The Linux Mint Blog

With each stable release of Linux Mint come two very important documents. The first one is the user guide. It’s a downloadable PDF eBook of about 100 pages which explains various aspects of Linux Mint. It starts with explanations on how to install Linux Mint, then it details how the Linux Mint tools work and how to make the best out of the desktop. It’s easy to read and covers both simple and advanced topics. It also gives details on the specificities of Linux Mint so no matter how experimented you are with Linux, you will definitely learn a few things by reading this guide.

The guide is currently available in English, in French and in Italian directly from the Start page. If you’re not using Linux Mint or if you start page is set to a custom address, you can download these guides from our download mirrors:

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/4.0/

The Release Notes consist of a web page which details information about a particular release. Release notes are mostly written for users of the previous release which are about to install a new release. They go through the new features and innovations of the new release, known issues that users should be aware of, and upgrade instructions may users decide to upgrade rather performing a fresh install. Linux Mint Release Notes are usually easy to read and interesting from a user’s point of view as they don’t only provide relevant information but also insist on new tools and features. For instance, by reading the release notes a user could get to know about a newly added console tool which wasn’t present in the last version nor documented in the user guide.

Linux Mint is indeed easy to use but not all its innovations and features always catch the attention of the user. If you like using Linux Mint and if you would like to know more about your desktop you should take the time to read both the User Guide and the Release Notes. For Mint users to make the best out of Mint the start page now links to these documents.

So happy reading everyone, and many thanks to Carlos Porto for this redesign on the start page.

The latest ISO of Elyssa was 675MB and as it passed all basic tests I uploaded it for the team to test. Exploder is currently trying his best to find problems with it, and Husse and Wes are also giving him a hand. I won’t go through the changes as we’re getting really close to a public BETA release. I’ll document them within the release notes instead.

So far 12 points were risen. I don’t think any of them are real showstoppers. I’m waiting on some clarification and further testing on some of these points and also keeping an eye on the release of Firefox 3 RC1 (which I’d love to be present in the BETA instead of Firefox 3 Beta 5).

If everything goes fine we’re only a few days away from the first public Linux Mint 5 BETA.

So here we are, April is almost over and after a tough competition here’s what the All Stars table looks like:

1 Kronophage — 2.773 pts, 23 games. * Congrats! *
2 MeansWell — 2.064 pts, 19 games.
3 oOp — 0.620 pts, 6 games.
4 Pulpie — 0.491 pts, 3 games.
5 BlakeBird — 0.488 pts, 4 games.
6 Max — 0.321 pts, 3 games.
7 Marco — 0.278 pts, 3 games.
8 Toby_ — 0.194 pts, 2 games.
9 kancerman — 0.155 pts, 1 games.
10 sick — 0.131 pts, 1 games.
There were 14 users playing 69 games.

Congratulations to Kronophage. He was 3rd last month and is at the top of the table this month.

The Quizz bot will reset the stats on the 1st of May. If you haven’t joined the Quizz yet, it’s very easy:

- In Linux Mint: open up Xchat-Gnome (or Konversation) then when it’s connected join the #pimpmymint channel.
- On other platforms: Launch your favorite IRC client, connect to the irc.spotchat.org server and join the #pimpmymint channel.

Note: Make sure to register your nickname with Nickserv so that the Quizz bot can remember you the next time you log in

We’re at build #017 already and it’s been a very long week end. I’m exhausted But the progress so far has been very good and the ISO is looking great. Firefox 3 and pulseaudio were included. Amarok was replaced by Rhythmbox. Brasero was added and Transmission version 1.11 is to be included.

An upstream bug in Rhythmbox was fixed for Jamendo to be supported and the functionality of pulseaudio was extended by adding support for Flash and the Pulse Audio Device Chooser. The multimedia system selector was also made visible.

PPPOE was added.

The software portal is 1/4 full and now counts 228 applications for Elyssa (thanks to Kronophage for this).

Support for MP3 encoding was added (previous versions of Mint only came with MP3 decoding).

Gnome was tweaked: Images can now be applied as wallpapers from the context menu and folders can be opened as root. When opening a folder as root, XFE is used instead of nautilus. A warning is given, the title of the window mentions “Root” and XFE looks different enough for users not to forget that they have a root window open

We’re now on a 2.6.24-16-generic kernel with CFS (completely fair scheduler) and with Gnome 2.22. The ISO is about 694MB large and fits on a CD.

As always there’s no ETA or release date planned. It will be released when ready, but as Hardy is out and I can see a lot of people are anxious to know when Elyssa will be out.. looking at what’s done and what’s left on our roadmap it’s reasonable to think we’ll be in a position to release a public BETA in about two weeks. Of course things happen and as any other edition the Main Edition will have to be tested by Exploder so don’t take my word for it, this is only an estimation.

