Whether you’re familiar with it or not you probably heard of Launchpad, a web application which provides bug-tracking, translation, code hosting, and a lot of other cool features to many open-source projects. Among other projects, Launchpad is heavily used by the Ubuntu distribution.

Linux Mint is growing and it doesn’t have any defined infrastructure to keep track of bugs and to coordinates translations. So a request was made to add it as a distribution in Launchpad:

https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/14929

And as an experiment, the youngest Mint project (mintUpdate) was added in Launchpad:

https://launchpad.net/mintupdate

You can go to the launchpad page for mintUpdate and follow progress or report new bugs. You can also help in translating it into new languages or see what is planned for future releases.

Hopefully this experiment will be a success and we’ll be happily using Launchpad for various aspects of our distribution.

The very first podcast dedicated to the Linux Mint distribution released its first episode. Congratulations to Sherry and Marc:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=38338

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.