Linux Mint Newsletter Issue 11
From The Linux Mint Wiki
Contents |
[edit] Sponsoring and Advertisement
The Linux Mint distribution is financially supported by individuals donating money through Paypal and by the money generated by the website through the Google Adsense service. Although this helps the development and the distribution in general it is not enough to start paying people to work full time on Linux Mint.
For this reason, we are looking for partners and companies to act as:
- Sponsors (companies donating money on a regular basis and appearing as official sponsors of the distribution)
- Advertisers (companies paying the distribution to advertise on the website and in the forums)
Some financial statistics:
- Donations in March: $164
- Advertisements in March: $683
Some web statistics:
- Visits in March: 106,801
- Unique visitors in March: 72,251
- Pages viewed in March: 436,665
- Average visits per day in March: 4450
If you are interested in advertising on Linux Mint or in sponsoring the distribution, please contact us at root@linuxmint.com, whether you're thinking of something big or something small we'll find a way to make it interesting for both your company and the distribution.
Note: You can also sponsor the distribution or advertise with Linux Mint (although this last option makes a little less sense) as an individual. If you're interested in this or if you want to know more, please do not hesitate to contact us.
[edit] Bianca KDE Edition
The KDE Edition of Bianca was finally released and we received really good feedback on it. Many thanks to all the people who tested BETA020 and BETA022 and participated in improving this edition. Starting with mintDisk, most of the minty applications present in Bianca should be either ported to KDE or made cross-desktop (to work under any desktop) in the weeks to come.
[edit] Community
- A new section called "Newbie Questions" was added to the forums. Linux gurus didn't become gurus overnight and generally started as newbies. Of course it takes a guru to make a guru out of a newbie and one could wonder who came first.. the guru or the newbie, but that's a different story. The idea here is to encourage new users to ask "stupid questions" and not feel ashamed or shy about it. Linux has a learning curve and one of the best way to contribute to it is to help novice users. If you're new to Linux Mint or Linux in general, please use this section to get help and a warm welcome from our community.
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/index.php?f=90
- A Frappr map was published and all Linux Mint users are invited to join it. The map gives a general idea of where users are located. Who knows you might find out your neighbour is using Linux Mint :) Eventually if the concentration of Linux Mint users is big in some areas the community will be able to gather within Local User Groups or Local Events.
http://www.linuxmint.com/map.html
- If fragging Linux Mint developers is your favorite hobby, you'll be happy to know we've set up an Open Arena server on linuxmint.com. A Frag Party was organized after the team had finished working on the Bianca series and more parties are to come in the future. Michael/d00p (our server admin) installed Open Arena 0.6.0, Western Quake 3 beta 2.2 and Teamspeak on the linuxmint.com server. You can find openarena and openarena-mod-western in the Romeo repository and teamspeak-client in the Ubuntu feisty repository. The server is online and available at anytime. Upcoming community frag parties will be announced on the forums.
More information on Open Arena: http://openarena.ws/?about
More information on Western Quake 3: http://www.westernquake3.net/main/
More information on Teamspeak: http://www.goteamspeak.com/
- We're trying to set up a Linux Mint Podcast and we're looking for people interested in participating, eventually in leading and managing this podcast. We'd like it to be a weekly hour show, made by and for the Linux Mint community. Hopefully we'll be able to gather a team of 2, 3 or 4 people for this. If you're interested in this project, please contact us at root@linuxmint.com
[edit] Feisty
Feisty was released and we're getting ready to work on Cassandra. Here are the main improvements that should affect our distribution:
- The installer was improved (better layout, release notes button, advanced tab for boot loader, integrated partitioner, windows migration assistant which can import your windows settings/bookmarks/contacts...etc into linux)
- "restricted drivers" and "desktop effects" tools should make it trivial to install proprietary 3D drivers and get compiz/aiglx working with wobbly windows and basic cube/layout 3D effects.
Feisty also comes with a more up to date package base and its repositories feature:
- A new 2.6.20-15 kernel
- Gnome 2.18
- OpenOffice 2.2
Overall this will give Cassandra a better base. Should you upgrade your Bianca installation though? We don't recommend it. Mintconfig is known to crash in Feisty and unless you're experiencing ACPI/WIFI problems that would be fixed by 2.6.20 or you're dying to get the latest OpenOffice 2.2, you should keep your Bianca install on top of an Edgy base.
[edit] Romeo
Open Arena and Western Quake 3 were added to Romeo. If you are into gaming we encourage you to install these two packages and give feedback on them in the Romeo section of the forums, so that they can make their way into Bianca and become avalaible to all users.
