The Linux Mint Blog

The PC market is in an interesting situation at the moment. Almost all the computers that are sold today come with 64 bit processors, which obviously support the AMD64 architecture but also i386. Owners of these computers are faced with a choice: running a 64bit operating system (AMD64) or a 32bit one (i386). The reality is that most of the software available at present is available for i386 and not always for AMD64. The older architecture is also more stable and is still seen as a reference by editors and developers. Last but not least, very few applications actually take advantage of the improvements of the new architecture so running an AMD64 operating system may actually not be faster than running an i386 one, and in some cases it could even be slower…

… so here is a new architecture which is ready, which a lot of people have the hardware for, but still… the software world doesn’t seem to be ready for it. I386 is still the predominant reference in the market and people will need a strong reason to change. That strong reason is the amount of RAM i386 can support: 4GB RAM. A budget computer (low to middle-range) now comes with 2GB of RAM and the upper market has already reached 4GB. No matter the performances, many users won’t run an operating system which doesn’t recognize all their memory. So we need to get ready and the same way we’ll have to support i386 after AMD64 becomes the reference architecture, we have to support AMD64 now even though it’s not fully on par with i386 yet.

I started working on the x64 Edition and I’m planning to make it as similar as the Main Edition as possible. Eventually I’d like to replicate all changes made to Main to x64 so that I can maintain both editions and release them at the same time. I’ve asked Chris (known as “lakehousetech” on the forums) to perform a benchmark and he compared the performance of Elyssa R1, Hardy i386 and Hardy AMD64. His results are available here:

http://upload.linuxmint.com/blog/p236/elyssa_hardy_x64_benchmark.ods

As you can see, none of the three systems clearly outperformed the two others. So based on this benchmark performance wouldn’t be a reason for you to switch to the upcoming x64 Edition, not yet anyway. A real objective reason to make the switch  would be if you already had more than 4GB RAM. Other than that we’d recommend you stick to what we do best and what receives most of our attention: The Main Edition.

This is also the reason why we’re considering this an edition rather than declining Main into two architectures. Every 6 months and with each release we’ll of course reconsider our position and re-assess the readiness of this architecture until it comes to par with i386 and we give it the same exposure as our main product.

x64 will start as a separate edition, one for enthusiasts and high spec computers. We’ll put all our efforts into it as it will eventually become our main product but for now we still consider it an alternative edition.

Comments and questions are welcome (I’m sure we’ll get a lot on this topic :)).

Note: It’s hard to say when this edition will be ready. The goal for Mint 5 was to start this edition and have an x64 version of Elyssa. We’re still aiming for this and this is receiving as much attention as ongoing development for Mint 6 (new mintUpdate, Application Manager (new mintInstall frontend), OEM support, Upgrade Manager). Once this edition is in place we’ll want to work on both architectures at the same time so there won’t be any delay between their respective releases.

Our server was hacked and code was injected into it to make connections on our behalf to pinoc.org and download a trojan called JS/Tenia.d

For more information about this trojan:  http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=146254

If you visited linuxmint.com in the last two days we recommend you scan your computer to make sure this trojan isn’t present. As this attack exploited vulnerabilities within our PHP code we took the opportunity to clean it all and secure every single page against injections in the future.  Linuxmint.com is now clean and secure but we experienced almost 20 hours of downtime and we lost almost 2 days of work into fixing this.

I  personally received a lot of emails from the community, warning us about the problem. I haven’t had time to reply but I would like to thank the people who came forward. If you observe a problem in the future please do not hesitate to report it.

I’d also like to thank Michael (d00p) and Mats (husse) for the help they gave me on this. Husse, as always, catches my attention on what matters and if it wasn’t for d00p, our domain would still be  down right now. I also apologize for the downtime and for the inconvenience. Comments and questions are welcome.

* News about Mint

mintUpdate 3 released!

Even 3.2 has been released. Quite a few new features, including better proxy  support.

