I can see that’s the question on everybody’s lips right now.. “when is Mint 7 going to be released?”. You probably saw on twitter that LinuxMint-7-DEV-052.iso was approved by Exploder and that it passed all the tests… and yet, no sign of it in the mirrors and no announcements on the website 🙂

I just want to ask the community for a little more patience. There’s very little left to do before the release but we can’t afford to skip any steps.

– LinuxMint-7-DEV-052.iso wasn’t fully tested by myself, and although it was maintained by me and approved by Exploder, I still want to make sure about a few things before I approve it myself.

– The Universal edition is going to be released at the same time as the Main edition, so that needs to get approved as well. I’m testing LinuxMint-7-Universal-DEV-007.iso right now. It looks good but I need to make sure it passes all the tests and that it’s easily upgradable to a Main Edition with a single click of the mouse.

– The User Guide needs to be updated and that will take a day or two.

– Once everything is fine, it will take up to 48 hours for the ISOs to propagate on the download mirrors.

After that, we’ll be ready for a release.

The upgrade path from Mint 7 RC1 is working fine. The upgrade path from Mint 6 will need to be tested and the upgrader will eventually need to be updated. This won’t hold the release though and we’ll make an announcement for Mint 6 users a few days after the release.

Please be patient and my apologies for the time this is taking.

I would like to thank all the people who helped translating Gloria. The response from the community was amazing.  The ISO is being finalized today and it includes full support for the Mint tools in 37 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese/Br, Portuguese/Pt, Arabic, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Galician, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Japanese, Ukrainian, Romanian, Slovenian, Catalan, Greek, Czech, Slovak, Marathi, Norwegian [nynorsk], Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Hindi, Finnish, Hebrew, Serbian and Belarussian.

Basque and Bosnian are also partially supported.

The ISO is estimated to be around 696MB including fonts for all the languages mentioned above to be displayed correctly out of the box.

The Universal Edition will also include the related language-packs for all these languages to work fully from the live DVD and in a fully localized Gnome environment.

I would also like to thank all the people who helped in testing the RC1 release of Linux Mint 7. 51 bug reports were catalogued and analyzed. And after triaging them all and releasing some fixes we’re now in a position to finalize the ISO.

The spreadsheet below shows the bugs which were looked at:

The ISO will now go into testing, and once approved by myself it will be submitted to the team and seeking Exploder’s approval for a stable release. We release when ready and if anything goes wrong we’ll just take more time so I can’t give an estimated release date but we’re getting close and we’ll make it worth the wait.

Again, many thanks to all who got involved. Many improvements were made since RC1, both in terms of bug fixes and language support and that is thanks to you.