home > Computer > Interview with Clement Lefebvre about Linux Mint. What is Mint What is Mint

Interview with Clement Lefebvre about Linux Mint. What is Mint What is Mint

What's new in Mint 8? What are the possibilities Helena( distribution name) should people especially like?

We have satisfied many requests that came to us after the release Linux Mint 7, and some of the changes we made have become very popular. Update Manager now allows you to ignore updates for specific packages. We support a certain level of updates for each package, so this feature gives a lot to users. We have also improved the Software Manager and implemented many small things that increase the comfort of using the distribution.

Linux Mint is not just based on Ubuntu, it is fully compatible with it. Unlike what Canonical does with Debian, we have no plans to fork Ubuntu repositories or break compatibility with our base distribution. We use two technologies to maintain compatibility and apply the changes we need: APT pinning (a feature well known to Debian users) and trimming (a technology we developed ourselves). When we want to make a package that behaves differently from Ubuntu, we can either maintain the package ourselves or tell the system to dynamically apply the changes we require. Our repositories have higher priority than others, so Linux users Mint gets the versions we support, not the base ones. Developing your own repositories involves a lot of work. If you look at the various distributions, you will notice that very few projects have the resources to both maintain their packages and innovate on them. on a regular basis. I can name only a few of these, and they are corporately funded - with a business model focused not on the needs of home users, but on profit-generating activities such as commercial support.
Of course, with our own repositories we can become more independent. Personally, I'd like to slow things down a bit and be more conservative with our core system, and when it comes to hardware recognition, provide more release continuity and fewer regressions, but we're generally happy with what's going on in the core projects - GNOME, KDE , Linux kernel and Debian and Ubuntu distributions. Every six months our own changes are reflected in the backdrop of many changes to the underlying system and the result is simply fantastic. Since our goal is to create the perfect desktop, we make some changes only when we think we can do something better. There are still a lot of ways to improve the desktop, so it's not time for us to focus on anything else yet. We leave the core of the system to the core projects and we do not believe that we should make any changes in this area.
What we want to change, we are allowed the flexibility to change APT pinning and our fits, so that we don't have to duplicate or change each package and push them into separate repositories.
If we talk about the load on the servers, then both Linux Mint and Ubuntu are mature projects with a developed mirror system. The mirror network is very important for distribution. It makes the downloading process easier, and therefore easier to use. operating system, it reduces the load on the servers and improves their performance for each user. What is also very important, local mirrors can reduce the load on the entire network. Let's take national providers as an example. If many people in a country download and use Linux Mint, this creates a significant load of requests to our servers in Germany or to Ubuntu servers in the US. It is in the best interest of national providers to mirror both Ubuntu and Mint so that users can access them local access. For distributions, this means less hassle. For users this means local servers, for providers - less foreign traffic. I wish I could answer this question in a shorter way, but there is so much to say about hosting strategy. To sum it up, there are not enough benefits to maintaining your own repositories at present; We don't face problems with server loads or problems with our independence as a distribution, and this will require a lot of work, attention, and attention will be shifted from what is really important: improving the desktop.

The project has been independent from the start, and while the system can technically qualify as a flavor of Ubuntu (since Mint is both based on it and compatible, and since the underlying system remains largely unchanged), the distribution itself, in terms of direction, structure and methods work is completely different. We consider Ubuntu to be the base and main component, since it remains virtually unchanged in final product, but still this is only a part that we can change, patch and configure so that it fits into the whole. Just like we decided to use GNOME as our desktop, we decided to use Ubuntu as our package base, and the reason for this is simple: these components give us better results. This doesn't mean we don't look at other systems. We often try different working environments, in particular community editions with KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox. And we are interested in porting our work to other package systems, such as Debian (we have such a project planned) and Fedora. Since these basic systems are complex, and since we concentrate on our main task, we do not work very actively with them and do not develop our own package or desktop system.

On your website you offer professional support for a price. Do you have many clients, and if so, are they mostly home users or corporate clients?

We have very few customers and most of them use our product at home or in a small business. Our support is more expensive than support from Canonical, Mandriva or others on the market. This is due to the fact that support is provided directly by the developers. We are very careful about support because we want to focus on the distribution itself, and not on the commercial activities associated with it. Our business model is very simple and very effective. We are funded by our users and their online activity and this allows us to not have to worry about whether what we do is profitable.

