The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 7 “Gloria”.

Quick steps:

• Download the ISO.
• While it’s downloading look at the videos and the overview of the new features in Linux Mint 7, read the User Guide and make sure to quickly go through the known issues.
• After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5 (as described in the user guide).
• Burn the ISO at low speed and enjoy Linux Mint 7.

Introduction to Linux Mint 7:

The 7th release of Linux Mint comes with numerous bug fixes and a lot of improvements. In particular the menu system, the application manager and the upload manager now provide new features such as “Suggestions”, “Featured applications”, “SCP and SFTP support”. The underlying base of the operating system was also strengthened with a new adjustment mechanism which makes Linux Mint more robust and less vulnerable to Ubuntu package upgrades, and the introduction of virtual and meta packages which simplify upgrade paths and the installation of multiple desktop environments.

For a detailed overview of the new features and improvements included in Linux Mint 7, please read What’s new in Gloria.

Introduction to the Universal Edition:

The Universal Edition is a customized version of the Main Edition with the following differences:

• It comes as a liveDVD instead of a liveCD
• It comes with built-in support for 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, Belarussian and with partial support for Basque and Bosnian.
• It comes with no codecs, no support for restricted formats and no proprietary components.
• It features an extra item in the Sound & Video menu which launches the installation of all missing codecs via a built-in .mint file
• It uses a text-based version of Grub instead of the graphical grub-gfxboot which comes with the Main Edition.

The purpose of the Universal Edition is to bring a localized live system to non-English speaking users of Linux Mint and to facilitate the distribution of Linux Mint in countries where software patents are enforceable.

System requirements:

A minimum of 512MB of RAM is recommended. Once installed the system works fine with as low as 256MB RAM. The installation process deals with 2.5GB of data compressed on a 700MB CD and it can hang or fail on systems with less than 512MB RAM. If you have between 256MB and 512MB RAM you may have to try to install several times.

Important information and known issues:

For a complete list of known issues read the Release Notes.

The root password is now set as the same as the one chosen during the installation. A blog post will follow to explain why and how this was implemented.

If you’re using Mint tools in other distributions, make sure to turn off the adjustment system by editing /etc/linuxmint/mintSystem.conf.

Download Linux Mint 7:

You can download the Main Edition via torrent or via HTTP:

Size: 697MB LiveCD

MD5Sum: 64e2a290fb51f8e7a9d058355fe93d0e

Torrent download: http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/LinuxMint-7.iso.torrent
HTTP download: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=38

And for the Universal Edition:

Size: 1.3GB LiveDVD

MD5Sum: f50fe4665952c5abd887f403c6409963

Torrent download: http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/LinuxMint-7-Universal.iso.torrent
HTTP download: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=40

Europe:

• http://mirrors.cytanet.com.cy/linux/mint/stable/7/ (Cyprus)
• http://ftp.klid.dk/ftp/linuxmint/stable/7/ (Denmark)
• http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/mirrors/linux/linuxmint/stable/7/ (Greece)
• http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/stable/7/ (Ireland)
• http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/linuxmint/stable/7/ (Portugal)
• http://mirror.sov.uk.goscomb.net/linuxmint.com/stable/7/ (UK)

Northern America:

• http://mirror.amarillolinux.com/linuxmint/stable/7/ (USA)
• http://mint.ez.by/linuxmint.com/stable/7/ (USA)
• http://linuxmint.sourcemirrors.org/stable/7/ (USA)

Rest of the World:

• http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/linuxmint/stable/7/ (Australia)

Order Linux Mint 7 on CD/DVD:

Our partner on-disk.com ships Linux Mint 7 Worldwide for as little as $10. They also contribute $5.41 to Linux Mint for each CD/DVD sold.

Linux Mint 7 can be purchased as a liveCD/DVD, as a virtual machine or as a live media (Flash/SD/CF) from here.

Upgrade instructions:

To upgrade to Linux Mint 7 from Linux Mint 7 RC1, launch mintUpdate, enable the “dist-upgrade” option in the preferences window and refresh the list of upgrades. Make sure to apply all level 1 and level 2 upgrades. Among level 3 upgrades make sure to select gtk2-engines-aurora, gufw, smplayer, and nautilus-sendto.

An upgrade path for Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” users will be published in a few days.

Enjoy!

Have a lot of fun with “Gloria” and let us know what you think. Reviews will be answered and your feedback will be used to improve the distribution before the next release. We hope you enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it and we wish you a very nice experience with Linux Mint.

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.