LMDE 201204

I’d like to thank all the people who tested the RC release and sent us feedback. We identified 68 bugs in this release and we’re currently down to 19 bugs left.

Amongst the bugs that were fixed, some affected the way we build our ISO images and the ability for the CD or USB stick to properly boot on computers which mount order changes during the boot sequence. Consequently, the final release of LMDE 201204 and future releases of Linux Mint should work on more configurations and systems where they previously failed to boot.

GDM3 also went under review during this RC release. Its lack of configuration and the fact that users couldn’t select their language were identified as important regressions. A discussion is ongoing within the MATE project at the moment to decide whether GDM2 should be forked by MATE or simply re-packaged within Linux Mint, and whether the codebase for it should be version 2.20 (which is feature-rich, graphically configurable and theme-able) or 2.32 (which provides a better interface). We’re also considering replacing GDM3 in LMDE and Linux Mint 13.

Linux Mint 13

Linux Mint 13 will be named “Maya” and should be available at the end of May 2012.

The codename was chosen a long time ago, after my daughter’s name who was named Maya in reference to:

• The Maya civilization
• The fictional Maya Toitovna
• Maya the Bee

In India, people might also know “Maya” as the “Illusion“.

Note: The choice for this codename has nothing to do with the Mayan Calendar or the notorious cataclysmic interpretations for 2012 (by then we’ll be looking at Linux Mint 14 and a different codename).

Linux Mint 13 should feature separate editions for MATE and Cinnamon. Whether one of these and which of these two editions will be considered the “default” wasn’t decided yet.

Upcoming partnerships

CompuLab

Since December 2011, we’ve been working on a close partnership with CompuLab.

The manufacturer produces a unique computer unit called the fitPC3, which comes pre-installed with a custom-made version of Linux Mint 12 featuring MATE 1.2 and XBMC.

Linux Mint and CompuLab are working together on improving this system and providing the unit with a great operating system. CompuLab also help Linux Mint by sharing a margin of their sales on an upcoming model called the “mintBox” (which will be a branded version of the FitPC3 with a Linux Mint logo) and by providing our development team with computer units and equipment.

We’re delighted with our relationship with CompuLab and with the units they produce. We’ll post a review of the “mintBox” and announce it as soon as it becomes available.

Yahoo

Yahoo is joining the list of search engines installed by default and participating in sharing revenue with Linux Mint, after an agreement was signed with DDC for the following regions: USA, Canada, Germany, UK, Ireland, France, Spain and Italy.

The Yahoo search engine will be the default engine in LMDE and could become the default in Linux Mint 13 (depending on ongoing talks with Google).

The partnership with DuckDuckGo will continue going forward and both search engines will be installed by default.

Other partnerships

Partnerships are also being discussed with Google and ThinkPenguin at the moment.

Linux Mint 10 reached “End Of Life”

Linux Mint 10 reached “end of life”. The release is likely to continue to work for a few years, but it isn’t officially supported anymore and won’t receive any more updates.

Linux Mint 11 will be supported until October 2012.

Linux Mint 9 and Linux Mint 12 will be supported until April 2013.

The upcoming Linux Mint 13 will be supported until April 2017.

Forums and community website:

The forums were moved to the USA to a new Cloud Server hosted by Rackspace, running Debian Lenny in 64-bit with 4GB RAM.

The community website remains in Toronto, Canada, where it’s now running on its own.

This configuration is more costly than before but this is not a problem considering the level of financial support we’re receiving from the community and the income generated through traffic in the distribution and the websites. During our tests, we found the forums would run smoothly with 8GB RAM and occasionally hang with 2GB RAM. It costs twice as much each time the amount of RAM is doubled on the server. Since we migrated the forums to their 4GB configuration 4 days ago, we only observed one period of downtime which lasted approximately 15 minutes. The rest of the time, the forums were faster and more responsive than before.

As I’m writing this post, there are 127 people connected to the forums, the server is showing a load average of 0.48, 0.42, 0.37 and using 2.6GB of its 4GB RAM.

