The work has started on Linux Mint 5 Elyssa and if you’ve been reading the forums you probably noticed three things already:

1. Apart for MintUpdate we’re focusing on improving existing tools rather than on developing new ones. New versions of mintDesktop, mintUpdate and mintMenu were already released in Romeo and we’re planning improvements on mintInstall, mintAssistant and mintUpload too. You can participate in testing these tools by adding the Romeo repository to your sources.list and by giving us feedback on the forums.

2. We’re trying to encourage people to translate our tools. All new Mint tools are internationalized and with each of their releases we also provide a translation thread on the forums which makes it easy for anyone to translate the tool into their own language. Whether you’re experienced with Linux Mint or not, if you happen to speak another language than English, don’t hesitate to participate in the translation effort. When Mint 5 is out it could very well be localized in your language.. depending on whether people speaking your language translated the tools or not, so don’t depend on them, translating is easy and doesn’t take much time.

3. Documentation has been lacking in Linux Mint, especially compared to other distributions. To address this and to decribe the specific tools and how they work we’ve produced a user guide. Make sure to read it and don’t hesitate to report feedback and tell us what you think. Also, if you have the time to translate it into another language don’t hesitate to do so.

The focus on Linux Mint 5 will be put into strenghening the distribution, improving documentation, processes, tools, translations… so the work we’re doing at the moment is extremely important. We’ll keep our mad and innovative ideas for Linux Mint 6 and focus on stability and consistency to produce a very robust and long-lasting LTS release.

Links:

User Guide 4.1 release:
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=9053

MintUpdate 2.0 release:
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=8937

MintBackup 1.1 release:
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=8698

MintDesktop 2.0 release:
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=8675

MintMenu 3.1 release:
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=8674

After some investigation it looks like a simple call to apt.Cache() from the python apt module is responsible for the high memory usage of mintUpdate. Without this call mintUpdate uses 4.6MB of RAM. As soon as the module is called the memory usage grows to 47MB. The python interpreter doesn’t free up memory and an additional 47MB of RAM is reserved every time mintUpdate refreshes (every 5 minutes by default).

Of course mintUpdate relies on the apt module to get the list of available packages so we’ll need to find some decent solution to replace this call. Either we’ll manage to force python in freeing the memory used by the module or we’ll rely on APT directly without using the module.

Anyway, the next release of mintUpdate should use around 5MB of RAM and this shouldn’t grow over time.

Note: This comes as excellent news as I was personally worried that we would have to rewrite mintUpdate from scratch using another language. The java-gnome bindings lacked popularity and were not even packaged for Debian. Perl kind of scared me a bit when it came to OO-threaded development and I wasn’t particularly amused at the thought of using C++ (although I must say I was quite impressed with how Eclipse handles C++ and with the quality of the Gtkmm API). Well anyway, more on this later.. and hopefully we’ll stay with Python, at least for already existing Mint apps.

Edit: Apparently python won’t let us force any garbage collection. However the apt module can be replaced entirely by calls to “sudo apt-get -s upgrade | grep ^Inst” and “sudo apt-get -s dist-upgrade | grep ^Inst”. We’ll even save calculating dependencies ourselves…

Clem

BETA 044 should be released this week.

BETA 044 is out and available for download 🙂