A new command line utility called “iso-localize” is now available. With this tool, users, magazines and communities from various parts of the World can now produce official Linux Mint ISO images in their language and distribute them as such.

From a technical point of view, the utility reads from an existing ISO file, downloads the language packs for the selected language, sets that language as defaults and asks the user to translate the labels found in the liveCD/DVD menu. It then creates a new ISO file, which behaves in every way like the original  and boots directly, with full support, in your language.

The branding aspect is important. As you probably know, we’re strict on quality and testing and we only release images when we thing they’re ready. Thanks to the open-source nature of our project, anybody can remaster our releases and modify them in many ways. These modifications result in custom systems which quality and features we’re not able to assess and for this reason we’re reluctant to see them distributed under our name. Sharing and opening software for others to modify is great, as long as modified versions aren’t distributed as if they officially came from us. We recently faced a problem with the Russian community where someone produced ISOs of extremely poor quality and the Russian community’s website was distributing them as “Linux Mint” ISOs. This is unfair to us and although people are free to modify our images, they should at least do so using their own name and their own branding. Many communities expressed the need for localized ISOs and this branding issue was a concern to us. This new utility solves both problems by allowing communities to create custom ISO images while restricting the scope of this customization to localization.

Of course, we still provide mintconstructor for people who are interested in remastering our images. Images produced manually or using remastering tools (mintconstructor, reconstructor or remastersys, etc…) should be considered unofficial and should not be publicly distributed with our name and branding. Our policy in that regard is to ask distributors of these custom images to create their own name and branding.

Images created with iso-localize can be considered official and distributed as such, using our name and branding.

To know more about iso-localize and how to use it, please read the dedicated tutorial.

After using the new Mint Community website for testing, with some new tests too, the last development ISO still had some minor bugs. Two were easy to fix, but the other two KDE ones have been a real pain. Well lets say they are very easy for a user to configure using system settings if you know where to look but to have them enabled by default is…. well… I gave up. KDE 4.4 now has new ways to generate the configs it wants after putting your configs there first. I’m sure it is just a bug, but it can wait till nest time.
I am uploading a new ISO to test via the Mint Community website testers.

Two new modules were implemented for the community website: moderation and ISO testing.

The moderation module

This module was developed in an effort to avoid spamming. It gives extended permissions to moderators, who can now delete ideas, tutorials and other things on the website. General rules, moderators and their activity are published at the following address:

http://community.linuxmint.com/user/moderators

The ISO testing module

This module was developed in an effort to improve the process of testing ISO images. Because of the way we used to work:

• It was hard for people to follow our progress
• It was hard for us to modify and improve our test cases
• It was taking too long for our editions to be tested

I’m setting up a new team of testers, visible here:

http://community.linuxmint.com/iso/team

Once all test cases are tested by at least one of them, I verify each test and approve the ISO for a public release. Compared to the past, this means an ISO will be tested by more people, and only require the approval of one person instead of two.

The progress of our testing is now also visible to everyone at the following address:

http://community.linuxmint.com/iso

We’re still dedicated to keep ISOs private until we’re fully happy with their quality. Ideally, I’d like to get to a stage where we have a large team of testers (between 20 and 30) who are 100% reliable, available most of the time and who fully understand the way we work. We need to be fast, but we also don’t want to lessen the quality of our testing by making it public. First, this would create a load on our development server that it could not handle, second, this would result in us getting too many reports and being unable to communicate on a one to one basis with testers to improve the way they understand our test cases, third, this would open the door to people distributing Linux Mint ISOs of bad quality and using them on their computers… and after all the efforts put into testing our system, we’d really would not like this to happen.

We’re committed to quality. In comparison, delays and deadlines have no importance. This new module will let you monitor our progress while we’re working on improving this quality.

Boo’s Mint 9 KDE i386 build #22 ISO is the first one to be tested using this new module. Ikey’s first Debian edition ISO could be next…