urn:www-linuxmint-com:feeds:atom The Linux Mint Planet » July 2, 2009 The Linux Mint Planet » July 2, 2009 2009-11-21T12:29:10+01:00 http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=928 Clem Linux Mint Blog: Monthly Stats - June 2009 2009-07-02T18:51:44+02:00 2009-07-02T18:51:44+02:00 Donations & Sponsorships:

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

Donors:

  • $116, Oscar T. (UK)
  • $100 (2nd donation), John Ritchie (Aging Technogeek) (USA)
  • $100, Douglas M. (USA)
  • $100, Terry M. (USA)
  • $100, Egyirba H. (USA)
  • $72 (5th donation), Theodore T. (UK)
  • $72 (2nd donation), Carlos C. (Portugal)
  • $72, Emil D. (Ireland)
  • $72, Patrick L. (Switzerland)
  • $72, Bjorn A. (Sweden)
  • $72, Muharem H. (Germany)
  • $58, Giovanni S. (Italy)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Jonathan B. H. (USA)
  • $50, Robert P. (Australia)
  • $50, Protecting Our Future (USA)
  • $50, Anthony F H. (USA)
  • $50, William R. (USA)
  • $50, John W. (USA)
  • $43 (8th donation), Temel B. (Germany)
  • $40 (4th donation), Philippe W. (Switzerland)
  • $36, Andreas H. (Germany)
  • $35, Adam S. (USA)
  • $30, Gabe G. (USA)
  • $30, Krzysztof K. (Poland)
  • $29 (2nd donation), DB. (Dick) (Netherlands)
  • $29, Emmanouil P. (Greece)
  • $29, Robert S. (UK)
  • $29, Aldo R. (Italy)
  • $25, Eddie F. (Australia)
  • $25, William S. (USA)
  • $25, Majestic Combined Services [MCS] (USA)
  • $25 (3rd donation), Gordon Hilliard (ghilly) (UK)
  • $25 (3rd donation), Michael G. (subslug) (USA)
  • $21, Julio S. (Portugal)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Douglas S. (USA)
  • $20 (2nd donation), Colin C. (Canada)
  • $20, John A. (USA)
  • $20, Glenn E. (USA)
  • $20, Nebojsa R. (Canada)
  • $20, Curtis O. (USA)
  • $20, David F. (USA)
  • $20, Harreson S. (Canada)
  • $20, Juha A. (Finland)
  • $20, Craig B. (Australia)
  • $20, Douglas T. (USA)
  • $20, Donald P. (USA)
  • $20, Brian G. (Canada)
  • $15 (4th donation), Kevin S. (kevinrs) (UK)
  • $15, Jonathan R. (Canada)
  • $14 (2nd donation), HeLikesMint (Germany)
  • $14, Pablo P. (Belgium)
  • $14, Morten F. H. (Denmark)
  • $14, Subtlekiss (UK)
  • $14, Fernando C. P. (Spain)
  • $14, Slavoljub M. (Norway)
  • $10 (5th donation), Henry W. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Dan B. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard G. (USA)
  • $10, Matko G. (Croatia)
  • $10, Jorn L. (Norway)
  • $10, Edward F. (Australia)
  • $10, Michael S. (UK)
  • $10, John P. (Australia)
  • $10, Mairin C. (Ireland)
  • $10, Andrew M. (USA)
  • $10, Charles E. (UK)
  • $10, John D. (UK)
  • $10, Joseph G. (USA)
  • $10, Robert David J. (UK)
  • $10, Maurice R. (Canada)
  • $10, John R. (USA)
  • $8, Dag Eirik A. (Norway)
  • $7 (3rd donation), Jindrich R. (Czech Republic)
  • $7, Socrates D. (Greece)
  • $7, Andre J. (Germany)
  • $7, Rowena J. (UK)
  • $7, Stanislav G. (Germany)
  • $6, John H. (UK)
  • $6, Sergey P. (Russia)
  • $5.5, Stephen M. (USA)
  • $5.25, Aneesh A. (India)
  • $5, Hamed K. (USA)
  • $5, Mark S. (UK)
  • $5, Arvind D. (Mauritius)
  • $3, Luca M. B. (Italy)
  • $2, Tomas H. (Slovakia)
  • $1, Shane L. (USA)

Sponsors:

Money raised in June:

* Donations: $2402
* Sponsors: $498.5

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

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 60%
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 26%
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 9%
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 4%

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 1,559,894 (+13.17%)
  • Pageviews: 2,939,104 (+9.17%)
  • Page impressions: 1,303,421
  • Search queries: 3,250,028
  • Forum users: 17,862
  • Forum posts: 156,267

