languages are also supported by the system (as in previous versions of Linux Mint) but with the mint tools in English.

If your language is not fully supported don’t hesitate to translate the tools yourself. It’s easy and you can do this directly from the Linux Mint forums: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=43

Our most talented artist, Carlos Porto, hit again! This time he redesigned the Linux Mint Start Page to include the 3 latest stories from the Linux Mint blog. Not only does the result look great but we’re hoping it will bring news from the team to Linux Mint users who would not necessarily know about the blog.

Note: Carlos also designed the Mint logo, the website, the forum theme and the software portal.