After many sleepless nights and a lot of work I am delighted to announce that the first release candidate for Linux Mint 5 Elyssa was released and that it is now available for download. A lot of changes and improvements were made since Daryna so make sure to read the “What’s new in Elyssa” section of the Release Notes.

Links: Release Notes & Download mirrors

Please report bugs here in the forums: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=12393

I would like to thank the team for the hard work put into this, Exploder for his responsiveness and for all the testing he’s done over the week-end and Jernau, the artist who signed 100% of the artwork used in this released. Many thanks also to Carlos who’s still working on improving various parts of the website and to Kronophage who is rapidly adding applications to the Software Portal.

Have fun with the first ISO of Elyssa and don’t hesitate to send us comments and feedback.

CNR is now available for Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna. It’s free, it doesn’t require any registration and the client is open-source. To install it, install the “cnr-client” package from the Daryna repositories. You should then be able to install software from the CNR.com web portal.

The main advantage of CNR over APT and mintInstall is that it can handle commercial software and integrate transactions. For this reason it represents a nice addition to the Linux Mint desktop.

Links:
— Press Release: http://www.linspire.com/lindows_news_pressreleases_archives.php?id=240
— CNR.com: http://www.cnr.com/

Questions and comments are welcome.

Note: Support for the upcoming Linux Mint 5 Elyssa will follow shortly.

With each stable release of Linux Mint come two very important documents. The first one is the user guide. It’s a downloadable PDF eBook of about 100 pages which explains various aspects of Linux Mint. It starts with explanations on how to install Linux Mint, then it details how the Linux Mint tools work and how to make the best out of the desktop. It’s easy to read and covers both simple and advanced topics. It also gives details on the specificities of Linux Mint so no matter how experimented you are with Linux, you will definitely learn a few things by reading this guide.

The guide is currently available in English, in French and in Italian directly from the Start page. If you’re not using Linux Mint or if you start page is set to a custom address, you can download these guides from our download mirrors:

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/4.0/

The Release Notes consist of a web page which details information about a particular release. Release notes are mostly written for users of the previous release which are about to install a new release. They go through the new features and innovations of the new release, known issues that users should be aware of, and upgrade instructions may users decide to upgrade rather performing a fresh install. Linux Mint Release Notes are usually easy to read and interesting from a user’s point of view as they don’t only provide relevant information but also insist on new tools and features. For instance, by reading the release notes a user could get to know about a newly added console tool which wasn’t present in the last version nor documented in the user guide.

Linux Mint is indeed easy to use but not all its innovations and features always catch the attention of the user. If you like using Linux Mint and if you would like to know more about your desktop you should take the time to read both the User Guide and the Release Notes. For Mint users to make the best out of Mint the start page now links to these documents.

So happy reading everyone, and many thanks to Carlos Porto for this redesign on the start page.