Mint seems perfect for home use. What features does it offer for enterprise use?
It's sustainable, predictable, modern, comfortable and productive - all the reasons you'd want to use it at home, making it ideal workstation. It is quite popular among small and medium-sized businesses. But our project is quite small, it lacks independence, long-term strategy, marketing, PR and support structures. For these reasons, we do not approach large businesses where Red Hat, Novell and, to a lesser extent, Mandriva and Ubuntu offer more visible solutions.

There are a lot of applications on your CD. Do you use any special compression techniques to accommodate them?

Yes, our live CD is compressed using Squashfs. These 700 MB actually contain 2.5 GB :)

It's too early to talk about it, but we are planning two significant developments - a community site with a hardware base, ideas (similar to Brainstorm), a blog platform, social network, support and application portal and much more. And we also plan to completely rewrite our Software Manager. This time we want to make it package-centric (so hopefully it will replace Synaptic) with 30,000 packages, user reviews, combining the best of the current mintInstall, GNOME App Installer and Ubuntu App Center.

What else would you like to say? Any words of wisdom, comments?

We had a lot of fun creating Linux Mint. Integrating changes from basic projects into our distribution, implementing our ideas, interacting with the community - we always enjoyed it. And we are very pleased to see people happy with what we do and our releases. And besides this, there is always so much more outside of Linux Mint, so many distributions that you can download and try, so many applications that you can install, it’s a whole lot of joy for everyone. I think that's the beauty of open source, the ability for a developer to easily build something on top of what's already been done, and how amazing the product turns out to be. I hope this doesn't change. There are serious issues and conflicts that should not be avoided when it comes to open source and free software, but I want to say thank you to all those who bring us joy and pleasure and who continue to be involved in Linux. This is the most important thing in our community and what we are all in it for.

Clem, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to have this conversation, we really appreciate it.

Dedicated to impressions after launching the system version "Live-cd", I expressed my determined intention to test full version"Liza" - "Live-DVD".

Just today I managed to carry out my plan. But in order to better understand new system, I decided to collect more useful information. Since the question of the new working environment, accordingly, my search began with the notorious mysterious working environment “MATÉ”. First of all I visited official blog "Linux Mint", and saw there an article I had missed earlier, entitled “Important fix for MATE – Feedback needed.” It was published on December 1 - earlier than I posted my last publication about “Lisa” here, but then I ignored it because of the “too technical” name, not expecting to find anything essentially important there for myself. But now, due to the task I had set for myself, I simply had to read the article with keyword"MATÉ".

By clicking on the link, I had already mentally prepared myself for the boring reading of obscure technical details, but I perked up noticeably when I saw the name in the caption under the title Clem- pseudonym Clemente Lefebvre, to whose “Advice and Recommendations” I recently dedicated. Probably something important, I thought, and I was not mistaken.

The article turned out to be very informative and I liked the fact that I (unexpectedly) found in it answers to a number of questions that worried me, and it’s funny that the most interesting (at least for me) Mr. Lefebvre placed in the second part of the article.

But I’ve probably already pretty tired the reader with the unusually long introduction. Let's get to the point. Since it seemed to me that the article might be of interest to many Linux Mint users, I bring it to the attention of dear readers translation of the full text of the publication by Clement Lefebvre without bills.

Important fix for "MATÉ" - need your help

"Linux Mint 12" will receive an important fix for the "MATÉ" desktop. This update is intended solve the following problems when installing certain themes:

Panel Disappearance

Notification system hangs

What was the cause of the problem?

This issue was related to compatibility between versions GTK"Ubuntu" (one of software implementations interface elements - approx. author of the site) And "MATE", which users encountered depending on the theme they installed. It is known that some topics (such as "Carbon", "Mint-Z-Mate", "Clearlooks") work well, but most of them caused problems: “MATÉ” began to work capriciously and slowly.

We removed the GTK patch from Ubuntu (010_make_bg_changes_queue_repaint.patch) and repackaged it into Romeo (an unstable branch of the Linux Mint repositories).

