Linux Mint 5 Elyssa RC2 (BETA 048) was released today. It comes with the brand new Firefox 3 RC1, Flash 10, improved printing and bluetooth support and a lot of bug fixes. The changes are described here in the forums: http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=12853

Links: Release Notes & Download mirrors

Please report bugs here in the forums: http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=12853

This time I would like to thank not the team but the community itself. You’ve been great at reporting bugs and describing issues and annoyances with RC1 (BETA 032). The quality of your feedback was outstanding and it really helped us making Mint 5 better.

Have fun with this better Elyssa and don’t hesitate to send us comments and feedback. The Stable release should come in a week or two and after that we should be looking at the first x64 or KDE ISOs.

A new website, similar to gnome-look.org and maintained by the people behind opendesktop.org, was made available for us, for our artists and for our community, to gather icons, wallpapers, splash screens and artwork in general specific to our distribution. This new website is LinuxMint-Art.org and it’s available here: http://www.linuxmint-art.org

I would like to thank McLovin, from the MintArt project, thanks to whom this was made possible and I would like to encourage everybody to participate in making this website an excellent resource for our community.

Note: The BETA for today’s “potential/eventual” (as it needs approval from Exploder first) release is already built, but I will make sure to add this website as a predefined Firefox bookmark before Mint 5 goes final.

I’ll go through the details later on but I can already confirm that there will be a second BETA release for the Main Edition of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa. If things go as planned and provided Exploder agrees to release it, I’m hoping to have it ready and available for download on Monday the 26th of May.

A huge number of changes were made since BETA 032 so we couldn’t afford to go towards a stable release without having a second BETA release tested by the community.

Among the major changes:

– Firefox 3 upgraded to RC1.
– A lot of bugfixes (I’ll detail these in a later post)
– A lot of changes in the package base (I’ll detail this as well).

I’ve also cleaned a lot of things and the ISO is currently 630MB… Of course it will get bigger as we approach the BETA release as there are things I also want to add (spell checkers for instance).