Firefox 2.0.0.10 was added to Daryna Upstream and should be available via mintUpdate.

Medibuntu is also currently working on Skype 2.0 Beta so this should come via mintUpdate soon enough as well.

We haven’t communicated much lately about our plans and what we were working on at the moment.

Daryna was a very sucessful release and the Linux Mint community is growing rapidly so we’ve been busy strenghening the software portals and other community websites. The forums should be themed in the days to come. Carlos Porto has been working on a green theme which looks similar to the main website.

We’re also writing a user guide. It’s currently 75 pages long with a lot of screenshots and will come as a PDF book. This guide will make it easy for people who are not familiar with Linux to install and configure the system on their computer. It will also cover the specifics of Linux Mint and in particular the various things you can achieve using the mint tools which come with your desktop. No matter how experienced you are with Linux there will be a few things you’ll learn from this guide (for instance, do you know how to make mintMenu show applications comments?) and we promise to also keep everything very simple and clearly explained for everybody.

The Debian Edition is nearly ready. It’s fast, it’s live and we’re 80% happy with the result so far. We can already look at it and say “Yes, Debian would be a great base for us to use and we could do without Ubuntu”. The real question is how this system will pass the test of time and the continuous flow of updates. We’re thinking APT pinning should do the trick but time will tell. So far we’ve been using a Debian Testing base with the Debian Multimedia repositories. We’re also using Mepis 7.0 repositories although it’s only to get our hands on Thunderbird without having to maintain it ourselves (we would if we were to maintain this edition but this is only an experiment so we just need to know that we could, and we know we can.. so it’s no big deal). The Mepis 7.0 repository is under_pinned so it only gets packages which are not in Debian… namely.. thunderbird. A few things remain to be done:

– The boot splash and grub menus are text-based. We might not spend time on this. Again, this is an experiment and we don’t “need” to make it graphical at this stage.
– There is no installer and we don’t plan on writing one at this stage. Again… we would write an installer if we were to move to Debian but is it worth it for this experiment? We tried to port Ubiquity and it didn’t work very well. We couldn’t find the source for the Mepis installer.. we tried Acronyx and had some issues with it and so we’re now looking at the Ruby installer used and developed by DreamLinux. We’ll either use that one or none at all.

We haven’t started the Fedora based Edition yet although I personally can’t wait to work on this myself.

Some community editions are coming. We’re testing internal BETAs of a miniCD Edition and a Fluxbox Edition.

2 new mint tools should be developped for Linux Mint 5.0:

– A tool to easily backup your home directory into a single file, with md5 checksum verification and easy restore capabilities.

– A tool similar to “Giver” to easily transfer files and folders from one computer to another on the same network.

We’re also looking at a few statistics:

– The money collected by the project in October was twice the amount collected the month before.
– According to Distrowatch HTTP stats we’re the 5th most used GNU/Linux distribution behind Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE and PCLinuxOS. Apparently if the percentage of users visiting distrowatch is similar between Mint and Fedora then we can assume Linux Mint has more users than Fedora. This is mind-boggling of course and it may not be true (it’s very hard to check).
– Our main mirror, lintelligence.de reported 2 million downloads for Linux Mint 3.0 Cassandra. We have no idea about the total number of downloads or the size of the user base which was assumed to be around 200,000 users. To be honest it looks pointless to make estimations about this as we really don’t have a clue. All we know is that we’re relatively doing very well, we’re probably among the top 10 operating systems used in the World and we’re definitely growing very fast.

Finally, additions were made to the software portal and you can now get Frostwire, Second Life, Wine Doors, MS Fonts and a few others new applications for Daryna.

Now.. you’re probably wondering what this is about? 🙂

As Linux Mint is becoming stable and as we’re coming to a point where we have achieved our main goals on the desktop we’re slowing down the release frequency (no Linux Mint 4.1 is planned for instance) and we’re spending more time on other editions. Coming up in the next few months we have 5 community-driven projects:

– KDE/mini KDE Edition
– XFCE Edition
– E17 Edition
– Fluxbox Edition
– miniCD Edition

So far, only two editions are officially maintained (Main and Light) and that freed our hands to invest a bit of time in R&D. So here we are now and here is what we’ll be looking at in the near future:

– Debian Edition
– Fedora Edition
– 64bit Main Edition

We started with the Debian Edition. The first reason was to show that the technology we develop is distinct from the upstream components it sits on top of and that, the same way we can change Evolution to Thunderbird, we can change Ubuntu to Debian or to Fedora and still make a great desktop. The second reason is simply that we did try most alternative components and that our selection was driven and justified by the tests we made.. so we could, for instance, appreciate the pros and cons of including Amarok instead of Rhythmbox and decide which solution was the most appropriate. This is true to a certain extent, and although we decided on Ubuntu to be our base, this decision was made without experimenting other bases. We do not plan to make our own base and do not plan to change our base to Debian or Fedora, but experimenting with these new bases will give us a better appreciation of the pros and cons related to using Ubuntu and eventually a better idea of what can be achieved in the long term or in case Ubuntu goes towards a direction we do not want to follow. And finally, the third reason was simply because we’re nerds and when we see the two brilliant distributions that Debian and Fedora are… we just can’t help ourselves to start building on top of them 🙂

So where are we at the moment with the Debian based edition?

– We have a liveCD.
– It’s based on Debian Testing
– It runs mintUpdate, mintDesktop and mintMenu
– We’re currently adding an installer to it… Ubiquity, Anaconda.. something else.. we’re having fun and experimenting 🙂

When we’re finished with this we don’t want people to use that as their main OS, but we’d like to get feedback and see how the desktop develops after a few months and how it follows the constant flow of updates brought by Debian.

Already we can tell you that much: It’s missing a lot of Ubuntu innovations (well you would have guessed that…) but oh my God … it’s so much faster!

So here we go, a little edition just to make a point, to us and to others, 100% R&D for the nerdiest of our beloved users 😉

Note: And this might come out faster than you think…

Clem