The Linux Mint Blog

A lot of people regularly take packages upgrades and in most cases they have no idea why. They think their system will be more up to date and more secure… they’re right, but they what they don’t realize is that every single package upgrade can potentially introduce a bug!

With an Ubuntu release every six months and one, two or three Mint releases in the meantime, do you really need security updates? Isn’t your system recent enough?

Releases are well tested, security updates and newer packages are not. Bear in mind that any kernel upgrade can potentially break your sound system, your wifi connectivity or support for any device on your computer, an Xorg update can bring you to a black screen and put your proprietary drivers on their knees…

So don’t upgrade unless you know why, and if you want to upgrade a package, then only upgrade the package, not the entire system.

In Celena we’re bringing two new things:

– mintAssistant will help you disable kernel upgrades.

– APT will be tweaked so you don’t get notified when Gutsy comes out.

You probably remember that “Upgrade to Feisty” message which popped up in Bianca… 🙂

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2007/08/linux_mint_dont_press_the_upgr.html

Rick Jelliffe is right, don’t press the upgrade button!

There’s a great way to get your TV listings in Gnome. It’s called onTV and you can install it by typing this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install ontv

Once installed, right click on your panel and add the OnTV applet. Answer a few questions and you’re ready to go.

OnTV shows what’s “on TV” at the moment and what’s coming up right afterwoods:

You can also search the listings for up to two weeks and get reminded before they come up.

Wicd (pronounced “Wicked”) is an alternative to the network-manager applet. Although its integration with Gnome is not as nice it seems to work better with WIFI encrypted networks. If you’re having problems with network-manager and you can’t connect to your network you should definitely give Wicd a try.

To install it, remove network manager:

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

Then download and install (by double clicking on it) this deb package: http://wicd.longren.org/pool/feisty/extras/wicd_1.3.1-all.deb

Then open the Control Center from mintMenu and search for “sessions”. In there add a “Wicd” entry and type “/opt/wicd/tray.py”. (You can also remove network-manager from there).

Then reboot…

Upon restart you should see this little icon in your panel:

Click on it to access Wicd:

It’s too early to tell whether Wicd will replace Network-Manager in future releases of Linux Mint. Both projects have improvements to make, whether it’s to do with networking or Gnome integration. The presence of two competing projects in that area is a very good thing though and we should expect wireless connectivity to improve greatly in the months to come.