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The second (and hopefully last) BETA for Celena is out and available for download:

http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5322

http://www.linuxmint.com/celena-beta021.html

http://www.linuxmint.com/download.html

This release could potentially go gold and become the stable release itself.

Please test it as hard as you can so we can make sure all important bugs are gone 🙂

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A new tool called mintUpdate is being designed at the moment as a replacement to the Ubuntu Update Manager and its notifier.

The new tool should be ready for Daryna (Mint 4.0). It will look like the Ubuntu Update Notifier/Manager but with a few differences:

  • Security Updates will be tested by the Mint developers before they become available in mintUpdate
  • Updates will be sorted in different categories and given different levels of confidence and emergency
  • The Mint team will be able to input additional descriptions for the updates than the ones included in the packages themselves and these descriptions will appear in mintUpdate
  • Some security updates (kernel, xorg.. etc) will appear but not cause notification and they won’t be selected by default. Related risks will also be described to the user when they get selected.

The purpose of this tool will be to give automatic security updates to users without letting them perform uneducated upgrades.

In Cassandra and previous releases the Ubuntu Update Manager was bringing security updates but this could potentially break Linux Mint.

In Celena, stability was improved and the Ubuntu Update Manager was removed.

In Daryna we’ll introduce mintUpdate and provide the best out of both worlds: stability and security.

The great advantage of mintUpdate will also be that we’ll be able to do that without managing our own repositories, just by following and testing updates and providing meta-information to mintUpdate about them.

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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.