Distrowatch donates $400 to Linux Mint

Work is going on on the final versions (hopefully) of  the KDE and XFCE editions. There are only a few problems left to solve, but they seem reluctant to disappear

* News about Linux

IBM, Canonical/Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat to Deliver Microsoft-Free Desktops Worldwide An alliance has formed

IBM Contributes Key Open-Source Code for Linux Supercomputers

KDE 4 update  Any similarity in that topic with slashdot is probably no coincidence

Ubuntu goes enterprise

VMware joins Linux Foundation

Google more and more involved in Linux

Reiser4 Update

* News about IT

German hackers poke hole in great firewall of China

Hackers steal 40 million credit card numbers

‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes

Vista’s Security Rendered Completely Useless by New Exploit

* Hardware news

AMD ditches Close-To-Metal, focuses on DX11 and OpenCL

* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

Home page

Blog  The planet  Wiki   Forum

* Editors comment

As always - if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me - you can post a comment here

Enjoy life

Husse

Linux Mint just received a donation of $400. This is the single biggest donation the project received since it was started in 2006. The donation came from Distrowatch in association with LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com.

Distrowatch is known to donate a part of its income to upstream projects and distributions on a monthly basis. This single donation of $400 makes it the second biggest Linux Mint donor.  By the past Distrowatch donated a total of $18,183 to the following projects:

* 2004: GnuCash ($250), Quanta Plus ($200), PCLinuxOS ($300), The GIMP ($300), Vidalinux ($200), Fluxbox ($200), K3b ($350), Arch Linux ($300), Kile KDE LaTeX Editor ($100) and UNICEF - Tsunami Relief Operation ($340)
* 2005: Vim ($250), AbiWord ($220), BitTorrent ($300), NdisWrapper ($250), Audacity ($250), Debian GNU/Linux ($420), GNOME ($425), Enlightenment ($250), MPlayer ($400), Amarok ($300), KANOTIX ($250) and Cacti ($375)
* 2006: Gambas ($250), Krusader ($250), FreeBSD Foundation ($450), GParted ($360), Doxygen ($260), LilyPond ($250), Lua ($250), Gentoo Linux ($500), Blender ($500), Puppy Linux ($350), Inkscape ($350), Cape Linux Users Group ($130), Mandriva Linux ($405, a Powerpack competition), Digikam ($408) and SabayonLinux ($450)
* 2007: GQview ($250), Kaffeine ($250), sidux ($350), CentOS ($400), LyX ($350), VectorLinux ($350), KTorrent ($400), FreeNAS ($350), lighttpd ($400), Damn Small Linux ($350), NimbleX ($450), MEPIS Linux ($300), Zenwalk Linux ($300)
* 2008: VLC ($350), Frugalware Linux ($340), cURL ($300), GSPCA (Linux webcam support) ($400), FileZilla ($400), MythDora ($500)

As you can see Distrowatch isn’t only one of the most popular websites about Linux, it’s also one of the biggest financial supporter of small distributions and upstream projects.  On behalf of the Linux Mint distribution I would like to thank Distrowatch, and in particular Ladislav Bodnar, for this donation and for all they’ve done for our project. Linux Mint is a successful distribution but it wouldn’t have been as popular if it wasn’t for websites like Distrowatch which allowed users to know about it in the first place. Today, we’re receiving the biggest donation since we started Mint. I feel really grateful. Thank you Distrowatch, Ladislav, and also thanks to LinuxCD.org and OSDisc.com for being part of this.

Many thanks for supporting us,

Clem.

Introduction

We made a very controversial decision when we released Linux Mint 3.1 Celena. We decided to remove the Ubuntu update manager and a lot of people criticized us for doing that. As it turns out it was one of the best decisions we ever made (arguably and according to us.. of course). MintUpdate came right in time for the release of Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna and since then it regularly got updated to become one of the best update managers.

