Clem found a couple of bugs in the last dev-ISO. One was a plymouth text theme bug and another was a mint4win (Wubi) bug. The mint4win bug is the one causing issues. Do we leave it for now, fix it now or remove it? Clem is working on mint4win to find a fix. I have build a new ISO but it includes the broken mint4win, but I will wait for direction from Clem before uploading it or another version for developer testing.
With the amount of testing growing due to more Linux Mint versions and more pre-defined tests, Clem is talking about including 10 more testers in the developer team to speed up testing and reliability. This will not happen until the next Linux Mint release and the details of how or who will be chosen has not been decided yet. I am sure Clem will post more details about this in the not too distant future.

I have been posting a lot of progress report updates and other Linux Mint KDE related information/questions to the forums in the past but that limits Linux Mint KDE’s exposure potential feedback. From now on I will be posting to the Linux Mint blog to gather more support and feedback for Mint KDE.

Look here for the old forum progress report for Isadora KDE.

I have uploaded my Linux Mint KDE dev-022 ISO for testing by exploder, Clem and the other mint developers. Exploder’s testing has been positive so far. Clem had done some heavy/ detailed testing on the last development ISO and caught some final bugs that really tidy things up for a clean RC release. Hopefully the RC of Linux Mint 9 KDE will be so good it will also be the final ISO.

Hang in there Linux Mint KDE fans the wait will soon be over…

Cheers Jamie

Following the speed improvements coming with the previous update, additional fixes and features were added to the Software Manager today. We strongly recommend you update the mintinstall package to version 7.1.6 using the Update Manager.

Changes:

• When showing a package, the Software Manager now only lists the 10 latest reviews. A link appears at the bottom of the page which you can click to see all the reviews.
• When showing a category, the Software Manager now only lists the 500 most popular packages.
• The communication between The Software Manager and the APT daemon now takes place entirely in the background, making the UI more responsive, in particular when you click the “install” or “remove” buttons.
• A new option called “Open links in the web browser” was placed in the “Edit”->”Preferences” menu so you can choose whether to visit the packages websites within the Software Manager or using your own browser.
• Bug fix: Double-clicking or clicking multiple times on a category or any other element of the UI does not result in duplications of elements in the navigation bar anymore.

Notes:

On the computer on which the Software Manager is developed, it used to take 43 seconds for the “All packages” category to be displayed. Although the data is already loaded in memory, GTK is relatively slow and rendering 30,000 rows in a table takes a lot of time. This new version of the Software Manager now only shows the 500 most popular packages in the category. On the same computer, the “All packages” category is now displayed in 1.3 seconds.

We could argue that functionality was lost since browsing through categories now doesn’t show all the packages from that category anymore. But browsing through a long list of 30,000 rows isn’t particularly useful to anybody. We can still browse through the top-500 for each category and reach particular packages using the search feature.

This update introduces two new localized character strings which will be displayed in English until new translations become available through an update of the “mint-translations” package.