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

1 blahblahx — 0.447 pts, 4 games. * Congrats! *
2 clem — 0.376 pts, 3 games.
3 Kronophage — 0.344 pts, 4 games.
4 GuttaMan — 0.294 pts, 3 games.
5 TheFishy — 0.213 pts, 2 games.
6 yoz-y — 0.187 pts, 1 games.
7 Zwopper — 0.113 pts, 1 games.
8 FastZ — 0.105 pts, 1 games.
9 RedJak — 0.103 pts, 1 games.
10 Catze — 0.076 pts, 1 games.

Congratulations to BlahblahX. Being at the top requires a lot of skills (time, luck, a bit of knowledge…etc) πŸ™‚

I guess the Quizz bot will reset the stats on the 1st of April.

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 πŸ™‚

I’d like to get everybody’s opinion on this:

As you can see it looks far more professional (shall I say boring?) than the theme we’re currently using. It’s all grey and squary looking but it has two huge advantages:

  • It looks pro.
  • A lot of space is gained on the screen (the widgets take much less and that leaves more space for content). In particular the difference isΒ  impressive in mintMenu and in Firefox.

Tell us what you think. There’s no doubt we’ll include this as a choice in Elyssa but I’d like to know what people think about this becoming the default theme.

Clem

With Ubuntu releasing 8.04 “Hardy” BETA we took a look at the new base and upgraded a Daryna desktop to it to see how it behaved.

The desktop seems faster and more responsive. The kernel is 2.6.24, it comes with CFS, the new linux scheduler and chances are this improves things a lot. Gnome 2.22 also seems snappier and comes with its own compositing effects so you can achieve minimal effects without actually using Compiz (we’re planning to add this to mintDesktop so you can configure this easily).

Rhythmbox 0.11.5 handles Magnatune, Jamendo, Last.fm, online radio, iPod support, podcasts, library monitoring, CD ripping, lyrics, album artwork etc… and it should replace both Amarok and SoundJuicer.

Firefox 3.0 comes with smart bookmarks, uses less RAM than its predecessor and integrates better with Gnome. The system gets the popular PulseAudio and PolicyKit frameworks. Xorg 7.3 provides better auto-configuration and Ubuntu improved the screen configuration tool. Brasero and Deluge should replace Serpentine and the Gnome integrated features for disc burning and torrent downloading. Inkscape isn’t part of the default selection but the new version comes with native PDF support.

Since Daryna most of the mint tools were improved but also localized and made more robust. We focused on stability for this release and although we postponed ambitious designs and innovations for Mint 6 a lot of small yet noticeable improvements made their way into the Mint 5 roadmap. It looks like this also happen with Ubuntu and with quite tangible improvements coming from upstream, in particular from the Gnome and the kernel projects.

We were already excited by the LTS aspects of Mint 5 (which we’re planning to extend, not as a complete rolling distro, but in order to guarantee that most desktop applications stay up to date), by the performance gains of the new mintUpdate, by the new features of mintMenu and mintInstall, by the overall GUI, localization, and stability improvements of our tools. Now we’re seing this new scheduler in action and a brand new Gnome deskop, already nicely integrated together by Ubuntu. What a release Elyssa is going to be! After we merge all these improvements together, Mint 5, and Hardy before it, are going to be real killer releases!

We’ve seen a lot of innovations on the desktop for Linux Mint 4.0, this time the release is going to be equally innovative but with more maturity. If we could ever make the desktop which was going to kill Windows, then this would be it. Ladies and gentlemen prepare yourselves for one of the greatest Ubuntu releases and right after that for one of the best desktops you ever got to see.

Ok, maybe I’m overdoing this a little πŸ™‚ Time will tell, but from what I can see things look extremely promising.