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News and Editorials

Peppermint OS: Another member of "Team Linux"

The first question that springs to mind when hearing of a new Linux distribution is not "what does it do?" but "why?" It would seem by now that virtually every possible angle has been covered, and that a Linux distribution must exist for almost any use case one could conceive of. Yet the recently-announced Peppermint Linux is slightly different in that it seeks to bridge the gap between standard desktop computing and "cloud" computing.

Peppermint is a fourth-generation Linux distribution. Peppermint is based on Linux Mint, which is in turn based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. It uses the LXDE desktop and Mozilla Prism, Mozilla's Firefox-based site specific browser, to run web-based applications more like standard applications. Aside from a different set of default applications, slight customization of Prism, and some pepperminty artwork, there's not a great deal of difference between Peppermint and Linux Mint's LXDE and Fluxbox editions. That's not surprising, Peppermint Linux contributor Kendall Weaver also contributes to Linux Mint and Lubuntu. Shane Remington is responsible for the web development and marketing for Peppermint, and Nick Canupp handles the forums and bug tracking.

One of Peppermint's most distinguishing features may be the attention paid to marketing. It's unusual for a fledgling distribution to focus intently on marketing, but Remington feels that a lack of marketing is one of the reasons that Linux has not won more converts.

Given that Weaver is already contributing to other distributions, why would another distribution be necessary?

To be clear, though, Weaver and Remington stressed that Peppermint is not about competing with other Linux distributions. Instead, they say they're part of "Team Linux." Remington says a main objective behind Peppermint is "to gain new users for Team Linux":

According to Weaver, the Linux desktop-only or cloud-only offerings made no sense. Peppermint OS was envisioned as a "hybrid desktop" that bring the two together and give "the user more freedom and more choices while offering a comfortable and familiar computing experience." Instead of taking the plunge directly from something like Ubuntu directly to ChromeOS, Weaver says that Peppermint is about "exposing a lot of the possibilities of what can be done in the cloud without taking away the ability to easily install local applications to handle all of the same functions."

No doubt this concept would not thrill Richard Stallman. Much of the software that Peppermint OS points to is free as in beer, but not free as in freedom. For example, Peppermint points to Google Docs for users who want to edit office documents and Pixlr for photo editing. Users wanting offline applications will need to install the standard Linux applications, since offline support is not available for the included web applications. Presumably this will change as Google and other providers introduce offline features based on HTML5, but for the time being there's not much support for offline use of web apps.

The social network integration that Weaver mentioned is minimal. Peppermint includes a Facebook link in the application menu, but beyond that there's not much integration so far. Ubuntu 10.04 goes much farther with the "Me Menu" and the selection of Gwibber to connect to Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, Flickr and others.

As its heritage suggests, there's not a great deal of difference between Peppermint and others in the Ubuntu/Mint family. Users who are looking for a light desktop with a lot of integration with web-based services can try Peppermint or just use Lubuntu or Linux Mint's LXDE release and install the Prism package. There doesn't seem to be a lot of "special sauce" in Peppermint, at least the current iteration, that isn't available in other distributions. Whether it takes off with Windows and Mac users is another story. According to Remington, appealing to Windows and Mac users isn't something "Team Linux" has done well thus far, but they hope to address that with Peppermint.

The Peppermint project doesn't have a strong commercial push yet, but Remington did hint that "there are some things on the table that we are working on but we are keeping a tight lid on for the moment." Peppermint will have a 64-bit version "soon" and "another special something that we will announce here in a few days' time, we hope."

As it is, Peppermint really doesn't have much to offer above and beyond current distributions for existing Linux users. It remains to be seen what the team does from here, but it's hard to see why the same work couldn't have been accomplished under the umbrella of another project. A custom edition of Lubuntu or Linux Mint, within the frameworks of those projects, would probably be more effective. Any marketing push and web development that Remington could supply to gain attention with Windows and Mac users for Peppermint could as easily be applied to an existing project. Perhaps Peppermint will evolve into something unique and compelling over time, but so far it's hard to see the reason for yet another entirely new Linux distribution.

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New Releases

Vinux 3.0 released

Vinux 3.0, a distribution designed for visually impaired users, has been released. "On behalf of the whole Vinux community I am happy to announce the 3rd release of Vinux - Linux for the Visually Impaired, based on Ubuntu 10.04 - Lucid Lynx. This version of Vinux provides three screen-readers, two full-screen magnifiers, dynamic font-size/colour-theme changing as well as support for USB Braille displays."

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Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring RC2

Mandriva has released the second release candidate of Mandriva 2010.1. "As announced previously, here comes the last development release for Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. This is essentially a bug fix release."

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Distribution News

Fedora

Fedora Board and FESCo Election results

The Fedora elections for the Fedora Project Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) have concluded. Tom Callaway, Máirín Duffy, and Rex Dieter have been elected to the Board and Bill Nottingham, Kevin Fenzi, Matthias Clasen, Kyle McMartin, and Steven M. Parrish have been elected to FESCo.

