Ok, we now have an official home for the art-team blog, and the “Wallpaper of the Week”. We have moved, to the official Mint Blog site, and now things will be much better integrated with the rest of the web sites. There will be more to follow, as we get everything worked out, and finish the set-up, I just wanted to let everyone know what is going on.

Link to the review: http://pariah73.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/linux-mint-5/

Pariah wrote a review of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa and focused on some of the new features. A very nice article which brings some good feedback and rises some interesting points.

Comments on the review:

– Pariah said “There is a talented Linux Mint fan out there who just started making his own artwork and it just had that perfect Minty look–polished and elegant..and minty!”

–> That must be Jernau. I’m not entirely sure what happened in our community and what created that snow-ball effect but the mintArt group initially created by Carlos Porto and Nicksavel eventually lead to a community-wide effort where a lot of people ended up making wallpapers for Linux Mint and posting them on the forums. McLovin stepped up as the new “artwork coordinator” of some sorts (we’re not very good at making titles :)) and we now have a portal dedicated to Linux Mint related artwork here: http://linuxmint-art.org/. We’re also lucky that a lot of talented artists decided to join our community, in particular Jernau signed 90% of the artwork that comes with Elyssa. So the credit goes to the community here. McLovin will soon take part to this blog and post the results of what is already famous in the forums as the “Wallpaper of the Week”. In my opinion, the reference on the desktop market, when it comes to artwork, is Apple and Fedora. I still think we’re behind compared to these two desktops but we’ve been progressing fast and Linux Mint is not only looking mature and professional, it now has an active community which contributes a lot of artwork. Congratulations to all the people who are involved in this!

– Pariah said “There are all new wallpapers which is a nice change (sorry but I just didn’t like most of the default set on Daryna) and a new gtk engine-Aurora.   Every wallpaper is available in wide-screen.  Gion icon set comes installed by default now.  A couple of new themes are Carbon and PepperMint…also there is a WildMint but the Windoze blue border horrified me on sight.”

–> We improved a few things such as the Daryna theme (which is now called Elyssa) and we included new themes and new engines, but again credit goes to the community who showed a lot of interest in that area and gave us a lot of feedback. We didn’t have Windows in mind while making the WildMint borders blue… but if it brings unpleasant memories we’ll change it in the future. What do people think about this?

– Pariah said “This uninstall from the MintMenu feature is so wonderful because it spares me much of the hassle of removing programs I don’t want.  Additionally, some great news on the Mint Menu is that it is using far far less resources memory-wise than in Daryna.   I actually had MintMenu on Daryna removed because of the load it placed on my memory.  No longer!   Mine went from 100MB to about 29MB!!  Good enough to make me happy because I had always liked the MintMenu (some do, some don’t; I know!)”

–>  Lars Peter Clausen made some radical improvements to mintMenu which IMHO was already the best desktop menu at the time. The uninstall feature is quite nice and was added after Lars implemented the “Launch when I log in” feature 🙂

– Pariah said “Of course, as usual the MintInstall is a great application for installing packages quickly and painlessly.  In addition to it just being a good package to begin with, Clem and gang improved on this as well by making options for installing deb and apt packages through the MintInstall as well!  Dependencies aren’t always resolved but it is still a way to get the latest and greatest in the bleeding edge world.”

–> That’s the problem with .deb packages, they don’t solve dependencies problems. This problem only concerns GetDeb though and not the Mint portal or APT. Adding support for APT and GetDeb was a small step forward to improve mintInstall. We’re planning radical improvements for Mint 6 and a lot of development on the client side, I’ll talk about this more in the future.

– Pariah said “To help folks remember they might be working in root now, a different browser comes up..Xfe…It looks a fright but it is supposed to be nothing like Nautilus so one can remember they are in root.  Good plan for now…hopefully in a release or two that quietly disappears.”

–> I completely agree.. XFE looks horrible, yet different.. so mission accomplished for Mint 5 but we’ll definitely try and improve the looks (or find a better way to provide the same functionality) for future releases.

– Pariah said “Changing Applications:  Serpentine and Sound Juicer were both replaced.  Now Brasero is installed (which I love) and so is Rhythmbox (which I despise).  Kudos for installing Brasero but Rhythmbox just had to go..and fast.  I have never had anything but problems with it all four times I have tried it, on four different distros…and if I remember right, it was a different issue each time too! lol…It’s just buggy as all get out and it crashes so much, SafeAuto wouldn’t insure it.  Guess what I tested out the “uninstall” feature on first! lol”

–> It’s not the first time I hear people say that and at the same time I truly believe Rhythmbox is the best option for the Main Edition’s desktop at this time. I’d love to get people’s opinions about this (please describe bugs if any and how to reproduce them as my first approach to solve this problem would be to fix things in rhythmbox or follow their resolution upstream).

– Pariah said “Firefox 3 is the default webbrowser (of course, accompanied by Thunderbird)  I am an Opera fan myself but I could sure appreciate the lower memory consumption and better speed on this fox.”

–> Opera 9.5 is in the repositories. It’s a fantastic browser but it’s not open-source so it couldn’t have made it in the default selection. Especially considering the quality and popularity of Firefox.

Conclusion:

Many thanks to Pariah for this review and I’m interested in hearing from the community on the points she made. Especially about Rhythmbox and to a lesser extent about the blue WildMint window borders.

We just received a picture from AvanceIT, a Linux Mint partner based in the UK:

From http://www.linuxmint.com/partners.php: AvanceIT specialize in IT support for home users and small businesses. They make a donation of Uk£10.00 Sterling for each installation they make of Linux Mint.