You probably know Maty as the leader of the Spanish-speaking Community. He’s also the maintainer of an upcoming community edition: Linux Mint E17 CE.

This new edition will come with the Enlightenment desktop and here’s a video made by the Mint E17 team to give you a little preview of it:

http://www.maty1206linuxeando.com/?p=779

One of the brand new mint tools scheduled to be included in Linux Mint 5 is mintBackup, a backup tool which lets you save the content of your home directory into a single file, which you can then easily restore on another partition/computer or wherever you want really.

The tool works fine and is fully stable. It will be packaged in the days to come and announcements will be made for the community to test and translate it.

As the preferred way of upgrading to a newer release is to perform a fresh installation from the CD, this tool will ease the process of migrating data and hidden configuration files.

Well, first of all… since we’re moving to a 6 month release cycle, shall we start calling Mint 5.0 “Mint 5”? What do you think?

Rhythmbox made huge progress and the reasons Amarok was chosen by Linux Mint as the default music player could now also apply to it.

It’s simpler to use than Amarok and it integrates better with Gnome. It’s also much smaller and only uses 12.2MB as compared to 144MB for Amarok. Switching to Rhythmbox could free up a lot of space on the CD and let us include more software within the default selection.

The main reason why Amarok was preferred to other players was because it was feature-rich but Rhythmbox seems to catch up and provides the following features:

  • Collection with automatic detection
  • Ipod support
  • Magnatune, Last.fm and Jamendo integration
  • CD Player
  • Notifications
  • Visualizations
  • Album artwork and lyrics downloaded from the Internet
  • Podcasts
  • Play count and rating system
  • Dynamic playlists
  • Internet radio

It’s not as smart as Amarok and doesn’t come with its intelligent “context” but it provides all the important features you would expect from a rich music player and with a much simpler interface.

By the time we’re finalizing Mint 5, Amarok 2.0 should be out and it might be an entire new story. So we can’t say for sure which player will be there by default in the next release of Linux Mint, but as true as Amarok didn’t have any real alternatives by the past, this is not the case anymore and we’ll keep a close eye on its competitors.