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Thank-you message from the Board

The Fedora Board has sent out a letter of thanks for all those who helped in Fedora releases. "We've had yet another in a long line of successful releases of the Fedora distribution. Now that the furor over the first few release days has passed, we on the Board want to recognize the outstanding efforts of our friends and colleagues in the Fedora Project."

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Fedora Project Contributor Agreement Draft Revision Posted

A new draft of the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement has been released. "Fedora Legal wishes to give the Fedora community a window of time for discussion and review of the revised FPCA. Due to the fact that the changes are relatively minor, and the original draft has been open for comments for some time now, this second window is open until June 4, 2010 (2010-06-04). After that point, either another revised FPCA will be released for review, or we will begin the process of phasing in the FPCA and phasing out the Fedora ICLA."

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Fedora Board Recap 2010-05-27

Click below for a recap of the May 27, 2010 meeting of the Fedora Board. Topics include License agreement for fedorastorm.com, Hall monitor policy change, and Fedora 13 release.

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Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Council 201006 elections

Gentoo will be holding elections for Council. Nominations are open from June 5-18, 2010. Voting begins June 20, 2010.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Risk Report: Five years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Red Hat has published [PDF] a white paper covering the state of security for the first five years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first five years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimize the impact of the issues and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped."

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SUSE Linux and openSUSE

Yunashko: openSUSE Strategy Meeting - wrap up

Bryen Yunashko reports on the recent openSUSE Strategy meeting. "Beside of the usual meeting things (introduction, ground rules, goals of the meeting) we wrapped up the stuff we did over the last months during our weekly IRC meetings. So we concentrated on our users, the strength and weakness openSUSE has, the competition we face and our expectations for future changes in the way we use computers. When building a strategy, you acknowledge that you can't be the best everywhere, you can't be everything to everybody, if you want to be successful, so you need to choose your focus - the already existing strength might be a good start to focus on." The team plans to present proposals to the community on June 8, 2010, which will then be open for 30 days of discussion.

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Ubuntu family

Zimmerman: Rethinking the Ubuntu Developer Summit

Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman looks at the evolution of the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) with an eye toward making it better in the future. He lists various problems with the status quo along with proposals for addressing some of those and is inviting the Ubuntu community to share its thoughts as well. "UDS produces many more blueprints than we need for a cycle. While some of these represent an explicit decision not to pursue a project, most of them are set aside simply because we can’t fit them in. We have the capacity to implement over 100 blueprints per cycle, but we have *thousands* of blueprints registered today. We finished less than half of the blueprints we registered for 10.04. This means that we’re spending a lot of time at UDS talking about things which can’t get done that cycle (and may never get done)."

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New firefox support model and coming changes in stable updates

Ubuntu Hardy, Jaunty or Karmic users may notice some changes in Firefox support. "Why: Firefox 3.0 (and xulrunner 1.9) are now unsupported by Mozilla. Rather than backporting security fixes to these now, we are moving to a support model where we will be introducing major new upstream versions in stable releases. The reason for this is the support periods from Mozilla are gradually becoming shorter, and it will be more and more difficult for us to maintain our current support model in the future."

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Project News

The Debian Project News for May 31, 2010 is out. "Welcome to this year's fourth issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include: * Bits from the Debian Project Leader * Parallel booting enabled by default * DebConf Reconfirmation Deadline * Declassification of the debian-private mailing list * LILO about to be removed in Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" * Firmware support in Debian's installation system * ... and much more."

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 356

The DistroWatch Weekly for May 31, 2010 is out. "Fedora 13 was finally released last week and, as promised, it is given prominent space in our weekly summary of events in the free OS world. Read the interview with leading Fedora personalities who discuss the many new characteristics of the release, then dip into our first-look review of the project's KDE edition. The news section also starts with a Fedora story, bringing attention to the large number of custom Fedora spins united under one web page for easy comparison and access. In other news, Red Hat focuses on green computing in the upcoming version of its enterprise Linux product, Sabayon developers prepare for a new release with a number of interesting enhancements, and a group of BSD hackers in Germany take over the development of DesktopBSD. Also in this issue, a reader's warning about the suitability of Qimo 4 Kids 2.0 for children, an update on the Mandriva 2010.1 roadmap, and a tutorial about creating PBI packages that can be installed on a PC-BSD system with one click. A big issue with something for everyone, happy reading!"