We hope that with this new version of GTK, "MATÉ" will work stable and fast with all themes.

How can I check if the fix works?

If you are using "MATÉ" in Linux Mint 12 and are interested in testing these fixes before they become available to anyone else, please follow the steps below:

Open "Update Manager"
Click "Edit"(“Edit”) —> "Application Sources"
Check "Unstable packages (Romeo)"(“Unstable packages (Romeo)”)
Click "Close"
Click "Update"
Sort the list of updates by version number
Apply all updates whose version is "2.24.6-0ubuntu5linuxmint1"

Once the updates have been applied, you will need to log out of your account, and then log in again under your name.

For what reason is all this implemented through the “Romeo” branch?

Romeo is not used often, and when it is used, it is for only a few hours and by a small group of people. Community testing usually occurs between RC releases (the version of the system before the release of the stable version of the system - approx. author of the site) and stable release. GTK is a key component in Linux Mint, so it usually does not need to be updated unless the RC version is no longer current (since the stable version has been announced - approx. author of the site). Because these issues seriously impact the stability and performance of MATÉ, we don't want to wait until Linux Mint 13 to provide you with this update, but we do need to ensure that this fix is tested by the Community before we release this update to universal application.
With your help, we want to make sure that this fix improves MATÉ and does not lead to any deterioration.

What does the future hold for MATÉ?

In the future, MATÉ will likely be the only implementation of the Gnome 2 desktop environment available, and it is extremely important that it adds stability and functionality to the point where it can prove itself to be the true successor to Gnome 2.32. and give the green light to people who don't want to switch to a different work environment in future releases.

In the preview (RC) release of Linux Mint, we included the first version of MATÉ with support for the Mint desktop. In the stable release we have significantly improved "MATÉ", introducing the “Mint” menu (“mintMenu”) into this environment by adding the “Mint-Z-Mate” theme and corrections critical error, which led to the crash of “Caja” (according to the product developers, “Caja” helps organize files and folders not only on the computer, but also online - approx. author of the site). We then finalized the updates to "mintMenu" and now we are introducing this update which should put an end to most of the critical situations faced by users using "MATÉ".

Once we have achieved a stable working environment, the next step is to enrich it with additional features and the ability to customize it so that it looks and behaves exactly like Gnome 2 in previous releases of Linux Mint. Ultimately, Our goal for MATÉ is to get to the point where you can't tell the difference between MATÉ and Gnome 2. It may take some time before we reach this goal, but with MATÉ rapidly gaining momentum, it should happen eventually.

We consider "MATÉ" as another work environment, such as KDE, Gnome 3, Xfce etc... and given the popularity of "Gnome 2" in previous releases of "Linux Mint", we are committed to supporting it and helping to improve it. The most popular Linux working environment was, and probably remains so, Gnome 2. Now it is not possible to save “Gnome 2” in “Linux Mint”, but it is available two promising alternatives: Gnome 3, which is stable and capable of providing an even better working environment than the one we were dealing with previously, but which this moment lacks functionality and flexibility, and "MATE", whose design is identical to "Gnome 2", but which currently lacks stability. Time will tell which of these workspaces will ultimately become the most popular. At the same time, we will work hard to expand the features and configuration options in Gnome 3, as well as improve the stability of MATÉ.
I would like to thank all the people who will take part in this testing for their help and support.

More on the topic :

What's new in Mint 8? What are the possibilities Helena( distribution name) should people especially like?
We have addressed many requests that have come our way since the release of Linux Mint 7, and some of the changes we have made have become very popular. Update Manager now allows you to ignore updates for specific packages. We support a certain level of updates for each package, so this feature gives a lot to users. We have also improved the Software Manager and implemented many small things that increase the comfort of using the distribution.

