We're taking a little departure this week from our sometimes successful attempt to be non-distro-specific, and looking at a neat little program that runs on Debian and Ubuntu flavors (including Ubuntu-derivatives, like Mint).

Have you ever had the joy of installing restricted or proprietary drivers on Debian or Ubuntu? Most of the time, it really does work like a charm. Sometimes though, something doesn't go quite as planned. We had this happen quite recently with Mythbuntu and an onboard NVIDIA card. The restricted drivers wouldn't work right, and the very latest from NVIDIA compounded our problem.

In our desperation, we tried Envy. Envy is the creation of Alberto Milone. It is an unofficial (so please note you are using it at your own risk) installer for both NVIDIA and ATI drivers. For those of you who are interested, it's a Python/PyGTK application.

We're guessing that most of you just want to get your freakin' video drivers installed, though.

We're big fans of Mint, Shaun Inman's web stats tracking tool. Although the default Pepper (Mint's term for plugins) will track the basics, the beauty of Mint (aside from the interface, which IS beautiful) is in the various Pepper's developed by Inman and the Mint community for further tracking web statistics.

Till Kruss has just released the first stable version of his Pepper, Tweets (which you can download here) which combines Damon Cortesi's Tweet Stats script with Mint. Not only can you "Tweet" from within the Mint dashboard (and view recent tweets from those that you follow), you can also display and track your Twitter usage statistics.


The Pepper is still in development, and there may still be some bugs -- not to mention Twitter's own erratic behavior as of late -- but we think this is still a very, very cool little tool.


[via Peppermint Tea]

We've written about personal finance sites like Mint and Spendview before, but Buxfer has a few interesting features that differentiate it from the others. While it offers auto-syncing of transaction information with your banks and credit cards, budgeting, and expense analysis, Buxfer also has three key characteristics:

1. Shared Finances - Buxfer allows you to create groups and assign specific finances to those groups to monitor who owes or receives money. For example, you could create a "Cable Bill" group and assign yourself and your roommates to the group to track who has forked over the cash for the Super Deluxe Sports Package.
2. Google Gears - By using Buxfer's Google Gears support, you can keep all of your private financial data on your own computer, instead of Buxfer's servers. The other personal finance sites store your information on their servers, thus out of your control.
3. Mobile Access - Buxfer has a mobile phone interface and an iPhone-specific interface for accessing your account remotely. You can also use Twitter or SMS to get account balances or to be notified of low balances, large withdrawals, etc.
   

Due to data security concerns, many people don't want to give their financial account information to third parties. However, account aggregation services like Buxfer can potentially create better security by creating higher, more efficient data availability. Not everyone is vigilant enough to login to every specific bank and credit card website every day to check account balances and check for fraud. However, by logging into a personal finance site, you can check the balances of all of our accounts in a few seconds which may make keeping tabs on your financial well-being a bit easier.

[Via VentureBeat]

You can access your bank account online, and your credit cards, student loans, mortgage payments, etc. In fact, you can pretty much handle all of your financial transactions online these days, which is great. There's just one problem. You have to visit approximately 21,874 websites in order to do it. And that makes it difficult to get a good picture of where your money is really going.

Mint wants to be the one-stop shop for all your online financial needs. You can access all your accounts from one page, and Mint can send you e-mail and SMS reminders when bills are due, and Mint claims it can save you thousands of dollars by offering financial advice. For example if you've got a high interest credit card when you qualify for a lower interest one, Mint will tell you. The basic service is free, the financial advice comes with the paid version.

It's sort of like an online version of Quicken, without the Quicken name. So why should you give your bank and credit account numbers to Mint? We're not quite sure yet. The company's been in beta for a few months now, but it really doesn't have a track record yet that would make us comfortable giving it all of our personal information. We know, it's kind of a catch-22. They won't get a strong privacy record until lots of people reliably use their service without getting ripped off. But people might be reluctant to sign up until the company's been around a little longer.

That said, Mint claims that it found an average of $1000 in savings for each user during the initial beta period. And that might be reason enough for some people to try out the new product.

Shaun Inman's Mint quickly rose to the top of our list of web stats tracking tools as it offers a powerful, customizable interface and a rich plug-in architecture that has quite a following. After launching Mint v2 back in January of this year, Inman has been releasing minor .x version updates to address the usual bugs and other quirks, but a new Mint v2.12 release brings some minor new features and one big new pepper (that's Mint-speak for 'plug-in'): the Outbound Pepper. As its name suggests, Inman's new pepper tracks outbound links from your site, helping you to see where exactly your visitors surf next.

