The Linux Mint Blog

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 is  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 🙂 Time will tell, but from what I can see things look extremely promising.

We’ve changed a few things on the IRC and we hope you’ll like it.

The Linux Mint IRC channel isn’t dedicated to provide community support anymore. The forums do that much better. Of course users are still welcome to ask questions but we would like the channel to become an active place where users can chill out, have fun, meet other users and talk about just anything they want. #linuxmint is becoming a social thing, a community chat room.

Now, the only thing you can’t do in #linuxmint is to offense others (bad language, offensive comments/topics…etc). Linux Mint is an operating system and anybody can launch XChat-Gnome or Konversation and be directly connected to the chat room. We want to keep the place safe and nice. Some users are under 18 and others don’t necessarily want to see rude talks. So for people who don’t want to have to watch their language we made #pimpmymint. In this channel you won’t have to excuse your French, you can swear as much as you like and we know you do (especially while playing the Quizz).

Xchat-Gnome and Konversation connect directly to #linuxmint where people can have nice and polite talks.

#pimpmymint is also available for people who want to play the Quizz or who don’t want to have to watch their language.

Here are a few commands for people who are new to the IRC:

/nick john (changes your name to john)
/nick john_away (changes your name to john_away, people usually do that to show they’re not here but stay connected so they can see what happened when they come back)
/join #pimpmymint (joins the channel #pimpmymint)
hello (writes “hello” in the chatroom)

And here are a few commands if you play the Quizz (on #pimpmymint, 18+ please):

!ask (starts the quizz)
!revolt (skip to next question)
!rank (show the score of the current game)
!allstars (show the all star table = people who won games)
mona lisa (submits “mona lisa” as an answer)

You can also register your name with the IRC server so your nickname is then owned by you:

/msg nickserv register john 12345titi (registers the nikname John with the password “12345titi”)
/msg nickserv identify john 12345titi (identifies as John using the password “12345titi”)

Questions and comments are welcome.
By the way, don’t hesitate to leave your IRC client run in the background and stay connected even if there’s no one or no activity. The chat room comes to life when 2 people start chatting and sometimes it can be quite interesting. You can set your IRC client to blink when things happen so it stays in the system tray until the chat room comes to life .

Have fun and see you on the IRC!

Clem