The Linux Mint Blog

After a long period of preparation and work on the mint tools we’re now entering phase 2: the migration towards the newly released Hardy base. Work has begun and the very first BETA of Elyssa was built today. Of course it’s highly unstable at this stage, it doesn’t fit on a CD and it’s full of rough edges. Things look very promising though and we should expect a first public BETA release within 2 weeks. We’ve had 6 months to think about this and almost everything is ready to be included so we should have a very smooth release.

Also, Octy and the Italian community translated the Daryna User Guide. The document should soon become available on all official mirrors.

Finally, Kronophage is working on the software portal and adding a lot of applications in it. The Elyssa section already features 145 applications. When finished the portal should contain around 1000 apps. Each application will feature a screenshot and we’re planning on using the same authentication system for both this portal and an upcoming home-made Brainstorm clone to encourage people to post comments, reviews and ideas online.

A lot of work has been put into mintMenu. In Elyssa this tool now comes in 16 different languages, with a configuration screen, improved drag & drop support in favorites, less delay and less memory usage. Each application also features a little context menu which can be used to automatically launch it at startup.

It’s also now possible to uninstall any application present in the menu by simply righ-clicking on it and selecting “uninstall”. A dialog box appears with the related packages and dependencies. This complements the easy installation of software provided by mintInstall and the software portal.

Finally, the “Other” and “System Tools” categories were merged into “Administration”. This makes the menu more compact and avoids the need for a scrollbar in the category pane.

Lars Peter Clausen, the main developer for mintMenu, is also porting this application from python to C. Although it was too late to include the C version in Elyssa, Lars’ latest version is very close to being stable and should hit the repositories some time after the release of Elyssa. The main advantage of porting mintMenu to C is a further reduction of the memory usage and extra speed gains both at startup and during the runtime.

We’ve experimented with Aurora GTK engines and created some futuristic themes. We’ve looked at Carbon and made something a lot of people liked but although a few themes ended up looking great we still haven’t found anything to replace the default artwork. So we’re now taking a different approach which consists of improving the Daryna artwork by making subtle changes to it. Have a look below and please give us as much feedback as possible on this.

This is how widgets (“widget” means graphical element. Buttons, progress bars, combos are widgets for instance) looked like in Daryna:

This is how these same widgets look like after we made some changes:

And these are the changes we made:

To illustrate the differences, here is mintUpdate running with the Daryna look:

And here is how it looks like with the changes:

I’m personally happy about the sliders taken from Clearlooks. That’s definitely an improvement IMHO. I’m not sure whether I prefer the gradients or the original for the tabbed folders. I like the lighter blue and the additional contrast but I’m afraid there’s too much contrast in the newer theme.. I also like the dotted separation between columns in the mintUpdate table. Finally, the highlighting (especially on the buttons) looks like a wave and that’s fine, but now that the contrast shows that more in detail, maybe we can opt for a straight highlight instead. Oh.. and note how widgets are still rounded, but not as much as before.

Please tell us what you think. Not just whether you like it or not, but in detail what you think is better, what you think isn’t, and why and how you would improve it. Don’t hesitate to save these pictures locally so you can quickly look at them and compare them in fullscreen mode.

PS: Other themes will be available as alternative choices, installed by default also.