The database in Toronto hasn’t gone down since the migration and the community website has had no downtime.

Development/test/archive servers:

We recently lost of test server in London which was also acting as our main public archive rsync server.

The public archive was moved to a second new Cloud Server hosted by Rackspace, running Debian Lenny in 64-bit with 2GB RAM.

The test server wasn’t replaced yet. We’re currently talking to Vault Networks (who already provides us with our Blog server in Miami) and Netrino (who is mirroring Linux Mint from the UK) to acquire a new server through sponsorship. If this fails, we’ll just purchase a new one.

We also started to experiment with remote development and remote release-related activities. The build and smoke-test of the LMDE 201101 32-bit ISO for instance was performed remotely in Miami. This allows us to test and modify ISO images remotely without suffering the delays associated with transferring the images back and forth between the server and our personal locations. I mentioned this briefly, but when the local area only provides a 128kbps uplink and uploading 1GB of data can take more than 2 days, this is a huge advantage for us. Most of our maintainers thankfully benefit from a decent broadband connection but this also represents a plus when we find minor bugs holding an RC release. We can then quickly and remotely modify the ISO, fix the minor bugs, and perform regression testing on it without going through another cycle with the maintainer. At the moment we’re only able to do this in 32-bit. The 64-bit server we’ll use as our test server will also be used for this kind of activities.

Our current status:

Our website is hosted in Stasbourg, France, by Nutime for a ridiculously low price. Michael Kaufmann (a.k.a “d00p”), who is also the owner of the Spotchat IRC network, supported us very early and worked in close collaboration with the team. Kuja and Michael regularly look after our hosting and perform administration tasks and monitoring for us and their involvement with Linux Mint goes far beyond hosting. Linux Mint couldn’t have taken off without their help at the time and though we moved most of our infrastructure to other dedicated locations around the World, we’re still in close relationship with them. Our IRC channels are operated for free on the Spotchat network, and we’re paying for a second dedicated server in Strasbourg which is hosting our repositories.

Vault Networks is our biggest sponsor and they’re providing us with a free dedicated server located in Miami. The server is used to host this blog, but also to seed torrents at high-speed during releases and recently to perform remote development and testing in 32-bit.

Our third biggest sponsor, SevenL, also provides us with a free dedicated server located in Toronto. The server helped us a lot when the traffic became more important and the growth of the project meant services had to be split and taken out of Germany. The forums were successfully hosted there for a long time. The server is now dedicated to hosting the community website.

An account with Rackspace was opened to allow us to quickly create cloud servers and allocate resources to them. Though this technology isn’t suited for remote development or testing, it’s extremely versatile and handy for web hosting and quick migrations. We currently pay for 2 cloud servers, one hosting our forums and the other one hosting our public archive. Due to the high cost of this service, it’s hard to say whether these servers will continue to host the public archive and forums in the future or whether we’ll be migrating these to proper dedicated servers in the future, but one thing is for sure, Rackspace is giving us a lot of flexibility here.

I would like to thank Vault Networks, SevenL and Nutime for the dedicated servers they provide to us. We rarely acknowledge their contribution outside the sponsors page on the website and their help is extremely valuable to us. Linux Mint is growing and many people have observed what is now a real infrastructure problem. We’re scaling and our servers are having a hard time dealing with the popularity of our desktop. Of course, this is extremely positive, though it does represent a real challenge. By communicating differently (hosting torrents both in Strasbourg and Miami, and linking to our HTTP mirrors directly from the blog) we managed to successfully release the latest LMDE without experiencing downtime on our website. With the recent allocation of a cloud server, we now enjoy stable forums and community website. It’s a matter of days before we address the situation with the test server and resume our activity for the upcoming KDE edition. And we’ll soon be able to remotely develop and test in 64-bit. It takes time, it’s not our area of expertise, but as you can see we’re tackling the problem slowly but surely and we’re receiving a lot of help and support from these three companies.

Update (2010-01-04): Our server in London is back and should be operational again as our test server within 48 hours.