Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” Xfce RC released!

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The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 14 Xfce RC.

Linux Mint 14 Xfce

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment which aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly. This edition features all the improvements from the latest Linux Mint release on top of an Xfce 4.10 desktop.

New features:

For a complete overview and to see screenshots of the new features, visit: “What’s new in Linux Mint 14 Xfce“.

Important info:

Make sure to read the “Release Notes” to be aware of important info or known issues related to this release:

  • PAE required for 32-bit ISO
  • AMD Radeon HD2xxx-4xxx series card
  • Additional drivers
  • “Extract Here” in Thunar
  • Mouse integration in Virtualbox
  • Moonlight
  • mint4win
  • CD images
  • GnomePPP and local repository

System requirements:

  • x86 processor (Linux Mint 64-bit requires a 64-bit processor. Linux Mint 32-bit works on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors).
  • 384 MB RAM (1GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
  • 5 GB of disk space
  • Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
  • CD/DVD drive or USB port

Bug reports:

Please report any bug you may find by leaving a comment on this blog.

Download:

Md5 sum:

  • 32-bit: 271b5426ac484d896424360113f15c04
  • 64-bit: 30fb958f5f4ad188082926618ed30aed

Torrents:

HTTP Mirrors for the 32-bit DVD ISO:

HTTP Mirrors for the 64-bit DVD ISO:

Enjoy!

We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun testing the release candidate!

61 comments

  2. Mint 14 xfce, so fast it will rip your face off !

    Add compiz, fusion icon, gnomeDO and nautilus (with addins) for linux perfected.

    Reply

  3. I spotted the iso file last night before the official announcement, and downloaded it there and then to give it a run in virtualbox. Seems very slick and fast. It’s actually vying for my affections over Cinnamon. Now I’m torn between four of the Nadia sisters, Cinnamon (who I’m currently officially with), Mate (who has been trying to get her claws into me for some time), and now KDE and Xfce who are both doing some severe flaunting with me. What’s a man to do? 😉

    Nice work Clem and the rest of the Dev Team. Thanks for making it such a hard choice. That means that all the versions of Linux Mint are superb. 🙂

    Reply

  5. what about changing the default MDM theme to one with a face browser for easier logins: click user and type password. Personally I like the ‘metal’ theme for its clean looks and simplicity. Thus it would be more in line with what windows users are used to ?

    Edit by Clem: Yes. We heard the feedback on Mint 13 when it came to the lack of support for user lists and themes and we’re hearing it now on Mint 14, people want it by default. We’ll improve the themes even more going forward and default to a user list theme in Mint 15. We might even develop a new greeter for MDM, we’ll see.

    Reply

  6. Thanks to all the Team for this release.
    Xfce /Compiz/ Caja are my desktop Alliance (i’ll stick with the LTS though …).

    Reply

  7. ac, maybe you meant installing Nemo, not Nautilus ;). It’s nearly identical but you’d better get used to it, there’s a mutiny on the Nautilus.

    Reply

  8. Also love to see Nemo work with gnome-sushi. Then I can switch to nemo from nautilus/thunar. Once you’ve had spacebar previews you can’t live without them ! Sometimes I don’t even launch a full video player to watch a movie/tv show. Just find it, hit spacebar and fullscreen.

    A sidebar preview (like KDE dolphin) would be nice too but it might be best as an add in for people who want it. Best not to create default out-of-the-box feature bloat and complexity ?

    Reply

  10. Clem, being that XFCE is the low spec spin of Mint, it would be kind of nice to have a more specific processor requirement to see how low it could serve its purpose. Maybe some approximation for AMD and Intel.

    Thanks.

    Reply

  11. I’ve found that 32bit mint 13 xfce will run fine on just about any machine designed for windows XP and that has 1GB of ram.

    Reply

  12. Executing ‘grub-install /dev/sda’ failed.

    This is a fatal error.

    Standard Dell Latitude D630, plugged in both power and ethernet.

    *sigh*

    Reply

  13. No complaints at all after using it all day. It’s beautiful and fast. Installed easy and updated fine. Great work. I can’t believe it’s only RC. Thank you, Clem and the Mint Team.

