The latest ISO of Elyssa was 675MB and as it passed all basic tests I uploaded it for the team to test. Exploder is currently trying his best to find problems with it, and Husse and Wes are also giving him a hand. I won’t go through the changes as we’re getting really close to a public BETA release. I’ll document them within the release notes instead.

So far 12 points were risen. I don’t think any of them are real showstoppers. I’m waiting on some clarification and further testing on some of these points and also keeping an eye on the release of Firefox 3 RC1 (which I’d love to be present in the BETA instead of Firefox 3 Beta 5).

If everything goes fine we’re only a few days away from the first public Linux Mint 5 BETA.

So here we are, April is almost over and after a tough competition here’s what the All Stars table looks like:

1 Kronophage — 2.773 pts, 23 games. * Congrats! *
2 MeansWell — 2.064 pts, 19 games.
3 oOp — 0.620 pts, 6 games.
4 Pulpie — 0.491 pts, 3 games.
5 BlakeBird — 0.488 pts, 4 games.
6 Max — 0.321 pts, 3 games.
7 Marco — 0.278 pts, 3 games.
8 Toby_ — 0.194 pts, 2 games.
9 kancerman — 0.155 pts, 1 games.
10 sick — 0.131 pts, 1 games.
There were 14 users playing 69 games.

Congratulations to Kronophage. He was 3rd last month and is at the top of the table this month.

The Quizz bot will reset the stats on the 1st of May. If you haven’t joined the Quizz yet, it’s very easy:

– In Linux Mint: open up Xchat-Gnome (or Konversation) then when it’s connected join the #pimpmymint channel.
– On other platforms: Launch your favorite IRC client, connect to the irc.spotchat.org server and join the #pimpmymint channel.

Note: Make sure to register your nickname with Nickserv so that the Quizz bot can remember you the next time you log in

We’re at build #017 already and it’s been a very long week end. I’m exhausted 🙂 But the progress so far has been very good and the ISO is looking great. Firefox 3 and pulseaudio were included. Amarok was replaced by Rhythmbox. Brasero was added and Transmission version 1.11 is to be included.

An upstream bug in Rhythmbox was fixed for Jamendo to be supported and the functionality of pulseaudio was extended by adding support for Flash and the Pulse Audio Device Chooser. The multimedia system selector was also made visible.

PPPOE was added.

The software portal is 1/4 full and now counts 228 applications for Elyssa (thanks to Kronophage for this).

Support for MP3 encoding was added (previous versions of Mint only came with MP3 decoding).

Gnome was tweaked: Images can now be applied as wallpapers from the context menu and folders can be opened as root. When opening a folder as root, XFE is used instead of nautilus. A warning is given, the title of the window mentions “Root” and XFE looks different enough for users not to forget that they have a root window open 🙂

We’re now on a 2.6.24-16-generic kernel with CFS (completely fair scheduler) and with Gnome 2.22. The ISO is about 694MB large and fits on a CD.

As always there’s no ETA or release date planned. It will be released when ready, but as Hardy is out and I can see a lot of people are anxious to know when Elyssa will be out.. looking at what’s done and what’s left on our roadmap it’s reasonable to think we’ll be in a position to release a public BETA in about two weeks. Of course things happen and as any other edition the Main Edition will have to be tested by Exploder so don’t take my word for it, this is only an estimation.

Note on compatibility: A compatibility mode was added as a new boot entry, featuring nosplash, noapic, noacpi and irqpoll. Also, the light edition will come with grub instead of gfxgrub and without pulseaudio. We’ll make it very easy for Light Edition users to add codecs through a single mint file so the Light Edition will also act as an easy workaround for people whose computers have compatibility issues with gfxgrub.

Note on the start page and search plugin: I reviewed the TOS and looked at this in details. I’m afraid there isn’t much we can do to improve the layout of the search results. The google images plugin was given a distinct icon to differentiate it from the search one. Start pages were assigned on a per-release, eventually per-edition basis so we can provide users with more relevant information (user guide, links to release notes and bug report places, security warnings..etc). We’re starting to use google analytics also so I’ll be able to give more accurate stats about the Linux Mint user base for each release/edition. Info on why we’re modifying the search plugin and how to revert to the default one will be covered in the user guide, which will be accessible from the default start page.

That’s about it.. there are also visual improvements in the terminal and a great isolinux theme but I’ll keep that as a surprise 🙂 A lot more is to come but I don’t see anything that could wrong at this stage. I’ll post more news as I go along.