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So Mint 4.0 might very well be called Daryna 🙂

Anyway… Celena should hit the download mirrors very soon now with only one BETA release preceeding the STABLE one.

With KDE and XFCE editions developped in parallels by Jamie Boo Birse and Merlwiz the team is going to be able to focus on Daryna “before” gutsy gets out! Of course, there is no way Daryna would be released before Gutsy, but the gap separating the two should be greatly reduced.

So far Daryna should simply be a merge of Celena’s and Gutsy’s innovations plus a few goodies such as mintServe and mintSupport.

New features in Celena: mintUpload, mintAssistant, PDF printing, stability and speed improvements, better base, new artwork.

New features in Gutsy: Compiz Fusion, Graphical Configuration Tool for X, Desktop improvements (deskbar, tracker, fast user switching),  2.6.22 kernel, AppArmor, better hardware support (Broadcom wifi chipsets for instance), more up to date package base (Thunderbird 2.0 etc..).

Daryna should compile all of these together.

New mint-tools currently in alpha or beta stage could be added as well or come in later on within  a Mint 4.1 release.

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In Bianca, the Firefox start page was linking to mintWifi and offline documentation. In Cassandra we introduced a flash animation with links to the main Mint sites. In Celena, the start page becomes online and for three purposes:

  1.  It will help us have a better idea of our user base. We’ll count the number of Linux Mint users by keeping track of the number of distinct IP addresses hitting this start page. We’ll be able to know about the most popular screen resolutions, and the worldwide repartition of users in terms of locations and languages.
  2. It will generate an other source of income for Linux Mint. The start page will include a Google seach bar which will generate extra money for the project through the Adsense program.
  3. It will allow us to put content and have it reached by users from a central online point. The Wiki proved to be inefficient at raising awareness of new tools and storing tutorials. We will use this start page at the basic entry point for all tutorials, videos, and user-centric documentation about Linux Mint.

In the long run we’ll know more about our user base, our users will know more about their operating system, and we’ll even get money out of it. Everybody’s happy.