    Reply

  14. Hmmm…. Tried again on a diff hard drive (SSD), let the installer resize some partitions automagically, did not receive the same error… Boot up is SO FAST!!!! WOW!?!?! Ran all updates, so far, this is GREAT!

    Reply

  15. I really would like to see some improvement on the lock screen, xscreensaver doesn’t look good. LM team could extend mdm project to the lockscreen too, as gnome did with gdm, by the way i really like the integration with the old gdm themes, witch didn’t work since some version of gdm! Well waiting for it to be released!!

    Edit by Clem: It uses gnome-screensaver by default.

    Reply

  16. My most sincere congratulations to the Linux Mint team again did a great job with Linux Mint XFCE. I tried the RC, and it really is brilliant. Congratulations.

    Reply

  18. Whhaaaaaaaa?!?! Wha What happened to all the programs? The iso being 857MB (similar to Cinnamon and ~100MB smaller than MATÉ), I didn’t think there was a need to slim down. I agree with most of the changes except these two:

    – VLC player – one of the most popular and a featured program on the Software Manager. It is useful and versatile, most people will have to download/install it manually now. Please have it by default. =)

    – gnome-system-monitor – The Xfce Task Manager just doesn’t compare. The gnome-system-monitor can be installed with no extra dependencies (mate-system-monitor will try to pull in a handfull of mate stuff). I know the gnome-system-monitor is a little heavy, but it has many useful features the Task Manager doesn’t, like: (1) show activity for individual CPU cores and not just the average (it’s very useful to know that one core is max while the others aren’t doing anything), (2) show actual MBs of memory used instead of percentages, (3) show network activity (something I personally like to keep an eye on), (4) the graphs are much larger and more intuitive than the tiny ones on Task Manager.

    I’m happy that GIMP and LibreOffice got to stay. =)

    Other things I noticed:
    – Font display anti-aliasing is turned off. (It makes a big difference (a lot better) with “slight hinting” on and, for me, the standard “RGB”.)

    – the Terminal has the menubar hidden and background transparency turned on (80%). I don’t think that should be the default settings. And the transparency looks and works a lot better if compositing is turned ON (from window manager tweaks in the settings).

    – in LIVE mode, unmounted filesystems have a weird/ugly greenish icon until you hover the mouse over it. Then it becomes the normal (transparent for unmounted) filesystem icon. Logging out and back in, the green icons return until you hover the mouse over it again.

    – My attempt using dd to create a usb looked successful in the terminal, but my computer failed recognize or boot it. Unetbootin worked though, and I am able to boot (same usb). (will try using MintStick later)

    – mint-fortune is installed, but still looks at mateconftool-2. I don’t mind, as I usually make a “mint-fortune-zorro” and have it always turned on (and I replace “koala” with “default” =D).

    – Thank you, thank you for providing so many MDM themes. (the user list doesn’t matter in live mode, and for installed systems you only have to change it one time… but people still want the user list by default). Was it me or did mint try to auto-login after a logout in live mode… very cool!

    That’s all I found after about 30 mins playing with this RC. I hope this helps improve the final version. I’ll post more if I see anything major. Keep up the good work.

    Reply

  19. My main OS. I use it in desktop and netbook. Fast, stable, configurable. i can use PCmanFM as file manager. Nothing better than this!

    Reply

  20. LM XFCE 13 fits perfectly for my utilities, but I’ll try (with no installing) Nadia version. I’m not a crazy person for updates…

    Reply

  21. I wasn’t able to format the drive and install from Linux Mint. I had to boot a gparted disk, format my partitions, then install. I tried to partition manually from LM, as I usually do, and I also tried letting LM handle the format and install itself. Both failed with errors saying it could not format EXT4 on the drive.

    Reply

  22. I’m pleased to see this new Xfce release, but I just installed the LTS release, Linux Mint Maya Xfce, a few days ago and don’t want to spend the time again to install and customize my OS. (However, I will do so for the next LTS release.)

    After a week of using Linux Mint Maya Xfce, I can say it looks and feels better out of the box than Xubuntu 12.10. The developers made some good decisions that saved me time. I’m glad that backports are made for older releases like mine. Due to backports, I also have Xfce 4.10. I should be good to go until 2017.

    Reply

  23. great quality for an RC. However when I adjust the volume with the volume panel control a volume change notification pops up and doesn’t go away until I click its close button.

