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In Linux Mint 5 Elyssa mintInstall will gain support for APT and the GetDeb portal. MintMenu will also support quick uninstallation of applications directly from the Gnome menu. As Linux Mint 5 will be based on an LTS Ubuntu release focus is on consolidating what’s already working and we’re being quite conservative in terms of new innovations. However, plans are starting to emerge for Linux Mint 6, which should come in about 7 or 8 months. In particular, mintInstall should gain the following features:

– CNR support
– simplification of the .mint protocol (in particular, when a .mint only refers to one .deb)
– Graphical interface for browsing the catalogue directly from the desktop, and for voting, commenting and basically doing what’s already possible online at linuxmint.com/software
– Support for uninstalling applications
– Support for “requesting” new applications

We’ll talk about this again and you’ll probably hear more and more about this after Linux Mint 5 was released. As for Linux Mint 5 itself, mintInstall is almost ready for it and at this stage all it’s missing is an eventual QT frontend to replace the GTK one under KDE.

Ideas and comments are welcome 🙂

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One of the big components of the Mint desktop is Firefox. In the upcoming Linux Mint 5 Elyssa, Firefox 3 will be installed by default. Of course, this new version of the popular browser will bring many new features and a better looking interface, but did you know it was using far less memory than the current version?

http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/

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If you haven’t already done so, have a look at the Gnome 2.22 release notes. As usual the latest release of Gnome comes with a lot of subtle improvements which are described and illustrated in the release notes:

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.22/

Although some of the applications that are part of the Gnome project aren’t included in Linux Mint by default, a lot of these upstream improvements will directly affect your user experience in the upcoming Linux Mint 5 Elyssa planned for release in May.