One thing that comes up a lot in the comments on the DistroWatch forum is that Mint uses Ubuntu repositories rather than maintaining its own. Could you explain why this is so and are you planning to create your own repositories? I understand that Mint has a small repository with 440 packages, could you tell me about that too?
Linux Mint is not just based on Ubuntu, it is fully compatible with it. Unlike what Canonical does with Debian, we have no plans to fork the Ubuntu repositories or break compatibility with our base distribution. We use two technologies to maintain compatibility and apply the changes we need: APT pinning (a feature well known to Debian users) and trimming (a technology we developed ourselves). When we want to make a package that behaves differently from Ubuntu, we can either maintain the package ourselves or tell the system to dynamically apply the changes we require. Our repositories are prioritized over others, so Linux Mint users get the versions we support rather than the base ones. Developing your own repositories involves a lot of work. If you look at various distributions, you will notice that very few projects have the resources to both maintain their packages and innovate on a regular basis. I can name only a few of these, and they are corporately funded - with a business model focused not on the needs of home users, but on profit-generating activities such as commercial support.
Of course, with our own repositories we can become more independent. Personally, I'd like to slow things down a bit and be more conservative with our core system, and when it comes to hardware recognition, provide more release continuity and fewer regressions, but we're generally happy with what's going on in the core projects - GNOME, KDE , Linux kernel and Debian and Ubuntu distributions. Every six months our own changes are reflected in the backdrop of many changes to the underlying system and the result is simply fantastic. Since our goal is to create the perfect desktop, we make some changes only when we think we can do something better. There are still a lot of ways to improve the desktop, so it's not time for us to focus on anything else yet. We leave the core of the system to the core projects and we do not believe that we should make any changes in this area.
What we want to change, we are allowed the flexibility to change APT pinning and our fits, so that we don't have to duplicate or change each package and push them into separate repositories.
If we talk about the load on the servers, then both Linux Mint and Ubuntu are mature projects with a developed mirror system. The mirror network is very important for distribution. It simplifies the process of loading, and therefore using the operating system, it reduces the load on the servers and improves their performance for each user. What is also very important, local mirrors can reduce the load on the entire network. Let's take national providers as an example. If many people in a country download and use Linux Mint, this creates a significant load of requests to our servers in Germany or to Ubuntu servers in the US. It is in the best interest of national providers to mirror both Ubuntu and Mint so that users can access them locally. For distributions, this means less hassle. For users this means local servers, for providers - less foreign traffic. I wish I could answer this question in a shorter way, but there is so much to say about hosting strategy. To sum it up, there are not enough benefits to maintaining your own repositories at present; We don't face problems with server loads or problems with our independence as a distribution, and this will require a lot of work, attention, and attention will be shifted from what is really important: improving the desktop.

From the Mint website it immediately becomes clear that the project is based on Ubuntu, and accordingly on Debian. When you started Mint, did you try to work more with the Ubuntu community? Or did you intend your creation as a separate distribution from the very beginning?
The project has been independent from the start, and while the system can technically qualify as a flavor of Ubuntu (since Mint is both based on it and compatible, and since the underlying system remains largely unchanged), the distribution itself, in terms of direction, structure and methods work is completely different. We consider Ubuntu to be the base and main component because it remains essentially unchanged in the final product, but it is still only a part that we can change, patch and configure to fit into the whole. Just like we decided to use GNOME as our desktop, we decided to use Ubuntu as our package base, and the reason for this is simple: these components give us better results. This doesn't mean we don't look at other systems. We often try different working environments, in particular community editions with KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox. And we are interested in porting our work to other package systems, such as Debian (we have such a project planned) and Fedora. Because these core systems are complex, and because we focus on our main task, we do not work very actively with them and do not develop our own package or desktop system.

On your website you offer professional support for a price. Do you have many clients, and if so, are they mostly home users or corporate clients?
We have very few customers and most of them use our product at home or in a small business. Our support is more expensive than support from Canonical, Mandriva or others on the market. This is due to the fact that support is provided directly by the developers. We are very careful about support because we want to focus on the distribution itself, and not on the commercial activities associated with it. Our business model is very simple and very effective. We are funded by our users and their online activity and this allows us to not have to worry about whether what we do is profitable.

Mint seems ideal for home use. What features does it offer for enterprise use?
It's stable, predictable, modern, convenient and productive - all the reasons you'd want to use it at home, making it the perfect workstation. It is quite popular among small and medium-sized businesses. But our project is quite small, it lacks independence, long-term strategy, marketing, PR and support structures. For these reasons, we are not addressing large businesses, where Red Hat, Novell and, to a lesser extent, Mandriva and Ubuntu offer more prominent solutions.

There are a lot of applications on your CD. Do you use any special compression techniques to accommodate them?
Yes, our live CD is compressed using Squashfs. These 700 MB actually contain 2.5 GB :)

What will happen next? What will we see in Mint version 9?
It's too early to talk about it, but we are planning two significant developments - a community site with a hardware base, ideas (similar to Brainstorm), a blog platform, a social network, a support and application portal, and much more. And we also plan to completely rewrite our Software Manager. This time we want to make it package-centric (so hopefully it will replace Synaptic) with 30,000 packages, user reviews, combining the best of the current mintInstall, GNOME App Installer and Ubuntu App Center.

What else would you like to say? Any words of wisdom, comments?
We had a lot of fun creating Linux Mint. Integrating changes from basic projects into our distribution, implementing our ideas, interacting with the community - we always enjoyed it. And we are very pleased to see people happy with what we do and our releases. And besides this, there is always so much more outside of Linux Mint, so many distributions that you can download and try, so many applications that you can install, it’s a whole lot of joy for everyone. I think that's the beauty of open source, the ability for a developer to easily build something on top of what's already been done, and how amazing the product turns out to be. I hope this doesn't change. There are serious issues and conflicts that should not be avoided when it comes to open source and free software, but I want to say thank you to all those who bring us joy and pleasure and who continue to be involved in Linux. This is the most important thing in our community and what we are all in it for.

Clem, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to have this conversation, we really appreciate it.

Linux Mint and its Cinnamon. Sketches of the application Fedorchuk Alexey Viktorovich

What is Mint

What is Mint

The full name of the first of the heroes of this cycle is Linux Mint. However, since it is clear which operating system distribution we are talking about, I will omit the first component in what follows.

The Mint distribution has consistently ranked first in the rankings since 2011. Distrowatch. Of course, this does not mean that it is the most common or the most popular - this rating, like all similar belly meters, is a rather arbitrary thing. But it certainly indicates the widespread popularity of the distribution in narrow circles of Linux users. So I can limit myself to a very brief description of it.

The Mint distribution was created in 2006 by Clement Lefebvre, who set out to create the ideal desktop “for the people” - home users and small businesses. It was a derivative of Ubuntu - the terms clone or fork do not apply in this case. That is, Mint in its basic part, right down to Xorg, is based on the Ubuntu code base, and all relevant packages are taken from its repositories without any changes. However, it also has its own small repository (about 500 packages) containing distribution-specific components.

Clement Lefebvre

In September 2010, the release of another distribution of the Mint project was announced - Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). As you can guess from its name, it was based on the Debian codebase, not Ubuntu. Its testing branch acted as such, and therefore LMDE does not have a release cycle - its “floating” versions were marked with a year and month. However, there will be no talk about them in this series - this distribution deserves a separate story, the time for which has not yet come.

From the book Fedora 8 User Guide author Kolisnichenko Denis Nikolaevich

4.1.1. What is X.Org 4.1.1.1. A little history In the first versions of Linux there was no graphical interface. In April 1992, the X Window system was created for Linux - the graphical subsystem of Linux. X Window (full name X Window System) is not GUI user, this is the system,

From the book Win2K FAQ (v. 6.0) author Shashkov Alexey

(1.9) What is DFS? Distributed File System is one of the tools Active Directory. It allows you to create network resources that can include many file systems on various machines. For user Active Directory is absolutely transparent and does not matter where and on what

From the HOWTO on Traffic Control with tcng and HTB by Brown Martin A

1.2. What is htb? Hierarchical Token Bucket is a class-based queue processing discipline written by Martin Devera with a simplified set of configuration options compared to CBQ. There is a lot of good documentation on HTB and its application on the author's site and Steph Cohen's site

From the book Linux Mint and its Cinnamon. Application essays author Fedorchuk Alexey Viktorovich

Introduction to Linux Mint It is logical to start a conversation about Mint and its Cinnamon with a story about what, comrades, Mint is, and what, brothers, Cinnamon is. I'll start with this and

From the author's book

Mint: proprietary tools It is a rare distribution that rightfully bears this proud name that does not acquire a more or less complete set of system tools specific only to it (in the future I will call such tools proprietary). Not

