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.

The XFCE and the E17 Community editions won’t make it for Christmas. The Fedora-based ISO won’t make it either and the 64bit ISO planned for Daryna will be cancelled.

The KDE Community Edition is almost stable though and it’s looking great. If it wasn’t for a few tiny little things it would be released already.

The miniCD and Fluxbox Community Editions are almost ready and should be released as BETA.

The Debian-based ISO is almost ready and will be released as an ALPHA.

Finally, Firefox should be updated to version 2.0.0.11 very soon.

The Mint Community has its celibrities and one of them is just after creating a blog. If you’ve been spending some time on the forums or in youtube you probably know Adler and the videos he produces of his desktop. Expect to see a lot of 3D effects and videos from his new blog which was added to the English section of the Planet.

Another blog was also added to the Planet. Written by John, The “Mint Connection” is a blog dedicated to polls and reflexion on how to improve Linux Mint. The first poll is already active and ask people for their favorite tool among mintInstall, mintUpdate, mintDesktop, mintAssistant, mintUpload, mintWifi and mintMenu. If this blog was to become popular it would gather a lot of interesting data and help the dev team to know more about the community’s needs.

Enjoy these 2 new blogs. The Planet keeps getting bigger, providing us with more frequent and interesting articles.

http://linuxmint.com/planet/index.php|
http://jjmacey.net/blog/
http://mintconnection.blogspot.com