Hi,
Very few bugs were found in Linux Mint 6 x64 RC1 and I’m happy to announce that RC1 users will not have to download the stable release. A few things happened however and the decision was made to include both Flash and Sun Java in 64 bit.
So far, x64 came with a 32 bit Flash plugin which was wrapped within nspluginwrapper. Although this prevented Firefox to crash it made Flash itself very unstable. Adobe recently released a Flash 10 plugin in 64 bit. We tested it and we’re happy to report that it works really well. It will replace the 32 bit plugin in Linux Mint 6 x64 Stable and be bundled directly with the browser without using nspluginwrapper.
Sun also decided to support X86_64 and recently released Sun Java 6 Update 12 build 03, which will replace OpenJDK in the stable release of Linux Mint 6 x64 Edition.
So you’ll be able to enjoy Flash and Java applets in full 64 bit… We usually don’t deviate from our RC, and very few things change after code-freeze, but we couldn’t pass the opportunity to see these two plugins run in 64 bit mode. I’m also looking at the possibility of including OpenOffice.org-base, it takes a bit of time to decide on the best packaging strategy, but we’re still really close to a stable release.
As always, we will not stick to any schedule our release dates and this will be released “when ready”. I hope you appreciate this is to achieve a better quality for our releases and I would like to thank all of you for your patience.
It will be the worth the wait, I promise 🙂