From the author's book

Features of the Mint repository Mint repositories are organized superficially similar to those of Ubuntu, but in fact they are built according to slightly different principles. In the official-package-repositories.list file they are described in two lines: deb http://linux-mint.froonix.org rebecca main upstream import deb http://extra.linuxmint.com rebecca main The first one is

From the author's book

Your own Mint: introduction During my first acquaintance with Mint, I got the impression that its installation contained so few unnecessary programs that it was not worth bothering with removing them. However, upon further examination, it turned out that there are quite a lot of unnecessary (for me) applications

The head of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, reported last Sunday, February 21, 2016, that over the weekend an unknown attacker managed to hack the project’s infrastructure, including its official website and forum, and replaced the link with a legitimate ISO image Linux distribution Mint 17.3 Cinnamon own URL. The hacker's distribution contained a backdoor.

According to Lefebvre's post, users who downloaded the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon image from the official website on February 20 are at risk. The attacker replaced the link to the 64-bit distribution with a link to his own server located in Bulgaria (5.104.175.212) and his own ISO version. Only those users who used a torrent link or a direct HTTP link to download were not affected.

“The hacked image was hosted on 5.104.175.212 and contained a backdoor that established a connection to absentvodka.com,” Lefebvre writes. - All traces lead to Bulgaria, to the names of three people. We don't know what their motives were."

The head of the project explained that attackers gained access to the Linux Mint infrastructure by hacking the project blog running under latest version WordPress. Developers and outside experts information security They claim that the hackers did not use any 0days for the popular CMS.

Interestingly, after the first message from Lefebvre, who assured that the consequences of the attack had already been eliminated and malicious links had been removed from the site, the hacker managed to penetrate the system again. The attacker again replaced all download mirror addresses with a link to the same Bulgarian server different versions distribution. It became clear that the developers had not discovered all the penetration points and holes that the hacker had taken advantage of. The team was forced to take the linuxmint.com domain offline to avoid further distribution of compromised ISOs.

Few changes have been found in the hacker version of the distribution so far. In fact, only the Tsunami Trojan was added to the image, which is a fairly simple IRC bot and uses infected machines to carry out DDoS attacks. This malware cannot be called new; it has been known since 2013.

But the matter was not solved with images alone. A couple of hours after the official report of the hack, security expert from Fox-IT Jonathan Klijnsma noticed that the databases of the official forum forums.linuxmint.com have surfaced on the darknet. A user with the nickname peace_of_mind wrote that he was ready to sell a complete forum dump, php mailer and shell for 0.1910 bitcoins (about $85).

Now the official Linux Mint blog is also warning users that the project's forums have been compromised and everyone is being asked to change their passwords as soon as possible.

The leaked dump contained nicknames, encrypted passwords, email addresses, personal message history and other personal data that users could fill out in the forum profile themselves.

Journalists from the publication ZDNet claim that they were able to make contact with an unknown hacker. The attacker introduced himself as Peace and said that distribution kits infected with the Trojan were downloaded several hundred times before the attack was detected. Moreover, the hacker claims that he compromised the project forum twice: first on January 28 of this year, and then on February 18. The hacker provided journalists with a small part of the stolen dump as proof of his words. The data was found to be authentic.

The hacker refused to give his gender, age or name, but said that he lives in Europe and is not affiliated with any hacker groups.

Peace also told reporters that he had discovered a certain flaw in the project’s system, and also had Lefebvre’s credentials in his hands, which allowed him to log into the site’s control panel as an administrator. The hacker refused to explain where he got this data from and provide evidence.

Peace reported that at first he changed the link only for the 64-bit image, but then decided to replace all links leading to mirrors for downloading various distributions. His words are confirmed by concerned users who reported this problem in the comments to Lefebvre’s official post.

All mirrors pointed to the same address

To top it off, the hacker replaced the official image checksums (MD5) on the site with his own, so that users would have no doubt that they were downloading a secure version.

Peace claims that this attack did not pursue any specific goals, he simply wanted to create his own botnet, and chose the Tsunami Trojan for its ease of use.

It has not yet been announced when the Linux Mint project will return to operation.

These checksums, just in case, are published on the official blog: