Full Circle is a free monthly PDF magazine about Ubuntu. It’s always of very high quality and very nice to read. The last edition of Full Circle (Issue #11) talks about us and makes a comparison between Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Link: http://dl.fullcirclemagazine.org/issue11_en.pdf

Although the article is nice I would like to point out a few mistakes made by the author and add a few comments for the readers:

– The problem with codecs is not that they might be “illegal” in some countries, but that they might give reasons for people to make patents threats in some countries. So for instance, if you’re in the USA you’re not breaking the law by downloading the Main Edition, but if you happen to be a company or a magazine which is using or distributing Linux Mint Main Edition you’re taking a risk because patent owners can potentially make a case against you. So for this reason, we also provide another version of Linux Mint, called the Light Edition, which comes free of all patented technologies.

– MintDisk was great back in the times when distributions didn’t come with Read/Write access to NTFS. Now, it’s basically obsolete only for early Mint users to remember how great a tool it was and how unnecessary it has become. Same thing with mintConfig (although it’s still used by the XFCE Edition), it was great back in the times when Gnome didn’t have a control center… but it does now, so there’s no much need for MintConfig anymore. These tools were very popular in Bianca and Cassandra but they’re not even present in the current Daryna and they’re now discontinued as better alternatives have now been adopted. The 3 most popular Mint tools at the moment are mintMenu, mintUpdate and mintInstall.

– We’re very likely to support X86_64 in the upcoming Linux Mint 5 Elyssa. All mint tools were repackaged to be platform agnostic (http://packages.linuxmint.com/) so they should now work fine under 64bit and we’re planning to support both i386 and X86_64 in the future. The reason for this is not that we believe in better performance under X86_64 (we don’t) but simply to ensure that Linux Mint 5 (which is an LTS release) will stay compatible with most people’s hardware over the next three years… and guess how much RAM people will have in 3 years? Probably more than 4GB.

To conclude, I would like to thank Full Circle for mentioning us. It’s a very nice magazine and it’s great to see them talk about Mint.

So here we are, March is almost over and after a tough competition here’s what the All Stars table looks like:

1 blahblahx — 0.447 pts, 4 games. * Congrats! *
2 clem — 0.376 pts, 3 games.
3 Kronophage — 0.344 pts, 4 games.
4 GuttaMan — 0.294 pts, 3 games.
5 TheFishy — 0.213 pts, 2 games.
6 yoz-y — 0.187 pts, 1 games.
7 Zwopper — 0.113 pts, 1 games.
8 FastZ — 0.105 pts, 1 games.
9 RedJak — 0.103 pts, 1 games.
10 Catze — 0.076 pts, 1 games.

Congratulations to BlahblahX. Being at the top requires a lot of skills (time, luck, a bit of knowledge…etc)

I guess the Quizz bot will reset the stats on the 1st of April.

If you haven’t joined the Quizz yet, it’s very easy:

– In Linux Mint: open up Xchat-Gnome (or Konversation) then when it’s connected join the #pimpmymint channel.
– On other platforms: Launch your favorite IRC client, connect to the irc.spotchat.org server and join the #pimpmymint channel.

Note: Make sure to register your nickname with Nickserv so that the Quizz bot can remember you the next time you log in

I’d like to get everybody’s opinion on this:

As you can see it looks far more professional (shall I say boring?) than the theme we’re currently using. It’s all grey and squary looking but it has two huge advantages:

• It looks pro.
• A lot of space is gained on the screen (the widgets take much less and that leaves more space for content). In particular the difference is  impressive in mintMenu and in Firefox.

Tell us what you think. There’s no doubt we’ll include this as a choice in Elyssa but I’d like to know what people think about this becoming the default theme.

Clem