LibreOffice at 6, New Souped up Mint Mini
September 28 was the official birthday for LibreOffice and Italo Vignoli looked back at some of the milestones for the project. Elsewhere, the Ubuntu family got new betas and Clement Lefebvre announced a new Mintbox Mini. Jack M. Germain reviewed Panther OS and Ryan Lynch recommended four distributions for Windows users.
Happy Birthday LibreOffice! It was officially six years ago September 28 that The Document Foundation and LibreOffice were announced. The project consisted of former OpenOffice.org developers and volunteered who feared the worst after its sale to Oracle. Since that time, LibreOffice has grown and matured into an award winning Open Source office suite. Group photos taken at the LibreOffice conference at Brno were also shared including one of the attendees who were there on day one, as Bjoern Michaelsen explained. Although they were the seed, the project has grown to hundreds of contributors from all over the world. Italio Vignoli said the project attracted new developers every month for 72 straight months. He also said tomorrow begins the LibreOffice 5.3 developmental cycle, which is planned for release in January 2017.
Ubuntu & friends received the second and final beta in the 16.10 developmental cycle. These images are said to be "reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs" but is still not ready for production machines. Some of the new features coming in 16.10 include Linux 4.8, LibreOffice 5.2, PPA changelogs in Update Manager, updated GNOME apps, and systemd for everyone. Check out the known issues before downloading. The Release Candidate is expected October 6 with the Final to be announced October 13.
A new mini Mint box was announced today by Mint lead Clement Lefebvre. He said the new box is the same small size of the original Mintbox Mini, but packs a lot more punch. The permanent storage doubled to 120GB as did the RAM from 4 to 8GB. The graphics got an upgrade as did the Ethernet and Wifi. New this model is Bluetooth all metal case, six USB ports, powered eSATA, and a microSIM. It comes with a five year warranty as well. Pre-orders are being taken.
Elsewhere:
* 4 of the Best Linux Distros for Windows Users