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The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Cinnamon.

Linux Mint 17 Qiana Cinnamon Edition

Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

New features at a glance:

For a complete overview and to see screenshots of the new features, visit: “What’s new in Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon“.

Important info:

There is some important info in the Release Notes:

  • In the installer, “Replace OS with Linux Mint” means erase the entire drive
  • Issues with Skype
  • DVD Playback with VLC
  • HiDPI
  • EFI Support
  • Solving freezes with some NVIDIA GeForce GPUs
  • Booting with non-PAE CPUs
  • Other issues

Make sure to read them to be aware of known issues and known solutions related to this release.

System requirements:

  • x86 processor (Linux Mint 64-bit requires a 64-bit processor. Linux Mint 32-bit works on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors).
  • 512 MB RAM (1GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
  • 5 GB of disk space (20GB recommended).
  • Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution (1024×768 recommended).
  • DVD drive or USB port

Upgrade instructions:

  • To upgrade from a previous version of Linux Mint follow these instructions.
  • To upgrade from the RC release, simply launch the Update Manager and install any Level 1 update available.

Download:

Md5 sum:

  • 32-bit: 00ef2ba7f377251852045664376ecebf
  • 64-bit: 3d8c3c3e82916e2110f965111b0ee944

Torrents:

HTTP Mirrors for the 32-bit DVD ISO:

HTTP Mirrors for the 64-bit DVD ISO:

Alternative downloads:

No-codecs images:

Distributors and magazines in Japan, USA and countries where distributing media codecs is problematic can use the “No Codecs” ISO images.  These images will be made available next week, for both the MATE and Cinnamon edition in 32-bit and 64-bit at the following address:

http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=22

OEM images:

Manufacturers can pre-install Linux Mint on their computers using the OEM installation images. These images will be made available next week, for both the MATE and Cinnamon edition in 64-bit at the following address:

http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=22

Enjoy!

We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun with this new release!

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Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Gold Sponsors:
VMware Cloud Hosting
Silver Sponsors:
ThinkPenguin.com
Bronze Sponsors:
Vault Networks *
AYKsolutions Server & Cloud Hosting
7L Networks Toronto Colocation *
compute.ch gmbh
David Salvo
Gutscheindrache.de Coupons
MBCEStore Mexico
Sysnova Information Systems		 Community Sponsors:

To become a sponsor or to see the full list of Linux Mint sponsors, please visit: http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

Donations:

A total of $8912 was raised thanks to the generous contributions of 350 donors:

  • $500 (2nd donation), Travis C.
  • $500, chainsaw
  • $200, Tord K.
  • $132.85, Joerg P.
  • $132.85, Jane S.
  • $132.85, Meises I.
  • $132.85, Sten L.
  • $100 (3rd donation), Jon Espenschied aka “xeno”
  • $100, Daniel W.
  • $100, Laserlab, Inc.
  • $100, