The Mint Newsletter – issue 96

* News about Mint

Preparations for the next version of Mint, Helena, is going on and as our Twitter indicates we are testing the first internal betas of Mint 8 Helena

Mint 8 – Boot sequence will be different

Monthly stats – October 2009

* News about Linux

Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, was released.

Mandriva Linux 2010 was released

GNOME 3.0 May Not Come Until September 2010

IBM and Ubuntu roll Linux for U.S desktops vs Windows 7

Is Kubuntu Caught in a Downward Spiral?

An open source version of Linux client is being developed for Skype

Security Hole in Kernel Allows Privilege Extensions – if you run ” cat /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr ” and get a vaule higher than zero you are OK. This is an old bug coming to life again

USB stick security flaw puts data at risk – the cracked operating system in this case is Linux kernel 2.6.26

The latest news about the kernel is always found here

* News about Open Source

Drupal Moves Into the White House

ApacheCon US 2009 was sponsored by Microsoft and thawte

Richard Stallman wants the European Commission to block the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle with its proposed acquisition of Sun.

Red Hat invests in the MySQL open source database competitor EnterpriseDB – this could have an impact on the Oracle – MySQL “problem”

* News about IT

A compromise was reached on the EU Telecom package and the amendment suggestion 138.

(Link to a Swedish page, but the compromise text is found in English – I have not been able to find any other good link)

CIA Buys Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Mark Shuttleworth praises “excellent” Windows 7

Cnet review of Windows 7

640,000 sites and approximately 5.8 million pages were infected in Q3’09

Facebook Wins $711 Million In Case Against ‘Spam King’

The Windows exploit Gumblar is Reloaded

Internet phone systems become the fraudster’s tool

Facebook users hit by botnet attack (When I googled this I saw that most hits were in Slavic languages)

* Hardware news

New material would allow a fingernail-sized chip store a terabyte

Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor

* Other news

Nokia “Only” Wants $200 Million From Apple In iPhone Patent Suit

Linus Torvalds gives Windows 7 thumbs up 🙂

* Comic of the week


Credit goes to xkcd

* More about Linux Mint

How to donate

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* Editors comment

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

It’s been  while since that last newsletter, unfortunately I have too much to do to publish more often.

Enjoy life

Husse