    Reply

  25. installed this on laptop with a win7 and data partitions…had run linuxmint xfce 13 with no probs but this rc version has just done something that no other mint has ever done…at boot i always see my win7 partition but now its gone…only way to get it back was to install yet another win7 so that the bootmanager could be reinstalled…definitely waiting for the final version!

    Reply

  26. The disk image from the torrent is labeled linuxmint-13-xfce-dvd-32bit.iso. Assuming it’s actually 14, but that sort of confused me.

    Edit by Clem: Can you tell which link/torrent you’re using? I checked both the links/torrents in this announcement and they’re working fine.

    Reply

  27. I have tried Mint xfce DE (live CD) one hour ago. Mint’s xfce looks different Ubuntu’s (Xubuntu). I say this should perhaps be called as “Lightweight Cinnamon” for weak machines.
    ( I mean;
    – Mint Cinnamon (for normal+ strong machines) and
    – Mint Light Cinnamon (for subnormal strong machines)

    Reply

  28. Has anyone else had a problem with 4OD (channel 4 tv player in uk) not working on most linux distros? It works fine on Maya XFCE but have just tried in Nadia XFCE and no good. What’s changed that would effect this?

    Reply

  30. Wow I just installed this without realising it was the RC.

    Some issues I have had.

    1. Installation did not work initially because as the partitions were being formatted, Mint would automount them, halting the installation. I had to disable automount to allow the install.

    2. Auto update did not work- Something wrong with some header. I had to delete some list somewhere to get it to work.

    3. Thunar does not display trash, making it impossible to clear the trash easily.

    4. Changing the default browser doesn’t stick – I had to remove firefox to stop it prompting me!

    Very polished and fast though, a great alternative to the main distro for my netbook, and now I have resolved all except 3 I’m pretty happy.

    Cheers

    Marcus

    Reply

  31. I couldn’t find “Time and Date” to adjust time and time zone information. I had to use “sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata” to change the time zone. I couldn’t find anything installed to change the time.

    Reply

  32. please remove pae just because more computers support it doesn’t mean it’s o.k to kick older hardware out of the picture seriously linux mint was the last distribution that would force pae on it’s users how pathetic!

    Edit by Clem: That wasn’t done on purpose. The non-PAE kernels are no longer available upstream. We still have non-PAE support in the LTS release which is supported until 2017 so it was decided we wouldn’t package our own kernels (which is something we never did but which we’re considering at the moment).

    Reply

  37. Excellent work!

    Still seems to be an issue with Intel graphics cards, though. CPU usage quite high (c.65% – 85%) & performance a bit sluggish, however the following seems to rectify:

    sudo apt-get purge xserver-xorg-video-modesetting xserver-xorg-video-fbdev

    Reply

  38. One fo the things I really liked about the earlier version was the availability of the Mate Menu. Has it been removed, or am I missing it somehow?

    Reply

  40. Unhopefully, mintmenu use a lot of RAM… as other components (applet etc) written in Python

    Is possible to have a light mintmenu?

    Reply

  41. While testing the Mint 14 XFCE RC x86 Live-DVD, as possible update alternative, I ran into the following issues.
    Some of them I consider bugs, others probably XFCE inexperience:

    1.) “Power Manager” –> “On AC” | “On DC” –> Actions: “When laptop lid is closed: Suspend”
    is not working. LCD panel turns off, but laptop keeps on running.
    However: Menu –> “Log Out”: Suspend, laptop’s Fn+F3 Sleep-button and “sudo pm-suspend” from terminal | console work as expected just fine within 40s.

    2.) Where/how does one set/adjust the TZ and actual time and date settings for the computer’s RTC?
    Menu –> Settings doesn’t have anything close to Time/Date and the panel’s calendar applet only allows “Datetime properties” for style/form, but NO actual settings.

    3.) Menu –> “System Information” doesn’t find Battery or any Sensors (loaded kernel module: i2c_ali15x3 for ALI1535+ A1 southbridge), while the XFCE4-Power-Manager correctly displays the battery state in the panel.

    4.) After installing the gnome-system-monitor, in: Panel –> “Add New Items…” I can’t find the “System Monitor” plugin to add. Where is it hiding or what is it’s XFCE equivalent?

