DuckDuckGo – Search without leaving personal information.

Feb 102012
 
 February 10, 2012  Websites Tagged with: , ,  No Responses »

After announcing a partnership in November 2011, DuckDuckGo is the default search engine in Linux Mint 12. The revenue that comes from Mint users clicking on adds will be shared, so, as a Mint user, I willingly had a look at it.

DuckDuckGo - Source: Wikimedia

It is first of all refreshing to see a new model and possibility in the search-field area. Google search is excellent, but not prefect, and since Google is growing its influence rapidly, it is nice to see an alternative.

DuckDuckGo is different because it claims not to track searches, or, as a consequence, not to adapt search results to the user. They explained these two concepts rather convincingly on those two pages:

http://donttrack.us/

http://dontbubble.us/

It takes a little time to get used to DuckDuckGo, with its main strongpoint the “!bang” syntax. This is a kind of shortcut to another page and can be pretty convenient. Especially to get away from DuckDuckGo. The search “Linux” will give you the best results DuckDuckGo could find on the internet, “!g Linux” will lead you straight to Google, showing the results Google found.

Since DuckDuckGo is not a finished project yet, users of this search engine will often use these !bang shortcuts to get good results. DuckDuckGo can’t show a image- or videosearch result for example, and their map functions, which is working well and is useful in Google, is almost non existing. “!n”, which stands for “news”, also goes straight to Google News.
(Side note: The same kind of “!Bang” shortcut can also be made for the Firefox-addressbar when using the right mouse-click “Add a Keyword for this Search” in a search field of a page).

DuckDuckGo hardly produces its own search results, but its merely using the results of other search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo an many (>50) more sites.

It then tries to put those results in the order it thinks is most relevant, but this isn’t always a success. DuckDuckGo also states that “there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form.“

Those “instant answer forms” are indeed quite nice, and often work well. This is a little info box at the top of the search results, giving links and information to searches it is sure to know the answer of.  However, such a box appears when I search “Linux” or even “GoHome” (a search company from Zagreb), but not when I type “Linux Mint” (though it shows up, in between other results, when searching for “Mint”).

Conclusion:

DuckDuckGo‘s strongpoint, which is arguably its only strongpoint, is the fact that it doesn’t track search result.
The results are usable for simple queries like finding a homepage, but it is by no means near the results and possibilities Google offers. I have now used it for a while, but at this present point of development, I think one has to be an ideologist, or someone very concerned with privacy, to keep using it.

It is nice to try something different and, in my case, the revenue from advertisement clicks will be shared with Linux Mint. Though as I only click on advertisements I am truly interested in, I have yet to click my first.

Behind the scenes of Linux Mint

Jan 292012
 
 January 29, 2012  Operating System Tagged with: ,  No Responses »

Who is actually making Linux Mint, how do they do it and where do they get their money from?

These where some of the questions I asked myself as a new user of Linux Mint. The answers might give some hints about the future and reliability of Mint. 

The Beginning

The domain name linuxmint.com was bought in 2006 by Clément Lefebvre. Clément, a Frenchman, had studied Computer Sciences in Paris and got a Masters Degree in IT. After his studies he worked for different companies and wrote for linuxforums.org (the articles are still available). He started publishing his articles and reviews on this own new site linuxmint.com and gathered a lot of ideas while researching and writing about Linux distributions. It inspired him to try to make one of his own distribution. As a base he used Ubuntu, as he considered it to be more user-friendly than Debian. On the 27th. of august 2006 he released his first product, Linux Mint 1.0, named “Ada”. This version never got really stable, but the next version, 2.0, named “Barbara”, caught attention and quickly got users who started to create a Linux Mint community. With the release of “Bea” in December, and “Bianca” in February, Linux Mint developed its own style and additions to the Ubuntu releases.

Linux Mint 2.2 Bianca (febr. 2007) - Source: Wikimedia

The Community

Clement Lefebvre, who moved to Ireland and lives there with his family, was keen on listening to the newly formed community, who got a voice on the Linux Mint Forums and a blog in 2007 to comment on news. New ideas where written down, bugs where discovered, patches proposed, improvements written, so people started helping out many different ways. Some people accepted the responsibility to take care of maintaining the different editions, some became testers or forum moderators.

