The first BETA was released for Celena. The Community already started to give feedback. So far one major bug has been found:

You can’t have Firefox in any other language than English. Installing another locale requires packages which conflict with Firefox > 2.0.999. Because of dependencies this also affects AptOnCD and a few other packages.

The team is repackaging Firefox for it to go from version 2006-mint1 to 2.0.06-mint1 and become compatible with these packages.

Ubuntu 8.04 will be called “Hardy Heron” and will serve as the base for Linux Mint 5.0. With long term support from and 3 years of security updates Linux Mint 5.0 will offer a professional edition which will focus on stability and enterprise desktop.

In Bianca we were trying to support as many languages as we could translate isolinux in. In Cassandra we decided on a set number and prioritized the CD space for new applications. With only 3 languages left the Cassandra live CD supported English, Spanish and French.

In Celena and future versions of Linux Mint, the live CD will support only one language: English. This of course doesn’t prevent the installation of other languages and the compatibility of the distribution with them, it just means that by default only English will be installed and by default the liveCD will run in English.

All French and Spanish speaking users will have to do the same as people using other languages: Open the “Control Center” and add support for their language using the “Language Support” option.

It is indeed a tough decision, particularly at this stage now that the Spanish Mint Community is becoming so vibrant not to be able to give them Spanish “out of the box”.