    5.) After installing lm-sensors, libsensors4, fancontrol through Synaptic, I don’t find a way, to actually have those sensor reading displayed. Where/how do I get the “Gnome Sensors Applet” or it’s XFCE equivalent to add to the XFCE4 panel?
    Trying to call /etc/fancontrol I get “Error: Can’t read configuration file”.

    6.) Where in XFCE can I enable ‘stickiness’ for the Synaptics touchpad driver, when moving around objects (2nd tap to release object at destination)

    Help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

    Reply

  43. Hi OS2User (currently post #41),

    I was testing the same version and noticed a lot of the same things too. What I wanted/expected from this version was all the usual Apps found in other Mint versions (great selection, IMO) with the Xfce DE well integrated (better than if someone just installed Xfce on top of another version). In this version, it seems they removed/replaced a lot and forgot a few things. Here’s my comments to your questions:

    1) I use the Desktop mainly, but still hope this is something that can be fixed.

    2) It seems they took out or forgot to include something to set/adjust Time and Date (in previous versions Menu->System->Time and Date). For TZ, something I picked up: “sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata”.

    3) When I tried a live USB on a laptop, I noticed the same thing. The “System Information” didn’t display any battery information, although Xfce correctly displays it.

    4) gnome-system-monitor is found in Menu->System->System Monitor. The Xfce equivalent is just under it in the menu (Task Manager).

    5) lm-sensors is already installed, not sure about the other two (not on linux at the moment). To display CPU temps, try command “sensors”. Not sure about other sensors and fan control.

    6) Again, using mostly desktop with mouse, but Xfce 4.10 has more mouse/touchpad settings, have you looked there? That’s not an option I use at all even when on a laptop, so I didn’t notice.

    Hope some of this helped. =)

    Linux Mint is still my favorite. I hope LMDE Xfce will NOT have such drastic changes. =)

    Reply

  44. I just installed Linux Mint 14 XFCE on my old Dell D420 laptop with a Core Duo 32 bit processor. I wasn’t sure about the PAE Required feature, but it seems to work ok on this low end system. I’m running it with 2gb of slow DDR2 memory and it seems to run fast enough. The added artwork is a good feature, because XFCE is kind of boring without it. I seemed to recognize all the hardware in this laptop no problem.

    Reply

  45. I isolated more of the issue with grub failing to install (fatal error):

    btrfs was the problem. If I use ext4 for the / partition, everything is fine. btrfs support is definitely not there for the / partition in the RC!

    Reply

  46. It all look good from a pen-drive, but fails to install. Somebody mentioned disabling automount should fix the issue, anybody confirmed this. What other workarounds needed to have all riserfs partitions? Cheers.

    Reply

  47. I couldn’t install Nadia XFCE on my netbook. It has an Atom N270 processor. So this means my netbook doesn’t support PAE???

    Reply

  48. I tried to just go with the default partitioning option, and i ended up with one 500G / ext4 partition, though. But I tried with disabling automount at the install time, but its still failing. Not sure if I can try with 13 instead of 14??

    Reply

  49. Awesome, I am able to create multiple partitions with different filesystems. BTW, just to clarify, I didn’t notice any automount daemon running during the live session. Instead, What worked for me is: Once you start the installer, click on the “get new installer version” link. This will fetch new installer code (you need to be connected to INTERNET) and then move forward with the rest of the install process.

    I have three test machines now with Btrfs, reiserfs and ext4 filesystems respectively. WOW.
    Nice work team mint. Keep it up !!

    Reply

  50. I agree with all who want (need) a face-browser (or name-browser) for login purposes. I am supporting a real-estate office and trying to convert all of our systems to Linux Mint. The non-tech users have gotten so used to the windows (ugh) login screen that they rebel against having to type a user name+password. (Lazy ?).

    FWIW, a few have had to buy new machines with Win 8 and they HATE it. They are the first candidates for Linux Mint as soon as I can get an acceptable configuration finished.

    Reply

  51. Typing this post from a fresh install of Linux Mint Debian edition running on my Dell Inspiron P450 with 384mb of RAM. Very nice X configuration works perfectly right out of the box. Squeezed the distro onto a 6 gig hard disk and have about 700mb of space left over to play around. A very smooth X experience. High five’s to all.

