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Well there are a lot of things to please everybody.

The colors in the terminal are slightly changed and look a little bit more elegant. And when you use sudo the terminal not only asks for a password but makes its clear which password it asks for. This is a nice touch. For instance sudo dhclient used to say “Password:”, and it now says “[sudo] password for clem:”.

NTFS works out of the box via fstab so we don’t need mintDisk or NTFS-Config anymore.

Restricted Manager was massively improved and should handle a lot more hardware than before. Broadcom wireless cards should also be supported.

The installer installs security updates. Although this won’t be activated in Linux Mint it’s a nice feature for Ubuntu users.

Compiz Fusion is installed by default and will come with its configuration tool in Daryna.

Additional tools and gadgets were added such as Tracker, a fast-user switching applet, synchronization in tomboy notes (thumbs up to Tomboy for this excellent new feature by the way).

The new package base gives users access to a lot of new software: Thunderbird 2.0, OpenOffice 2.3, Gnome 2.20, kernel 2.6.22 etc..

With strong innovations from various project, the excellent work made by Ubuntu on Gutsy, the new mintUpdate and a strong Celena base Daryna looks very promising.

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Ubuntu made some great improvements in their latest release and Gutsy now handles NTFS support out of the box. This basically mean that fstab can take care of your Windows partitions and give you read and write access to them… no configuration needed. For this reason NTFS-Config and mintDisk won’t be present in Daryna. The mintDisk project was successful and quite popular among Linux Mint users. Although this means the end of this project it’s good news for users as NTFS support simply just got better.

The purpose of mintConfig was to give users a control center since Gnome didn’t have one. Gnome 2.18 introduced the Gnome Control Center and as it didn’t allow users to add items to it mintConfig was kept in Cassandra. This feature wasn’t very important though and the presence of both mintConfig and the Control Center made things look redundant. In Daryna only the Gnome Control Center will be present. The mintConfig project won’t die though as its XFCE variation is still very important to Merlwiz’ XFCE Edition, it will be reconverted to fit that desktop.

Finally, the Restricted Manager got improved in Gutsy and is now taking advantage of a new Ubuntu repository called “restricted”. Running our tests we found out this new Restricted Manager was able to successfully install restricted nVidia drivers and activate Compiz Fusion without needing any advanced manipulation by the user. We’re talking with Alberto Milone at the moment to see whether this new Restricted Manager can handle as many graphic cards as Envy currently does.

EDIT: Things go fast and after a few words with Alberto Milone, Envy will be present in Daryna. Although it’s a bit redundant with the Restricted Manager it should still be better at pulling the latest drivers and this should especially be important to ATI cards users. It will also work better on systems with tweaked xorg.conf or recompiled kernels. A poll will be organized in a few months to see whether users are happy enough with the new Restricted Manager or if they still heavily rely on Envy to make their graphics card work in Daryna.