In Linux Mint 5 Elyssa mintInstall will gain support for APT and the GetDeb portal. MintMenu will also support quick uninstallation of applications directly from the Gnome menu. As Linux Mint 5 will be based on an LTS Ubuntu release focus is on consolidating what’s already working and we’re being quite conservative in terms of new innovations. However, plans are starting to emerge for Linux Mint 6, which should come in about 7 or 8 months. In particular, mintInstall should gain the following features:
– CNR support
– simplification of the .mint protocol (in particular, when a .mint only refers to one .deb)
– Graphical interface for browsing the catalogue directly from the desktop, and for voting, commenting and basically doing what’s already possible online at linuxmint.com/software
– Support for uninstalling applications
– Support for “requesting” new applications
We’ll talk about this again and you’ll probably hear more and more about this after Linux Mint 5 was released. As for Linux Mint 5 itself, mintInstall is almost ready for it and at this stage all it’s missing is an eventual QT frontend to replace the GTK one under KDE.
Ideas and comments are welcome 🙂
You’re doing a good job, mate !
Clem,
You must incorporate the dist-upgrade in the minstall.
Great job!
Clem, you always recommend against upgrading the distro because of the issues it creates. Why not write a tool that updates Mint safely by preserving the home folder but wiping the rest and installing over it, so really its not updating its doing a fresh install, but from a user’s perspective it seems like an update.
great job with mintinstall =)
i was also wondering about the future of it…
i read that packagekit will be in the future of many mayor distros, so i think we got to prepare also for this.
after reading that “packagekit” will bee included in fedora 9 and is now in foresightlinux along with gnome 2.22 http://www.foresightlinux.org/news.html
it might also be used in ubuntu after hardy… so this might affect directly mint.
more here:
http://packagekit.org/
and a nice presentation from fosdem08 (his bashing is entertaining and in many stuff he is right):
http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/public/introduction-to-packagekit.pdf
perhaps in conjunction to belovedmonster’s suggestion, a tool to tell you what non-linux-mint core programs are installed?
In other words, a list of what programs the user installed, beyond those that came with the mint installation.
I would find a human-readable list like this very useful, since I frequently switch from Mint to KDE Mint to Mint 4, to Ubuntu Studio on my other partition, etc.
And maybe that human-readable list could someday be turned into a mint-install readable list, so that upgrading = keep home folder, keep list of installed applications, wipe hard drive (except home folder and list), install new distro, use list+mintInstall to install new versions of all previously-installed programs.
Dear belovedmonster, try installing your home directory in a separate partition. That way when you do a fresh install, nothing is lost.
Please include the number version in the portal!
Sorry, I guess that my last post is badly worded.
I asked that the software version to appear on the portal.
MintInstaller Says:
Dear belovedmonster, try installing your home directory in a separate partition. That way when you do a fresh install, nothing is lost.
I am a newbie. Where can I find instructions on how to install my home directory in a separation partition?
Why the continued insistence on CNR? It’s not widely respected, and likely to turn away more users than it attracts? Linspire has perhaps the worst reputation in all of Linux.
Also, is there going to be anything addressing the CNR “double-install” problem, where you install from CNR, and then 30 seconds later updater tells you there’s an updated version of the package you just installed already in your repository, and would you like to update it?
It just worries me to no end, this continued insistence on CNR integration. I fear that serious users will avoid Mint like the plague because of it. Of course, I hope I am more than wrong, but I have (and have had for some time) a *very* bad feeling about this. Is it simply a kickback from CNR for referrals? If so, I would think your excellent name in the community is worth more than a taint from being in bed with Linspire would bring, in the long run 🙁
I mean no disrespect, but I’m *terribly* concerned about this, and haven’t recieved an answer when I’ve brought these issues up before…
Include updating of software installed by mintInstall.
I think all that are good stuffs, but would prefer
the steps in terminal
These taste wonderful and are a great way to use up lots of zucchini. ,