Today we’re going to rise the bar even higher with the release of mintUpdate 3 and we’ll be introducing yet another innovative idea: The ability to view the history of applied updates. The reason why mintUpdate was developed in the first place was to avoid uneducated updates but even with our 5 levels of filtering most users still blindly apply level 3 updates. With this new feature, after their system is damaged not only will they still be able to cry, but they’ll be able to tell us what updates they applied.. so we can in turn get a better idea of which level 3 packages should get a level 4 or 5.

New GUI

The graphical user interface was changed to look less minty (I know.. some people won’t approve and get emotional here) and more like other Linux tools.  This is also to encourage other distributions to adopt what we think is now the best update manager on the market.

New features

All updates applied via mintUpdate are noted. The tool remembers the package name, the old and new versions, the level and the date of the update. From the view menu, you can now see the history of applied updates. The idea is to clear that list after you made sure everything was fine. This way, in case problems occur after you’ve applied updates you can narrow down the cause of the problems by identifying which update caused the regression.

MintUpdate runs in both user and root mode. Under Gnome, the proxy settings don’t always apply to root sessions so we introduced Proxy support. This will also make it easier for KDE users.

Improvements

• Log files are now saved in /tmp so they don’t take unnecessary space in /usr/lib and in /home anymore.
• The Internet detection was improved and the domain used for the ping is now configurable.
• The routine which checks for the updates (called checkAPT) was improved as were its ties with mintUpdate itself.
• The status reporting was improved. Logs are now clearer and show more information. In the GUI, status is now also reported via a status bar.
• The configuration moved from /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintUpdate/config to /etc/linuxmint/mintUpdate.conf and is now persistent (it won’t be affected by package updates).

Package and notes

Version numbers: We’re changing the way we assign version numbers to our tools in order to make it easier for them to be translated. The major revision number will change everytime the GUI is affected and a new set of translations is needed. All other changes will make the minor revision to be incremented.

MintUpdate 3 is availabe in the Romeo repository: deb http://packages.linuxmint.com elyssa romeo

The current version is v3.1 and is available here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/romeo/m/mintupdate/mintupdate_3.1_all.deb

Non-Mint users will also need: http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/m/mintupdate-gnome/mintupdate-gnome_1.0_all.deb or http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/m/mintupdate-kde/mintupdate-kde_1.0_all.deb

Translations

mintUpdate 3 is currently supporting English and French. Please help us translate it by following the instructions written on this forum thread: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=15695&p=95945

Feedback and bugs

Please post comments here on the blog if you find bugs in mintUpdate 3. Give us feedback also if you like it and if everything’s fine so we can eventually consider it stable and move it down to stable repositories.

Changelog

• 3.0: Initial release
• 3.1: Fixes a typo in the translation file.
• 3.2:
  • Creates /etc/linuxmint if it’s not present (handy for non-Elyssa systems)
  • If ping fails, tries to read google.com. This improves Internet detection on systems where ping is sometimes too slow.
  • New translations: Italian, Catalan, Swedish, Czech, Japanese, Slovak, Norwegian-Bokmal, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugual & Brazil variations).

* News about Mint

Finally the Elyssa KDE CE edition beta 045 was released

Some news about Mint editions

* News about Linux

The number of computers sold with Linux preinstalled  raises sharply in the UK

A better ATI open driver to appear

Launchpad 2 released

The 2.6.27 merge window closes - we can look forward to almost every webcam working

Jack Keane game shipping for Linux

10 good habits that improve your UNIX® command line efficiency

I stumbled upon TuxSoftware.com which has a selection of Linux software delivered by the Linux Software Installer which is based on mintInstall. This may have been mentioned in the newsletter before but it can’t hurt mentioning it again

* News about IT

Microsoft’s plans for post-Windows OS revealed

Much of the sale of Windows Vista is really Windows XP 

Novell developers make their own Open Office - go-oo

2008 Best of Open Source Software Awards

British police shame 999 time wasters on YouTube

Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At US Border No Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies

Thailand bans Grand Theft Auto IV - I think it should be totally banned - I can’t see why promoting steeling cars and killing the drivers  should be allowed even in a game - but that’s my personal view / Husse

Online threats materializing faster, study shows

FBI Warns of Storm Worm Virus

The hacking exploit Neosploit is “euthanized” - distributors citing support costs that didn’t justify the expense.

* Hardware news

New Version of IEEE 1394™ Standard Approved

A $10 high-resolution, lens-free microscope fits on a dime-size chip.

Foxconn sabotaging Linux - the BIOS in mother boards is crap for Linux
* Trivia and other links   

* More about Linux Mint

You find the Wallpaper of the Month in the Blog

Home page

Blog  The planet  Wiki   Forum

* Editors comment

As always - if you find something I’ve missed in the newsletter please tell me - you can post a comment here

Enjoy life

Husse

Linux Mint 5 Elyssa KDE CE RC1 (BETA 045) was released today.

Links: Release Notes 

Please report bugs here in the forums:  http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=15612

Have fun and don’t hesitate to send us comments and feedback.

Many thanks to the following donors and sponsors for financially supporting Linux Mint:

Sponsors:

- $70, Philippe Lotz, MBA, International Consulting & Coaching (alsaphil - France)
- $52, Linuxmint-Shop.de (Germany) - http://www.linuxmint-shop.de
- $45, Linux-Onlineshop (Germany) - http://www.linux-onlineshop.de
- $40, Az Van (newW2 - USA)
- $36, LinuxISOS.de (Germany) - http://www.linuxisos.de
- $20, TOPIMMOBILIEN (Tim - Germany) - http://www.immobilien-es.com
- $20, Espen H.
- $12, Sito3p.com (Italy) - http://sito3p.com/g_Go?Src=LinuxMint
- $10, Tuxdevil Outsourcing LLC http://www.tuxdevil.net
- $10, MXD Internet Solutions (Filip Oscadal - Czech Republic) - http://www.mxd.biz
- $10, Dimitris Athanasiou (RHO, Greece) - http://www.speedtest.gr
- $7, Panagiotis Papasaikas (Greece) - http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ppapasai/
- $5, Vassilis Skoullis (Greece)
- $5, linuxmint-italia.org (Pietro Martino / prior123 - Italy) - http://www.linuxmint-italia.org
- $5, Robert Holland
- $5, Kevin Gabbert
- $2, LinuxMint-Forum.de (Germany) - http://linuxmint-forum.de/
- $2, Khurt Williams (USA) - http://islandinthenet.com/
- $1, Lintelligence.de. (d00p - Germany) - http://www.lintelligence.de
- $1, Linuxmint.de (d00p - Germany) - http://www.linuxmint.de
- $1, Ian Egland (Echolynx - USA)
- $0.5 Martijn van Loon (aapiethaaap - Netherlands)

Donors:

- $100 Michael Muller (USA)
- $100 S B Furniture Ltd (UK)
- $80 Antonio Marcos L.A. (Spain)
- $60 (in 2 donations), Andreas L. (Norway)
- $50 Alan D S. (USA)
- $50 (2nd donation) Edward B. (USA)
- $44 Heiko H. (Germany)
- $24 Paul D. (Netherlands)
- $20 Barry P. (UK)
- $10 Jan T. (Germany)
- $10 James R. (USA)
- $2 Luis M. (Portugal)

Money raised in July:

* Donations: $550
* Sponsors: $359.5

http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

The votes were cast, and they are all in. The winner is clear.

Congratulations go out to akaNed for winning the 1st issue of Wallpaper Of The Month, his great work on this wallpaper got him a very well deserved win.

(see the full posting on the forums)

This wallpaper has been submited to the linuxmint-art.org site, and cen be found HERE.

The submissions section for the September issue has been started, and is currently ongoing, so get your artwork ready, and post it HERE, and you could be the next winner.