Note on compatibility: A compatibility mode was added as a new boot entry, featuring nosplash, noapic, noacpi and irqpoll. Also, the light edition will come with grub instead of gfxgrub and without pulseaudio. We’ll make it very easy for Light Edition users to add codecs through a single mint file so the Light Edition will also act as an easy workaround for people whose computers have compatibility issues with gfxgrub.

Note on the start page and search plugin: I reviewed the TOS and looked at this in details. I’m afraid there isn’t much we can do to improve the layout of the search results. The google images plugin was given a distinct icon to differentiate it from the search one. Start pages were assigned on a per-release, eventually per-edition basis so we can provide users with more relevant information (user guide, links to release notes and bug report places, security warnings..etc). We’re starting to use google analytics also so I’ll be able to give more accurate stats about the Linux Mint user base for each release/edition. Info on why we’re modifying the search plugin and how to revert to the default one will be covered in the user guide, which will be accessible from the default start page.

That’s about it.. there are also visual improvements in the terminal and a great isolinux theme but I’ll keep that as a surprise A lot more is to come but I don’t see anything that could wrong at this stage. I’ll post more news as I go along.

Well I have started on the Elyssa KDE Beta’s using the new Hardy base. My first Beta is up and running live in a virtual machine and it is all looking great so far. I think that since there is not much of a change in KDE 3 (3.5.8 to 3.5.9) that this will speed up development for me. I see the big slow down being porting the mint applications to Qt3. Well I had better get back to work.

Cheers Boo

After a long period of preparation and work on the mint tools we’re now entering phase 2: the migration towards the newly released Hardy base. Work has begun and the very first BETA of Elyssa was built today. Of course it’s highly unstable at this stage, it doesn’t fit on a CD and it’s full of rough edges. Things look very promising though and we should expect a first public BETA release within 2 weeks. We’ve had 6 months to think about this and almost everything is ready to be included so we should have a very smooth release.

Also, Octy and the Italian community translated the Daryna User Guide. The document should soon become available on all official mirrors.

Finally, Kronophage is working on the software portal and adding a lot of applications in it. The Elyssa section already features 145 applications. When finished the portal should contain around 1000 apps. Each application will feature a screenshot and we’re planning on using the same authentication system for both this portal and an upcoming home-made Brainstorm clone to encourage people to post comments, reviews and ideas online.

A lot of work has been put into mintMenu. In Elyssa this tool now comes in 16 different languages, with a configuration screen, improved drag & drop support in favorites, less delay and less memory usage. Each application also features a little context menu which can be used to automatically launch it at startup.

It’s also now possible to uninstall any application present in the menu by simply righ-clicking on it and selecting “uninstall”. A dialog box appears with the related packages and dependencies. This complements the easy installation of software provided by mintInstall and the software portal.

Finally, the “Other” and “System Tools” categories were merged into “Administration”. This makes the menu more compact and avoids the need for a scrollbar in the category pane.

Lars Peter Clausen, the main developer for mintMenu, is also porting this application from python to C. Although it was too late to include the C version in Elyssa, Lars’ latest version is very close to being stable and should hit the repositories some time after the release of Elyssa. The main advantage of porting mintMenu to C is a further reduction of the memory usage and extra speed gains both at startup and during the runtime.

We’ve experimented with Aurora GTK engines and created some futuristic themes. We’ve looked at Carbon and made something a lot of people liked but although a few themes ended up looking great we still haven’t found anything to replace the default artwork. So we’re now taking a different approach which consists of improving the Daryna artwork by making subtle changes to it. Have a look below and please give us as much feedback as possible on this.

This is how widgets (”widget” means graphical element. Buttons, progress bars, combos are widgets for instance) looked like in Daryna:

This is how these same widgets look like after we made some changes:

And these are the changes we made:

To illustrate the differences, here is mintUpdate running with the Daryna look:

And here is how it looks like with the changes:

I’m personally happy about the sliders taken from Clearlooks. That’s definitely an improvement IMHO. I’m not sure whether I prefer the gradients or the original for the tabbed folders. I like the lighter blue and the additional contrast but I’m afraid there’s too much contrast in the newer theme.. I also like the dotted separation between columns in the mintUpdate table. Finally, the highlighting (especially on the buttons) looks like a wave and that’s fine, but now that the contrast shows that more in detail, maybe we can opt for a straight highlight instead. Oh.. and note how widgets are still rounded, but not as much as before.

Please tell us what you think. Not just whether you like it or not, but in detail what you think is better, what you think isn’t, and why and how you would improve it. Don’t hesitate to save these pictures locally so you can quickly look at them and compare them in fullscreen mode.

PS: Other themes will be available as alternative choices, installed by default also.

The user guide for Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna was translated into French by Kronophage (who also happens to lead the IRC Quizz all-stars table for this month). The document is available here: http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/4.0/LinuxMint-4.0-User-Guide_FR_v1.pdf