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Fedora Weekly News 227

The Fedora Weekly News for May 26, 2010 is out. "This week's issue kicks off with many announcements from the Fedora Project over the past week, including much detail on the release of Fedora 13, amongst many other items. In news from the Fedora Planet, some discussion on Google-sponsored new VP8/WebM open video standards, a last chance to vote in the various Fedora Board elections, and an article on "12 tips to getting things done in open source." In this week's Fedora In the News, we cover previews and reviews about the brand-new Fedora 13 release from around the globe. In Ambassador news, lots of coverage from the recent Fedora Ambassador Day North America, including links to blog postings about last week's event held at Iowa State University. The QA Team brings some brief news focused around the lead-up to Fedora 13. Translation team news is next, including recent changes in the design of Fedora documentation structure, an overview of Fedora 13 tasks from this past week and a new member of the Fedora Localization Project for Arabic. Security Advisories covers the security-related packages released for Fedora 11, 12 and 13 over the past week. News from the KDE SIG is next, including arrival of KDE SC 4.5 beta to KDE-RedHat unstable repositories for Fedora 13, and recent work on a new Phenon backend for VLC. This issue wraps up with updates from the Fedora Summer Coding Project, with a status update on what students and their mentors are up to. Enjoy Fedora 227 and Fedora 13!"

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openSUSE Weekly News #125

The openSUSE Weekly News for May 29, 2010 is out. "Now the twentyfirst week goes to the end, and we are pleased to announce our new issue. This week was very busy. I've made my first step with Milestone 7, and I like it. So I propose that you try it out too. And please not forget to file founded bugs in our bugzilla.Through helping with testing, we all can make our distribution better and more stable. The other thing where I was busy was the move from our Weekly News pages to a new Place. From now on, you can find actual Weekly News under: http://wiki.opensuse.org/Weekly_news. So wish you many joy by reading this Issue :-)"

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #195

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for May 29, 2010 is out. "In this issue we cover Track the Desktop Team and UNE in Maverick, Ubuntu Server update for Maverick Meerkat. Ubuntu Foundations and Maverick Meerkat 10.10, Maverick Community Team Plans, Welcome: New Ubuntu Members, Winners of the 1st Annual Ubuntu Women World Play Announced, Ubuntu Stats, Ubuntu NC LoCo Team: Guitars to Goat Festivals: Ubuntu For All, Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team: Ubuntu @ Intel LAN Party, Catalan LoCo Team: Ubuntu Lucid release party in Valencia, Why Launchpad Rocks: Great Bug Tracking, Ubuntu Forums News, Interview with Penelope Stowe, The behavioral economics of free software, Return of the Ubuntu Server papercuts, Rethinking the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Testing Indicator Application Menu Support, In The Press, In The Blogosphere, Landscape 1.5 Released with new Enterprise Features, Canonical Pushes Skype into Ubuntu Repository, Linux Security Summit 2010, Full Circle Magazine #37, Ubuntu UK Poscast: Three Friends, Upcoming Meetings and Events, Updates and Security and much much more!"

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Newsletters and articles of interest

Spinning off from Ubuntu (The H)

The H takes a look at Ubuntu spinoffs and beyond. "Curious users who have come to Linux through Ubuntu gain from the traditional virtues of a closer relationship with the software, the computer, and how it works, and may have become inquisitive about other versions of GNU/Linux and why they exist, the loyalties and animosities they arouse, and the experience and fun they bring."

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Distribution reviews

Hands-on: MeeGo for netbooks picks up where Moblin left off (ars technica)

Ars technica reviews MeeGo 1.0. "We conducted extensive testing of the MeeGo 1.0 Netbook User Experience on the same Mini 10v to see how it compares to its Moblin predecessor. The underlying design philosophy is largely unchanged, but a number of significant differences are apparent in the application stack. In the transition from Moblin to MeeGo, Intel seems to have significantly reined in its ambitions by making a number of pragmatic compromises. Several components from Moblin that were built largely from scratch have been discarded in MeeGo in favor of existing Linux software."

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MeeGo Brings The Magic (Linux Magazine)

Linux Magazine has a review of MeeGo. "Right from the get-go, MeeGo looks neat and very well integrated. Indeed it is! What it does is to turn a netbook into more of an appliance - a single purpose tool in a small, neat little package. Every hardware component on the Asus 1000HE worked perfectly, including the web camera, built-in microphone, bluetooth, wireless, touchpad (with two finger scroll), keyboard hotkeys and even suspend and resume! From the boot screen to the desktop it's certainly pretty. It's the best integrated Linux "desktop" I have ever seen. The simple icons are really striking and give the whole operating system a solid, unified look and feel."

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Slackware 13.1: A Linux Distro That Gets Out of the Way (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews the latest Slackware release. "I think Slackware has a certain style that should be appreciated. Criticizing Slackware for lack of modernity would be like criticizing a well-maintained 1957 Chevy for not having power windows or satellite radio. You don't run Slackware to escape from the complexity or configurability of Linux; you run Slackware to embrace those things. Users turn to Slackware for a Linux distribution that doesn't get in the way. Package up the system software and make it relatively easy to shove on to a computer. Then get out of the way. And that's what Slackware does."

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