At the present day there is a development team, a bug squad, a community moderation team and so on. Wikipedia names the following people as being part of the development team:

  • Clement Lefebvre – Founder, project leader, developer and maintainer of the Main, Universal and x64 editions
  • Don Cosner – Release manager and internal tester
  • Jamie Boo Birse – Maintainer of the KDE edition
  • merlwiz79 – Maintainer of the Xfce edition
  • Shane Joe Lazar – Maintainer of the Fluxbox edition (for versions 5 and 6 of Mint)
  • Kendall Weaver – Maintainer of the Fluxbox and LXDE editions (version 8 )

On linuxmint.com there is a page that lists the current teams and its  members.

Around the release of Linux Mint 10 “Julia” (Nov. 2011), a community site was published. This gives members more possibilities to interact with the technical aspects and development of Mint, as opposed to the more social role that the forums have.

Bugs, new ideas and translations can be reported to different launchpad pages, and art-work has gotten its own domain under linuxmint-art.org. Code can be found at github.com.

As mentioned before on this blog, Linux Mint also has a podcast, called Mintcast – “the podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux”.
In episode 54, the MintCast team had an interview (starting at 14:50 min.) with Jamie Boo Birse, the KDE edition maintainer living in Australia. This interview gives an excellent view upon the way some people contribute to Linux Mint.

Linux Mint 12 Lisa - (2012) Source: Wikimedia

The Money

Linux Mint gets its money from advertising on its sites, donations, partnership and sponsoring.

In a 2008 interview with distrowatch.com, Clement Lefebvre said that Mint hardly makes any money from supporting clients, as he wants to concentrate on developing Linux Mint. He did however mention a company created by him and ideas about future plans in another interview from 2008 on linuxmintusers.de, but seems to be more clear about his policy of letting development come before support in this interview from  June 2009 on tech-no-media.com.

So the above mentioned means of getting money are important. Donations can be made on this page, and are published on the blog. According to a blogpost, they received $7632.31from donations, and $1542.78 from sponsors in the month of November 2011. This brought about the following comment in the post:

“The donations we received this month were simply amazing. This is an all-time high since the creation of the project and the support we’ve been getting from the community during this release has been fantastic. The figures speak for themselves, $9,175 in total, 335 people offering help via donations, 150 sponsors, and this is just the visible tip of the iceberg, the tangible financial support! We’re also receiving patches, suggestions, ideas, bug fixes, and help in so many other ways. The IRC and forums are booming with people helping each others. There’s a lot to be proud of when you’re part of such a community. Many thanks for your support and to everyone out there in the community who help make Linux Mint better.”

A list of sponsors can be found here, and partners and vendors are listed here. Most partners are important for their offering of web-hosting, dedicated servers and bandwidth.

Since 2009 Clement Lefebvre could afford to work full-time on Linux Mint. According to his own words, about 10% of this time goes to the actual coding.

In January 2012 Linux Mint announced a partnership with Blue Systems, which included a cooperation with Netrunner, a KDE/GNU Linux distribution. This allowed Linux Mint to attract a second full-time developer for the whole year of 2012.

The Future

Although it is very hard to measure, if not impossible, it seems clear that Linux Mint is growing rapidly in number of users at the moment. Linux Mint is probably in the top 3 of the most used flavors of Linux and seems more vital than ever. This means that some form of reorganizing might be necessary.
In a long and recommendable interview with MintCast from January 2011, Clement Lefebvre expresses (around 1h.02 min. in the episode) his worries about having “too many users” for the number of developers working on Linux Mint. This number of users certainly has increased considerable since, but with the current success, the possibilities for funding and other help must have increased as well.

 

Sources:

http://www.linuxmint.com/

http://blog.linuxmint.com/

http://www.mintcast.org/

MintCast » Episode 50: Interview with Clem Lefebvre January 2011.

MintCast » Episode 54: Jamie Interview March 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Interview-Clement-Lefebvre-Linux-Mint-52754.shtml April 2007

http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Interview_Clement_Lefebvre_of_Linux_Mint_by_Tony_Mobily-1/ Sept. 2007

http://www.linuxmintusers.de/index.php?topic=177.0 March 2008

http://www.tech-no-media.com/2009/06/interview-with-clem-from-linux-mint.html June 2009

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100222 February 2010

http://www.com-sl.org/entrevista-a-clement-lefebvre-por-tuxinfo.html June 2011

 

Mintcast – a podcast – not just about Linux Mint

Jan 142012
 
 January 14, 2012  Podcasts Tagged with: , ,  No Responses »
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Edit Jan. 21. 2012: Thank you MintCast team, for a very nice and sympathetic mention of this post and my email (at 1.13:36) in MintCast episode 98!
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One of my favourite podcasts is MintCast, a podcast about Linux Mint. Or, more precise, as they say themselves: “A podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux”. Most topics are indeed about Linux in general, or even about other Linux flavours.The latest podcast (as I write this – episode 97) is for example titled: “Which Linux is right for you?”

