Now.. you’re probably wondering what this is about? 🙂

As Linux Mint is becoming stable and as we’re coming to a point where we have achieved our main goals on the desktop we’re slowing down the release frequency (no Linux Mint 4.1 is planned for instance) and we’re spending more time on other editions. Coming up in the next few months we have 5 community-driven projects:

– KDE/mini KDE Edition
– XFCE Edition
– E17 Edition
– Fluxbox Edition
– miniCD Edition

So far, only two editions are officially maintained (Main and Light) and that freed our hands to invest a bit of time in R&D. So here we are now and here is what we’ll be looking at in the near future:

– Debian Edition
– Fedora Edition
– 64bit Main Edition

We started with the Debian Edition. The first reason was to show that the technology we develop is distinct from the upstream components it sits on top of and that, the same way we can change Evolution to Thunderbird, we can change Ubuntu to Debian or to Fedora and still make a great desktop. The second reason is simply that we did try most alternative components and that our selection was driven and justified by the tests we made.. so we could, for instance, appreciate the pros and cons of including Amarok instead of Rhythmbox and decide which solution was the most appropriate. This is true to a certain extent, and although we decided on Ubuntu to be our base, this decision was made without experimenting other bases. We do not plan to make our own base and do not plan to change our base to Debian or Fedora, but experimenting with these new bases will give us a better appreciation of the pros and cons related to using Ubuntu and eventually a better idea of what can be achieved in the long term or in case Ubuntu goes towards a direction we do not want to follow. And finally, the third reason was simply because we’re nerds and when we see the two brilliant distributions that Debian and Fedora are… we just can’t help ourselves to start building on top of them 🙂

So where are we at the moment with the Debian based edition?

– We have a liveCD.
– It’s based on Debian Testing
– It runs mintUpdate, mintDesktop and mintMenu
– We’re currently adding an installer to it… Ubiquity, Anaconda.. something else.. we’re having fun and experimenting 🙂

When we’re finished with this we don’t want people to use that as their main OS, but we’d like to get feedback and see how the desktop develops after a few months and how it follows the constant flow of updates brought by Debian.

Already we can tell you that much: It’s missing a lot of Ubuntu innovations (well you would have guessed that…) but oh my God … it’s so much faster!

So here we go, a little edition just to make a point, to us and to others, 100% R&D for the nerdiest of our beloved users 😉

Note: And this might come out faster than you think…

Clem

Daryna was officially released. If you haven’t downloaded it already please use the torrents. I you have don’t forget to seed for others to be able to get faster download speeds.  Enjoy the latest version of Linux Mint.

The following community editions are to follow:

• KDE/miniKDE
• XFCE
• Fluxbox
• E17

Then we’ll probably release alpha experiments of:

• 64bit
• Debian-Testing Based Edition
• Fedora 8 Based Edition

The next mint tool being developed should be a tool that lets the user upgrade from one release to another.

There should not be any Linux Mint 4.1. Time should be invested in strengthening our structures, our documentation and in experimenting in different editions before we get to the much anticipated Linux Mint 5.0.

With Linux Mint 5.0 we’ll start addressing the enterprise market as well.

Clem

Ubuntu made some great improvements in their latest release and Gutsy now handles NTFS support out of the box. This basically mean that fstab can take care of your Windows partitions and give you read and write access to them… no configuration needed. For this reason NTFS-Config and mintDisk won’t be present in Daryna. The mintDisk project was successful and quite popular among Linux Mint users. Although this means the end of this project it’s good news for users as NTFS support simply just got better.

The purpose of mintConfig was to give users a control center since Gnome didn’t have one. Gnome 2.18 introduced the Gnome Control Center and as it didn’t allow users to add items to it mintConfig was kept in Cassandra. This feature wasn’t very important though and the presence of both mintConfig and the Control Center made things look redundant. In Daryna only the Gnome Control Center will be present. The mintConfig project won’t die though as its XFCE variation is still very important to Merlwiz’ XFCE Edition, it will be reconverted to fit that desktop.

Finally, the Restricted Manager got improved in Gutsy and is now taking advantage of a new Ubuntu repository called “restricted”. Running our tests we found out this new Restricted Manager was able to successfully install restricted nVidia drivers and activate Compiz Fusion without needing any advanced manipulation by the user. We’re talking with Alberto Milone at the moment to see whether this new Restricted Manager can handle as many graphic cards as Envy currently does.

EDIT: Things go fast and after a few words with Alberto Milone, Envy will be present in Daryna. Although it’s a bit redundant with the Restricted Manager it should still be better at pulling the latest drivers and this should especially be important to ATI cards users. It will also work better on systems with tweaked xorg.conf or recompiled kernels. A poll will be organized in a few months to see whether users are happy enough with the new Restricted Manager or if they still heavily rely on Envy to make their graphics card work in Daryna.