A new version of mintUpdate is coming very soon. Among the improvements, the graphical user interface has been completely revamped and a new screen lets you visualize the history of applied package updates.

Most Mint tools come with a big Mint logo and are called mintSomething. As most of them are innovative and provide features that are not present in other distros/OSes this stresses the fact that they were developed by us and contributes to make our distribution more popular. It also has negative effects as it lessens the chances for these tools to be adopted outside of Linux Mint. Finally, it probably makes more sense for the user, and so for the quality of our desktop, to call our tools depending on what they provide more than with a mintName.

I have to say… I really don’t know what to think of this right now, I’m hesitating. I can’t promise I’ll go with the majority vote on it, in the end I’ll do what I think is best anyway, but it would definitely help if I could get people’s opinion on this.

[poll=5]

I’ll release mintUpdate 2.8 in Romeo under the name “Update Manager” and without branding. The interface looks less minty but more professional. I’d like to know what people think before I do that, and after they got a chance to see the new interface.

Also, and although this is marked as a Mint 6 Felicia improvement, since Elyssa is an LTS with rolling aspects, I hope you’ll soon be able to enjoy the ability to see the history of applied updates. It’s a very nice improvement and I hope you’ll like it.

A few improvements were made to mintInstall:

– When installing an application, it now automatically detects the best strategy and the best repositories to use. As a consequence it’s much faster than it was in Daryna (this was already the case in Elyssa) but it’s as user-friendly too. It doesn’t ask you to make that confusing choice between default and local repositories anymore. If the mint file defines repositories, it uses them in conjunction with the mintsystem ones. If it doesn’t it looks for the packages in your own repositories. If it finds them it uses your repositories (no apt updates required), it it doesn’t it uses mintsystem’s.

– After installing an application a little dialog used to pop up.. saying “success”. This was redundant and not particularly useful. It was removed and the main window’s state is now updated to reflect on the result.

– In the frontend, if an APT search returns no result, the result dialog says “No result” instead of appearing blank.

– In the frontend, if you type anything in the textfiel, the value of the textfield is replicated in the other tabs.. a bit like the search plugins in Firefox, you don’t have to retype the same thing every time you change tabs anymore.

– Translations: Bulgarian was updated, Czech and Catalan were added.

Note: If you want to get mintInstall 4.0 without using Romeo you can get the deb package here: http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/romeo/m/mintinstall/mintinstall_4.0_all.deb

Enjoy 🙂

– 60% of Linux Mint users are running version 5 Elyssa. On the week of the release that number quickly came up to a rough 50% and has been slowing going up since.

– Flash 10 Beta 2 (10.0.525) was added to the Romeo repositories. Please report your experience with it so we can decide whether or not to add it to the Elyssa repositories before version 10 stable is out.