Weekly Newsletter – Issue 62

* News about Mint

Elyssa x64 RC1 released

If any of you have ideas for how we can make Mint more known please feel free to leave a comment.

* News about Linux

Gnome 2.24 released

Released final versions lately

Pardus Linux 2008.1 ; Vector Linux 5.9.1 ; sidux 2008-3

Gentoo is having problems and cancels the 2008.1 release. They state “we overstretched our human resources during the prolonged 2008.0 release process” To bad…

An alternative to MS Exchange on Linux

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about IT

The Netherlands Patent Office changes to open source software. The entire Netherlands public sector is to change in the long term

The European Parliament adopts a legislative report about telecom. It’s supposed to stop some attempts to block filesharing – however I can’t find that in the report linked to. More about it

Mozilla Releases 9 Updates To Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird

Zend Teams With Adobe to Marry PHP and Flex

Greenpeace ‘Guide to Greener Electronics’

Users fail to spot fake pop-ups

‘Uncloneable’ biometric passports pass the test

Wikileaks posts a hack of Palin’s e-mail account on Yahoo

Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail all vulnerable to Palin-style password-reset hack

‘Password Recovery’ Services may be crackers that gets you in deep trouble

Researchers discover PDF exploit packs

In-depth manual and automated assessments found nearly 97 percent of sites carry a severe vulnerability.

TheΒ  notorious service provider Intercage is (was) a severe vulnerability in itself and got cut off from the internet

* Hardware news

First True 3D Processor Created, Runs at 1.4 GHz

New ‘On/Off Switch’ Protects RFID Cards From Hacks

Asus ships software cracker on recovery DVD

* Trivia and other links

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

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

10 comments

  1. “If any of you have ideas for how we can make Mint more known please feel free to leave a comment.”

    I’ve been thinking for a while now that having micro sites for particular releases would be a good way of advertising. Say, just before the release of Mint 6 we launch micro site about that release to highlight it’s features in a flashy way.

    What do you think of it?

  2. To make Mint more know, i think it is important that Linux Magazines write about it. The first time i have read something about mint was in a German Linux Magazine.
    For the moment, i prevent sometimes the Site “Pro-Linux.de” that they publish news about Mint.

  3. CLem try to contact Linux Format Magazine. im in the UK, and theyre probably the best (maybe only) Linux mag. if the could write a chapter about it, especially since its rise to the number 3 position in distrowatch.com im sure more people in the UK will know about it.

  4. Good Day!!! Im a computer engineering student here in the Philippines and i have an idea on how to introduce Linux Mint to other people… Maybe Mint could start by teaming up with schools and universities… We are currently taking up a subject that talks about LINUX and Windows. Honestly all 25 students in that class including me are using Windows and we are not aware of LINUX , not until our professor introduced the Fedora Core… In just two weeks, the class understood the hidden beauty of Linux and the class is now looking for a distribution that will satisfy them, and that’s how i got on this site… My point is, if Mint could give some schools and universities a taste of its OS so that universities could use it for educational purposes, the students might also adopt the same OS in their homes and so on… I am an officer in our university’s Computer Engineering Organization and we used to get stuffs from computer related companies for giveaways to our members with this, the organization, the company and the members benefit from each other… Maybe Mint could use this strategy =) Thanks, im currently downloading Mint’s ISO and im sure that this OS is one of Linux’ best flavor =)

  5. Mint needs more publicity. We all know how great it is but others need to know & be tempted to give it a try too. Maybe a magazine article with a cover cd/dvd. Frequent mentions on Distrowatch and articles on other websites. Mint really needs each flavour, Gnome, KDE, XFCE to get exposure on distrowatch when they are released and reviews & articles done on all three flavours.

  6. “If any of you have ideas for how we can make Mint more known please feel free to leave a comment.”

    Pop-up advertising? I understand there may not be the funds for this (i don’t know, there may or may not be), but I’m sure that would be effective.

    Or what about contacting Linux Format (magazine) and asking them if they could do a special edition or something? Obviously not all on Mint, but with a free Elyssa (or The F-Girl, I am not sure what she is called) CD, and maybe a piece actually written by one of the developers? I know I’d be really interested if it was not just a review, but more in-depth, written by the people ‘in the know’.

    What about an interview? I know open-source sofrware’s been in the news a fair amount, in the US, but we don’t hear about it so much here in the uk… πŸ™ Maybe Linux Mint could have an interview on the radio, or on a small-time telvision programme, even. I know the interest’s there, a lot of people comment on how ‘easy to use’, ‘pleasing on the eye’, and ‘clean-feeling’ my beloved Linux-Mint Box is. I just think a lot of people don’t even know what linux is. We need to go more mainstream; Linux isn’t just for geeks!

    Hmm… What about flyers to local LUGs? I mean, I know they will already all know about Linux, but a) it may convert them to Mint, and b) they can do a bit more in individual communities spreading the word.

    Ooh! A podcast! Now that would be something that you could get people to listen to if they were interested. People who know about the stuff talking about it are always more likely to get Mint more well – known than someone like me waffling. I’d tune in every time.

    How about flyers in ‘computer magazines’? Not Linux ones, just plain computer magazines, and tech magazines. That would reach more people who don’t even know about Linux.

    More publicised events, like the firefox 3 launch? Like the campaign to get more people to download Firefox – the more buzz, the more people check it out, the more people download.

    A base in the UK – (OK I’m biased ‘casue I live here πŸ˜‰ ) and other countries, then it would be easier to attend loacl Linux events. Nothing major, maybe a deal with a local LUG? I don’t know if this would be possible or not, but if it were, then the more events attended, the more people know about it.

    Well, that’s all I can think of for now.

    Hope this helped!

    Becks

  7. I’ve just read this in Distrowatch Weekly News and it should be mentioned!

    “So the time has come to update the Major Distributions page – with two changes. The first one is the replacement of MEPIS Linux with Linux Mint in the category of user-friendly distributions. While MEPIS has long held the position of being one of the best distros for users new to Linux, Mint has become a very strong contender in recent months. In fact, anybody who compares the two today, can’t but notice the enormous amount of activity, innovation and excitement at Linux Mint. In contrast, MEPIS, while still remaining a solid distribution, has lost much of its lustre, with release frequencies dropping considerably and with many MEPIS community sites having closed down. According to the Apache logs on DistroWatch, four times as many DistroWatch readers visit this site with a version of Linux Mint than those who come with MEPIS. In short, Linux Mint is clearly where much of the newbie-friendly action is taking place right now.

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