A quick update on my progress of KDE Elyssa.

So far I have cleaned up KDE Daryna in an effort to reduce it to a CD size with the main applications like Open Office still installed, but this does not look possible. I posted about suggestions for new or different applications and got some good and helpful responses, but keep them coming if there are any more. I have spent a lot of time looking at a new theme for KDE Elyssa, a brighter one for sure. There has also been lots of great wallpapers posted in the forums lately so go have a look.

The next step is to do some alpha builds using my cut down Daryna and the Ubuntu 8.04 beta and then the RC. These alpha builds help find bugs/problems before the full Ubuntu 8.04 is released. I will also start building up my cut down Daryna with some of the old applications and some of the new ones suggested too.

Cheers Boo

Thanks to all the people who made donations, thanks to our sponsors who help us financially on a monthly basis and thanks to the income generated through ads we’re now in a much more comfortable position than we were a year ago and as our community and our needs have grown it was time we invested in a second server. So we went ahead with Michael from lintelligence.de (which you probably know as “d00p”) and bought a brand new machine which we’re now using for file hosting.

The server we were using so far is now fully dedicated to web hosting and supports our website, our forums, and all the services under www.linuxmint.com.

On the new server we’ve migrated the upload service used by the maintainers to upload the ISOs, the rsync service which lets our mirrors synchronize with our releases and importantly enough, we’ve also migrated our repositories. Of course, in order not to break anything the Daryna (and previous release) repositories are still at the same place, but starting with Elyssa we’ll be using http://packages.linuxmint.com instead.

The main advantage that this new server brings to us is that the web server (forums, website..etc) is consequently faster since it doesn’t have to deal with the mirrors, the downloads/uploads of ISOs, and soon enough the repositories anymore. It’s now fully dedicated to only one thing: Web hosting. The same thing goes for the second server as well, since it doesn’t have to deal with community web services, the file serving and the repositories will also be faster.

The other advantage of doing this is that in case of downtime only some of the services are down. So if the repositories are down and mintUpdate can’t do its job, we can still access the forums and the website, and vice-versa.

I’d like to thank the community for financially supporting us. Whether it’s through ads, sponsors or donations, Linux Mint is a project which funds come 100% from its community. This lets us focus on the distribution itself without spending time on developping associated salable products or services (Powerpacks, support..etc). It also lets us invest now and then like we did now with this new server and this is very positive.

The future will tell if this income coming from the community will be enough for Mint to grow into a full limited company and to start hiring. As we’re setting up a business here in Ireland new challenges will arise (12% corporation taxe, 20% VAT, 40% income tax, administrative paperwork..etc) but we’re also confident that the release of Elyssa will push Linux Mint to even higher grounds, increase the size of its community and hopefully let us be the 100% community funded project we’ve been so far.

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.