Mint 18 Xfce Imminent, Gmane.org Shutting Down
Mint project lead Clement Lefebvre today said that Mint 18 Xfce is "almost ready" but KDE users will have to continue to wait. The second alpha in the Ubuntu 16.10 developmental cycle is available to crash testers as of today in Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Kylin flavors only. In other news, the Gmane mailing list archive site is shutting down as the founder has grown weary with the hassles as well as a prolonged DDOS attack. Finally today, Carla Schroder shared her Linux story.
Clement Lefebvre said today in the Mint Monthly News that Mint 18 Xfce is "almost ready." The last bug fixes are in and the team is getting everything ready for the announcement which could be any time now. KDE users aren't so fortunate. Lefebvre said on that "front, things are progressing slowly." He and his team are hoping to have a beta ready sometime in August. Seems the big hold up is the migration to KDE 5 which Lefebvre said was like working on a brand new product instead of an upgrade. LMDE users will get the new Mint-Y theme backported to them soon as well. One final note from today's Mint Monthly News is that CompuLab is working on a "refresh" of the MintBox Mini.
Long time mailing list archive site Gmane.org is shutting down. Gmane has been the home for technical mailing list references since 2002. But it's no longer fun for founder and only maintainer Lars Ingebrigtsen. He's been sued in India and threatened with legal action in at least France, among other annoyances. The straw that broke Ingebrigtsen's back was a sustained denial of service attack throughout the month of July. He's been wondering a lot lately if it's all worth it. So, he's decided to move the mail and news servers to new hosting. However, Ingebrigtsen is indeed discontinuing the web-based archive. He said he's just "fed up." He's willing to send a disk with the web server archives to anyone who wants to take it over. But with the Gmane.org web presence gone, it feels like the end of an era. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout the community with some even trying to get a petition started.
The Ubuntu project today announced the release of "Yakkety Yak Alpha 2" except there's no Ubuntu image to test. Images for Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Kylin are available. The developers are primarily interested in recieving bug reports on the installer in order to get it fixed up before the next milestone release. See the announcement for download and release information.
In other news:
* Fork YOU! Sure, take the code. Then what?