Linux Mint Newsletter Issue 13

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Linux Mint 3.0: Cassandra

After two BETA releases, Cassandra is finally out. Many thanks to all the people involved in its development, people who tested it or contributed suggestions and ideas. We hope you'll enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it.

We're starting to see the results of the work made by the mintArt team. Cassandra uses the new Linux Mint logo and is slightly more polished than Bianca. mintArt should really kick off for the next release and give Linux Mint an equivalent level of polishing as in Fedora. It's a very ambitious project but we're getting there little by little and you can see how the artwork evolves from one Linux Mint release to the other. We're lucky to count some great artists among us and we should push even harder on the artwork for the next release.

Our server was down yesterday as the result of people downloading, or trying to download, Cassandra. We've put quotas on our main mirror so things should be a bit better from now on. If you are still trying to download Cassandra prefer the torrent to the iso file, it saves bandwidth and can give you better download speeds than the ISO if a lot of people are seeding it.

One of the best innovation in Cassandra is mintInstall. You probably noticed the absence of the Gnome Application Installer (also known as gnome-app-install or Add/Remove...). We've replaced this with a Software Portal and a little application called mintInstall. The idea is to be able to install software by clicking the mouse and browsing the portal. Underneath the hood, the software is actually installed by APT, repositories and keys are set up but this is totally transparent to the user. The system doesn't use the user's sources.list, and it doesn't affect it (well to be precise: it backs it up and restores it). If you haven't done so yet and you are running Cassandra, please visit the Linux Mint Software Portal:

http://www.linuxmint.com/software/

Ubuntu announced the upcoming availibility of CNR (Click'n'Run) on their distribution. Although this should be compatible with our distribution it is likely that we won't add it by default in Linux Mint. Time will tell if mintInstall replaces the need for CNR or not or if both technologies will complement each others.

What's new in the Linux Mint Software Portal

We've added 16 games :) Among them you'll find "Western Quake 3". If you're into first person shooters please install this. We have our own Western Quake3 server and we're planning on organizing a Linux Mint Fag Party very soon... to celebrate the release of Cassandra:

http://www.linuxmint.com/software/?sec=item&id=9

We've also added some popular applications such as Google Earth, Skype, Opera, Picasa, Kompozer (the new name for NVU), FileZilla, Brasero, Exaile and a lot more.

You don't need to configure anything for these to install on top of your Cassandra installation. Just browse the portal, download the mint file and double click on it. We're hoping to add a lot more applications in the future and we made it easy for you to create your own mint files:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=18673

PCLinuxOS, Linux Mint, Fedora.. Desktop Linux for Everyone

Three of the best desktop operating systems just got released. We've worked hard on one of them and released Cassandra (Linux Mint 3.0). Now it is time for us to look at PCLinuxOS 2007 and Fedora 7, to read reviews and to gather feedback to see how to do even better for the next release.

No matter which distribution is right for you, Linux has clearly made a huge step forward and is more than ever ready for the desktop. We hope you'll enjoy these 3 new releases as much as we do. These are very exciting times for Linux.