{"id":2764,"date":"2015-01-16T06:48:26","date_gmt":"2015-01-16T11:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=2764"},"modified":"2015-09-08T18:39:56","modified_gmt":"2015-09-08T17:39:56","slug":"monthly-news-january-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=2764","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – January 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/strong>We wish you all a very Happy New Year 2015. This year is only just started and unfortunately terrible things happened already. Our job isn’t to comment World news though but to focus on what we have all in common, a very constructive and positive passion for computing and for Linux in particular. I hope we’ll continue to make people happy this year and by doing so I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun and happiness as well.<\/p>\n

To start the new year we shared exciting news about the new MintBox Mini<\/a>. I’d like to thank our friends at CompuLab, it’s always a pleasure to be working with them.<\/p>\n

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The latest MintBox, smaller than ever<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In November last year, probably as a consequence of the Linux Mint 17.1 release, the traffic doubled on our repositories and intensified in December to a point where our server could no longer serve enough concurrent connections. During a week or so this resulted in very slow response times, download speeds or even in timeouts and errors in various APT applications (apt-get, the Software Manager, the Update Manager, Synaptic etc..). We would like to apologize for this. Although it’s good news to see more people use Linux Mint, issues which affect everybody like this are our worst nightmare. A cluster was put in place and two servers now handle requests for the main repositories. We’re happy to report that they’ve been running smoothly for a few weeks now. Traffic also increased on other servers and the next thing to break was this very blog. You might have seen the temporary announcement while it was being moved to a faster server (or an error page while it was down). Altogether we have close to 10 dedicated servers in various places all around the World but some of them were acquired at a time when our audience was just a 10th of its size. We need to continue to scale and get to a position where traffic can double again without breaking anything. It’s an easy yet important task.<\/p>\n

LMDE 2 “Betsy” received a lot of updates this week and its “Mint” packages are now almost on par with Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca. The next step is to adapt the Debian Jessie base and port all the changes and fixes already applied for Linux Mint 17.x on top of Trusty. This should take a week or two and we might be in a position to open up a BETA some time in February and to start welcoming feedback from people interested in helping us test this new distribution. Similar to Linux Mint 17.x, LMDE 2 “Betsy” will be using the traditional sysvinit. The move to systemd could happen with Linux Mint 18 and LMDE 3, giving this new technology and the Linux ecosystem 2 years (or more) to mature and to iron out integration and compatibility issues. Cinnamon in particular is built without systemd support by default and the development team is planning to change this in version 2.6 to give the DE the ability to switch at runtime between systemd and consolekit\/upower without the need to recompile anything.<\/p>\n

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Pre-ALPHA “Betsy” running Cinnamon 2.4, sysvinit and GTK 3.14<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

January is an exciting month for us. Everything we implemented has been delivered and a new development cycle is starting. After a quick maintenance release on selected projects (muffin, cinnamon, cinnamon-desktop, nemo) we’re ready to switch our Cinnamon labels to 2.5.x, to merge pull requests, to talk about big ideas and to decide what we want to achieve in the next 6 months. Many great ideas are yet to be implemented, thanks to your feedback we’ve a huge backlog of items we want to focus on. Developers are free to choose what they want to work on but also conscious of the needs of our distribution and what is most important to you. Personally I want to continue to improve the system layer and the Mint tools as these benefit all editions, but I’m also planning on improving performance and snappiness in Cinnamon. Sticking to LTS boosted our development and it showed us how quick we were at developing new features. The adoption of tools such as Github made it really easy for new developers to join us and for people outside the team to contribute new designs and new implementations. I can’t wait to tackle some of the items on our Roadmap and it’s very exciting not to be able to predict what great improvements will land in 17.2, where they will come from, who will implement them and what aspects of the operating system they’ll improve.<\/p>\n

Last month we received $14,000 in donations. 509 people donated to us. The amount of support we’re getting from you has always been exceptional, but what happened in December was unprecedented. We’ve never received so much and from so many different people before. I don’t know what to say only that I’m delighted to see so many people happy with what we’re doing and wanting us to continue. I already feel privileged to be able to work on something I love and to feel that community around me. I really enjoy working with the Mint developers as well and I’m excited because after we worked together for 6 months, like me they were able to enjoy seeing it all released in 17.1, like me they were able to read your feedback and your reactions and now they’ll get what is somewhat like a Christmas bonus after a fantastic year, as their budget includes a portion of the donations. It’s great to be able to share and create with great people, and it’s all thanks to you who support us, who promote us, who support each others, who feed us with ideas and information on how to make it better and better. So this is a big thank you to all of you and here’s to another great year. Let’s see what we can do \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gold Sponsors:
\n\"Linux<\/a>
\nSilver Sponsors:
\n\"ThinkPenguin.com\"<\/a>
\nBronze Sponsors:
\n\"Vault<\/a>
\n\"AYKsolutions<\/a>
\n\"7L<\/a>
\n\"BayLibre\"<\/a>
\n\"compute.ch<\/a>
\n\"David<\/a>
\n\"Michael<\/a>
\n\"Milton<\/a>
\n\"Sysnova<\/a><\/td>\n		Community Sponsors:<\/p>\n