The Debian Edition experiment will be released in the days to come as an ALPHA. Why as an ALPHA? Because it is not intended to be used as your main desktop but to give an overview of what a Debian base would provide for the Linux Mint distribution.

The release will be targeted at IT enthusiasts only, in the form of a liveCD without an installer.  The reason why there will be no installer is simply because it would require efforts and time to write one and it wouldn’t actually add much to the experimentation. The dev-team also wanted to focus on two other experimentations (a Fedora based ISO and a 64bit edition) and developing a liveCD installer seemed unreasonable at this stage.

The absence of the installer also means this edition can not be considered stable, or even beta, since some of its functionality is missing. A single ALPHA release is planned in the days to come and should be followed by the stable release of Daryna KDE Community Edition.

One of the things Linux Mint has been really bad at, since the beginning, was at providing users with satisfying ways to download its releases. Very few mirrors were available and they were manually synchronized with the main server. This will hopefully change with Linux Mint now supporting rsync and developing a new network of download mirrors.

By Monday, the new system should be in place and we should already see 3 new mirrors become available:

– University of Crete (Greece)
– ploppGROUP Internetservices (Germany)
– Heanet (Ireland)

The biggest difference of course is that these new mirrors won’t simply mirror a particular release but they should stay available all the time and for future releases as well. If you’re living in one of these countries this will probably come as very good news to you. If you don’t and you happen to know about mirrors please tell them about us and that we’re looking for them.

Somewhere in Australia, Jamie “Boo” Birse is working hard on the KDE edition of Linux Mint. The system is stable and ready and a few final glitches need to be resolved. Among the changes that were made by Boo in the latest ISO, is a complete new look and feel based on the black artwork by Agust (also used by the Main Edition) but with the Gadi blue logo replacing the traditional one.

Have a look: