mintDesktop 1.6 and mintInstall 2.7 were released yesterday:
What do you mean “i18n”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization
In an i18n’d application all sentences and words that the user can see are in a separate file dynamically loaded depending on the locale used by the user. In other words if you add a Swedish translation file to it.. It starts showing in Swedish in your Swedish environment.. Automatically 🙂
The translatable items and the program logic are separated so that anybody can easily translate the application.
All mint tools are going through this at the moment. MintUpdate and mintInstall are already i18n, mintDesktop is getting i18n’d as we speak.
Launchpad will coordinate translation efforts for these projects.
Tricky upgrade path to Gutsy…
Gutsy should be released tomorrow and we will be looking at a brand new Ubuntu. A lot of great innovations have been implemented by the Ubuntu developers and a lot of new software made it to their repository. Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3 and Thunderbird 2.0 for instance are among them.
The Mint developers also put a lot of efforts into modernizing their tools.
MintInstall and MintDesktop should come with significant changes. MintUpdate is ready and should be included in Daryna. And finally, innovations that were put into Celena will be ported to Daryna as well, this includes for instance mintAssistant and mintUpload.
Development on Daryna itself begun and the upgrade path to Gutsy proved very tricky.
Based on the 7.10 RC release the team didn’t manage to get a stable system yet. Users are recommended to avoid upgrades to Gutsy. Among other known issues Firefox and Gdebi stop working… and sudo causes problems.
With Gutsy final being released tomorrow Daryna should become usable in the days to come and we should expect a BETA release soon enough.
The challenge for the Mint team will be the upgrade path which will eventually determine whether it’s possible to upgrade from Celena to Daryna and whether Mint still uses Ubuntu to produce the liveCDs or start generating its own.
In brief.. things look very promising but there are still a few uncertainties.