It is another weekly talk show, like there are a few around in the Linux world. MintCast is different because they have a young host and some less younger hosts, who all have different backgrounds, providing a nice mixture of opinions. I think it is fair to say that the hosts are ” slightly above average Linux-users” and not Super-geeks, so they use an easy to follow language and explain things if they don’t. Their reasoning in the discussions is one of the strong points of the current three hosts. They manage to look at subjects from different angles, and as a team, they don’t jump to conclusions.

In episode 96 they announced that they are working on live-streaming their show, making it possible for listeners to react, and possibly interact, while the show is being recorded. This might start from episode 100 onwards.

MintCast on the internet.

The appearance of MintCast on the internet is a bit scattered, and possible confusing. It can be found on Google+, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook (where it seems to be sporadically updated), an IRC-channel (irc.spotchat.org – #mintcast – which seems to be uninhabited most of the time), the Linux Mint forums and it has its own webpage, which merely lists their podcasts with shownotes. In the sidebar of mintcast.org you can find ways of subscribing to the podcasts, and links to others sites with information.

With live-streaming there might be blown some new life into some of these channels.

My Linux Mint 12 setup

Jan 122012
 
 January 12, 2012  Operating System, Software Tagged with: , ,  No Responses »

I have been using Ubuntu (and Fedora at some point) since 2007 or ’08, but the recent forced change to Unity threw me off. It seemed that Linux Mint provided a good user-friendly alternative for Ubuntu, so I switched to Linux Mint 11. Recently Mint 12 was released, with a GNOME 3 interface that is based upon the looks and functionality of GNOME 2. I did have some doubts whether the desktop environments installed in the first Mint 12 releases where to my liking, but with the latest addition of Cinnamon I feel at home.

I made a fresh install of Linux Mint 12 and added and tweaked it to my liking.

Linux Mint 12 – Wallpaper by Svenne1985

Here is what I did and installed to get Mint 12 Cinnamon as I want it:

Tweaked Firefox

  •    Add-ons and search engines.
  •    Used Firefox Sync, which had my bookmarks and preferences saved.
  •    Installed the research organizer and collector Zotero and Zotero Word Processor plug in. My Zotero account came in very handy to reinstall data.
  •    Installed Scribefire 4, the blogging tool.

Screenshot of the whole screen with Firefox open.

  • Installed Dropbox (synchronisation) again and feeling blessed to have so much online – it contains a lot of important files, like backups and databases.
  • Downloaded the launcher Kupfer. IMO it beats Unity, and is therefore the main reason for switching away from Ubuntu. (Gnome-Do is a good alternative).

Kupfer

  • Changed the power- and screensaversettings
  • Went through the programs that start automatically at every boot of Linux. Disabled those not needed. (As explained in this blogpost)
  • Downloaded Chromium to install the Tweetdeck app. – Even though it was a sort of downgraded after Twitter took over, it still works.
  • Installed the password manager KeepassX and thank Dropbox for keeping my Keepass database available. So no passwords were lost this way.
  • Downloaded Skype – Eventhough it is not the full version that is available for Linux, it comes in handy for long distance calls to those without internet.
  • Tweaked Thunderbird. I choose IMAP again in stead of POP-mail.
  •   Installed for fun Add-on Display Contact Photo.
  •   I found my mails from MInt 11 in the .thunderbird map in the backup on my external harddisk.
  •  Installed the e-mail notifier Mail Notification.
  • Downloaded RSSOwl and imported my exported feedlist.  It is a fast rss-reader with lots of options to play around with.

RSSOwl

  • Downloaded Abiword. I want that fast and lean word processor at hand.
  • Installed Textroom. The full-screen text processor to grab those fleeing thoughts that can’t stand distraction.
  • Installed Rednotebook, a calendar based notebook that I use as a logbook.
  • Installed FileZilla, for FTP (transferring files to a server for example).
  • and Scid. Has all you need to study and play chess.

 

I couldn’t resist installing

  • 0AD again. The real-time open-source strategy game with the truly stunning graphics. The game-play is not quite finished yet, but starting it up feels like going on a holiday to the Mediterranean.
While I tried backing up my system with the back-up tools provided by Linux Mint,  I am not a fan of it so far. I prefer backing up my files to an external harddisk and uploading again whatever I need.