    Reply

  52. @Zorro (currently post #43)

    Thanks for looking into it. It really is good to know that I am not the only one having/noticing those issues 🙂

    2.) “sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata”
    Thanks for that 🙂 It’s a clumsy way to have to set the TZ, but at least it works – until the forgotten Time & Date settings bit makes it into Settings, hopefully in the final release.

    4.) “gnome-system-monitor is found in Menu->System->System Monitor. The Xfce equivalent is just under it in the menu (Task Manager).”
    Thanks for pointing me to the XFCE Task Manager, missed that one completely due to the name being Task for what (H)Top, gnome-system-monitor (g-s-m) and others call processes. Odd.
    BUT I only get to see System Information, which is something completely different – the g-s-m didn’t get hooked into the menu here and, as initially said, neither has a panel plugin.

    5.)Thanks 🙂 ‘sensors’ now at least gives me the temp, which, judging by the sound of the cooling fan, oddly seems to be higher (idling at 69°C) than with my current LM Helena and I also think LM 14 MATE/Cinnamon Live-DVD. But I’d have to re-check to be certain and it also still leaves the issue with the missing Sensors panel plugin.
    Synaptic lists lm-sensors here as ‘installed manual’, even so I thought to have it seen there already right ouf the box, but wasn’t sure about it.

    6.) I skipped XFCE before, since the mouse settings didn’t have a touchpad section at all. Now V4.10 finally caught up with the rest of the world – at least somewhat. Having a rather small touchpad, being able to make an object ‘sticky’ when dragging it around, is very convenient, so you don’t need to worry about running out of space on the pad when trying to get the object to its destination. There you simply tap the pad again to let the object drop. It’s quite unfortunate, that this driver option is missing or are there any additional config files somewhere allowing just that?
    I couldn’t care less about all that theming stuff, so many people apparently consider to be essential, if instead a bit more sophisticated hardware driver configuration options would be available instead.

    Reply

  53. I tried putting Linux Mint 14 Xfce on my Dell Inspiron 9300 Laptop and it will install just fine but it does not install necessary drivers for my wireless built into the laptop ? Its an Intel Chip Im pretty certain and I can boot XUbuntu just fine on it with no problems. Anyone else having probs with this same issue

    Reply

  54. When burning a DVD in k3B, I can only get up to 4x speed. Normally I can get up to 17x with this program on other distros. Xfburn is even slower.
    Solution seems to be to delete the ‘gvfsd-burn’ file in /usr/lib/gvfs/

    Reply

  55. In common with the 12.10 Ubuntu releases, PulseAudio seems to be a bit problematic- I’ve had audio/video sync issues & an annoying 1.5 second ‘freeze’ when launching a video file. When recording the output from my sound card, the playback is at a slower speed. This happens on both my main PC & laptop. Downgrading the following packages to the versions in Mint 13/Ubuntu 12.04 seems to rectify: pulseaudio, pulseaudio-module-x11, pulseaudio-gconf, libpulse0, libpulse-mainloop-glib0, gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio. Both systems now running audio/video smoother than ever!!

    Reply

  58. My solution to the DVD burning problem in comment 54 seems to be wrong! Removing the ‘gvfsd-burn’ file worked initially, but I’m back at 4x speed again. I used the same program (+ discs) in Kubuntu 12.10 and it always ran at 17x speed so maybe it’s an XFCE issue.

    Reply

  59. Hi!

    I just copied the RC to a stick with mintStick, and noticed two things:

    1. mintStick ERASES the stick WITHOUT notice. All other USB install-copy programs warns about the fact they’re about to erase the USB stick. Lucky for me, there wasn’t any sensible – unique copy data into it. I had copied some information I wanted to have on the persistent ‘drive’, though.

    2. the USB stick becomes READ-ONLY!!! I can’t copy a casper-rw file to it after copying the installer… and since it erases all contents, I can’t have it already copied in it. 🙁

    3. When it finishes copying, at least on the Spanish translation, I got a messas “ERROR: Installation successfully complete. You may restart etc., etc.”

    Kind of confusing. 🙂

    Now I’m going to restart with it. Let’s see how it looks like.

    Reply

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