Other changes in this new version include some updates to the display and handling of Mint's advanced preferences, as well as a new 'Ignore IPs' advanced preference to help you keep track of just the traffic you want. There is also a new 'Found' tab in the Searches pepper that lists pages at your site and the keywords used to find those pages.

As usual with Mint updates, this new version is available free to all registered users. You can find out a lot more about Mint from Haveamint.com, with a demo installation for your to tinker with before buying. Licenses for Mint cost a mere $30/domain.

[via Peppermint Tea]

Mint is a powerful, extensible web statistics package from Shaun Inman, web designer extraordinaire. With a wide array of plug-ins that can even incorporate stats from other services like FeedBurner, Mint is a one stop, self-installable shop for virtually any and all stats you will ever have to view for your site. In fact, one of Mint's strengths is that it can be customized to scale down gracefully to a one-column view for users who prefer the option to view their stats on mobile devices. Even after getting an internet-rich iPhone, however, Richard Herrara doesn't want to have to chose between the default two-column view or the device-optimized view - so what's a web hacker to do? Why, hack one of Mint's files to auto-detect the iPhone browser and only display the one-column view for that particular device, of course! Head over to Herrara's site for the instructions on two simple edits you must make to Mint's head.php file, as well as a custom iPhone stylesheet to upload for some dual-mode desktop/iPhone Mint-y goodness.

[via Peppermint Tea]

We're big fans of web stats packages, and Shaun Inman's powerful and flexible Mint is definitely near the top of our list. While Mint and its various plugins can watch all manner of web stats and there are even widgets to check some stats from the comforts of your desktop, Tyler Hall decided to go one step further and has built a pepper (i.e. - a plugin for Mint) simply titled php-Growl that can send some Mint statistics to Growl, the Mac OS X system notification utility. While it can take some configuring (the comments at the Peppermint Tea post where we found this offer a good overview), this sounds like a handy way to keep an eye on stats without having to furiously refresh your Mint page or run yet another Dashboard widget.

php-Growl is being hosted at Google Code and is distributed under the MIT License.

As I get more serious about the writing I'm doing on a couple of personal sites, I've also become more interested in finding a good web statistics tool to learn everything I can about my visitors. This is why a 2.0 upgrade to Mint, a powerful and stylish web-based monitoring package we found back in 2005, couldn't have come at a better time. Created by Shaun Inman, web designer extraordinaire, Mint has everything you need to keep track of, well, everything you need to, along with a flourishing plugin community called the Peppermill for adding just about anything you want.

Now Mint 2.0 costs $30 per domain (upgrades from version 1 are $19), but after checking out the screencasts and live demo, you can color me sold. I've been bouncing between using monthly services like SiteMeter and even FeedBurner's new StandardStats for websites, and neither of them hold a candle to the style, extensibility, power and gorgeous design of Shaun's Mint. Besides, I'm always happier paying a lump sum over subscribing, so Mint is going to pay for itself in just a few months anyway.

If you're looking for one of the most impressive web stats packages that you can run on your own servers, Mint looks like a fantastic option.

[via Daring Fireball]

Back a couple of years ago, there was a really great (for its day) statistics package called ShortStat that was available for free for sites running on PHP / MySQL. ShortStat became extremely popular, and eventually evolved into a commercial statistics package called Mint. As such, development on ShortStat stopped.

Luckily, Stephen Wettone also enjoyed using ShortStat and decided to build a statistics package based on it, which he called SlimStat. Even better, he decided to keep SlimStat free.

So if you're looking for a nice and quick but in-depth statistics package for your website, give SlimStat a look.

Performancing, the people who brought you the Performancing blogging extension for Firefox, have launched a new web service called Performancing Metrics that aims to provide "professional grade blog statistics" for serious bloggers. Performancing Metrics can handle multiple blogs and will aggregate data from all of your blogs, generates RSS feeds so you keep an eye on your stats easily, and shows AdSense data and search engine traffic. It's entering a market currently occupied by Mint and, though it's not geared specifically to blogs, Google Analytics. Performancing Metrics is currently in a free, open beta period; no word on whether the service will still be free once it's out of beta.

[Via Jeremy Zawodny]

Shaun Inman has released Mint, a refreshing new web site statistics package that, if nothing else, is gogeous to look at. It costs $30 per site, which may be refreshingly cheap to some and alarmingly expensive to others, and requires PHP and MySQL to run on your server. Mint collects the data you'd expect, including unique visitors, most popular pages, browser stats, and referrers (for which it sports RSS feeds!), and comes with an API called Pepper which developers can use to extend Mint with new functionality. Shaun talks a bit about what's in Mint in a post on his blog.