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1350 (4th)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 4% (2nd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 29,001th

Events:

Summary:

  • The community continues to strongly support the distribution. 88 people donated money in June for a total of $2402.
  • The amount of money received from our sponsors grew to $498.5.
  • All indicators show that the release of Linux Mint 7 created a boom in the size of our user base and that its growth is now getting back to normal.
  • On Distrowatch, Linux Mint is slowly loosing its popularity as the novelty factor isn’t there anymore and the news related to the distribution aren’t relayed in the press and on Linux related websites. Linux Mint isn’t new anymore, but it isn’t as established as other distributions yet and de facto not considered a “major” within the Linux community even though the size of its user base can in times be as much as two to three times larger than the ones of projects like SUSE, Fedora or Mandriva.
  • The Overall income is up 29%, and June 2009 was the (4th consecutive) best month ever since the start of the distribution.
  • In brief: Finances have never been so good, Linux Mint sits in a very comfortable position on the Linux home desktop market second only to Ubuntu, its user base continues to grow but the distribution needs to engage in marketing, ads and/or promotion campaigns to get the attention of the medias. Now that Linux Mint is known to most Linux users and that it gathers the second biggest share on the market, it needs to get itself known to others and to compete with other desktops such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS.
]]> http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/?p=362 albertomilone Alberto Milone: X-Bus – a daemon for input devices 2009-07-02T16:00:11+02:00 2009-07-02T16:00:11+02:00 What is X-Bus?

It’s a personal project I’ve been working on (among other things) since I joined Canonical. It’s a daemon which handles input devices through the XInput protocol. In the future I hope to add support for outputs too.

What’s the purpose of X-Bus?

Its main purpose is to provide developers with a common (and simplified) way to access XInput from languages which have DBus bindings (Python, Ruby, C, C++, Java, Perl, etc.). It is not specific to any desktop environment, even though it uses C++ and QT4 (see below).

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. applications which make use of the same backend with different frontends (as opposed to having different backends and frontends)?

Current features:

  • Exposes XInput (listing/setting properties, catching signals, etc.) through Dbus with a simplified API.
  • Stores the (per-user) current inputs configuration in an XML file and applies it at startup or when requested.
  • Emits signals (through Dbus) when new devices are plugged in or unplugged (so that, for example your client application can refresh its UI to reflect the new situation).
  • Tracks keyboard activity so as to disable your touchpad when you’re typing.

It’s an attempt to combine the features in syndaemon and xinput (the command line tool), from both of which X-Bus borrows code.

3 examples of what X-Bus can be used for:

  • User interfaces to configure touchpads (which is the 1st thing I would like to work on).
  • User interfaces to configure touchscreens whose drivers support XInput (I still need to expose the calibration functions provided by XInput though).
  • Automatic rotation of your touchpad (figuratively speaking) when your screen is rotated (after this is implemented).

Why QT?

Because of its DBus and XML modules and because it’s a pleasure to work with QT in general.

Example: if you add the Q_SCRIPTABLE macro to the function in the header file, this function will be made available in your DBus interface. This applies to signals too. This makes maintenance a lot easier.

In my opinion it would be overkill to use the DBus low-level API and I don’t think the glib (DBus) bindings can offer what I described in the example (feel free to prove me wrong on this). Furthermore I would have to use an external xml module to perform validation and the things that I currently do with the xml file.

Doesn’t it duplicate efforts? Why don’t you work on $INSERT_DAEMON_HERE instead?

Yes, it does (partially) but my point is: can we use $INSERT_DAEMON_HERE on KDE, Gnome, Xfce, etc. ?

Furthermore, if you have a look at X-Bus’ API you’ll see that (currently) there’s very little duplication.

Where’s the code?

Source code (have a look at the examples which are written in Python)
Packages

NOTE: this is just a first release and users won’t benefit from it without a user interface (unless they want to edit the xml file manually).

]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVTaJI7lRVQ YouTube: [Tutorials][Linux] Linux Mint / Ubuntu installation with Windows 2009-07-02T14:00:59+02:00 2009-07-02T14:00:59+02:00 [Tutorials][Linux] Linux Mint / Ubuntu installation with Windows
This is short video, how to install Linux Mint or Ubuntu on your hard drive, without deleting Windows(R). You can install Linux as your 1st or 2nd operating system ( DUAL BOOT ). No windows deleting, just dual boot :) Tags: how to install linux mint ubuntu debian fedora gentoo windows xp 2000 grub lilo hdd hard drive games gta iv vice city san andreas easy tutorial apt get yum portage user jestem hardcorem hardkorem beryl compiz desktop 3d From: webnull Views: 3861 7 ratings Time: 06:59 More in Howto & Style ]]>