So Mint 4.0 might very well be called Daryna 🙂

Anyway… Celena should hit the download mirrors very soon now with only one BETA release preceeding the STABLE one.

With KDE and XFCE editions developped in parallels by Jamie Boo Birse and Merlwiz the team is going to be able to focus on Daryna “before” gutsy gets out! Of course, there is no way Daryna would be released before Gutsy, but the gap separating the two should be greatly reduced.

So far Daryna should simply be a merge of Celena’s and Gutsy’s innovations plus a few goodies such as mintServe and mintSupport.

New features in Celena: mintUpload, mintAssistant, PDF printing, stability and speed improvements, better base, new artwork.

New features in Gutsy: Compiz Fusion, Graphical Configuration Tool for X, Desktop improvements (deskbar, tracker, fast user switching),  2.6.22 kernel, AppArmor, better hardware support (Broadcom wifi chipsets for instance), more up to date package base (Thunderbird 2.0 etc..).

Daryna should compile all of these together.

New mint-tools currently in alpha or beta stage could be added as well or come in later on within  a Mint 4.1 release.

The KDE/miniKDE Edition is ready. In fact you can already download it. It will be officially released tomorrow.

With a Main, a Light, an XFCE and a KDE Edition, development on Cassandra should  stop and the focus should go on Celena in the days to come.

Maty talked about the possibility of a Fluxbox Community Edition but it’s not clear whether it will come in time for Cassandra or if it will be introduced after the release of Celena.

Boo uploaded LinuxMint-3.0-KDE.iso and LinuxMint-3.0-miniKDE.iso. Merlwiz uploaded LinuxMint-3.0-XFCE.iso.

The three ISOs will be tested in the days to come and made available to our mirrors.

Both the KDE and the XFCE editions should be released this week.