About 50% of Linux Mint users use a language other than English.

So what happens to them when they run Celena BETA 020?

Well, as you probably know isolinux is only in English so their liveCD boots in English. Once they arrive on the desktop they click on “Install” and the installer appears.

The first screen of the installer asks them about their language.

If the user chooses “Spanish” (for instance) the installer immediately switches to Spanish. Later in the installation, the installer will also download necessary packages to support Spanish so when the user finishes the installation and reboots, his system starts in Spanish (this didn’t work in Cassandra and Celena BETA 018).

Thanks to this we can now only ship the CD in English (and save a lot of space on the CD for other applications) and the same time have a system which can run in virtually any language.

The only problem in fact is for people using the liveCD as a demo or as a tool rather than an installation medium.

We’re getting really close to releasing a second BETA for Celena. Things have been cleaned up, we’ve fixed many of the problems reported by the community and everything looks pretty stable.

A few more tests will be performed and we should expect a BETA release early next week.

A new command line tool is coming in Celena BETA 018 called “apt”. It’s a very simple addition which merges commands from apt-get, aptitude and apt-cache. It also doesn’t require the user to type “sudo” in front of the command.

This tool will make life easier for command line afficionados who used to type a lot of APT commands.

For instance instead of typing:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo aptitude reinstall gnome-utils

sudo aptitude show gnome-utils

You’ll be able to type:

apt update

apt upgrade

apt reinstall gnome-utils

apt show gnome-utils

Supported commands include:

  •  update
  • upgrade
  • dist-upgrade
  • dselect-upgrade
  • build-dep
  • check
  • install
  • remove
  • source
  • clean
  • autoremove
  • autoclean
  • search
  • show
  • changelog
  • reinstall
  • stats
  • depends
  • rdepends

As you can see there’s nothing new but it’s all about comfort. Of course if you prefer to use apt-get, aptitude and apt-cache they still will be there for you.