While most of us are content with the Main and Light Editions, eagerly waiting on the next XFCE or KDE Community Editions, being seduced by the latest Fluxbox CE BETA or simply having fun with the Debian Testing based ISO… two brand new editions are being developed at the moment.

The miniCD CE is developed by Blahblah_x in the USA. It comes as a 350MB ISO which can be burnt on a miniCD in order to be able to fit in your wallet. It uses the Gnome desktop and comes with fantastic artwork. Beta 026 is being tested at the moment and we should expect a public BETA release very very soon.

The E17 CE is maintained by Maty from Costa-Rica and its artwork is being developed by Molom from Australia. This edition uses the Enlightenment desktop. Although no beta has been tested yet the E17 team has communicated a lot about the project and recently set up a blog which was added to the Linux Mint planet. According to the blog we should expect this edition to become stable this month.

I’ll go straight to what most people want to know: The KDE CE Edition will come as a 2nd BETA in the days to come. Although it’s extremely stable a few tiny issues need to be addressed prior to the release and as many changes were made since the first BETA release it looks wiser to give this release a week of community testing. I’ve already installed it on my laptop and I can tell all the KDE fans among us, this is definitely among the best KDE desktops I’ve ever got to see. If you liked Cassandra KDE CE, you’ll absolutely love this one.

mintBackup was released in Romeo and is currently being tested. Translations are also being made for the tool which already supports 5 languages.

The Fluxbox CE Edition, made in Romania by Shane, is ready to be released as a BETA.

The Debian-based ISO experimentation is finished and ready to be released as an ALPHA (technology preview).

The Fedora-based ISO experimentation is likely to be postponed for another 6 months as focus is moving towards the upcoming Linux Mint 5 release, translation of all the mint tools, the User Guide, and the development of an alternative to Giver (easy file-sharing across the network without any shares).

The 64bit ISO experimentation won’t start during this release cycle.

Clem

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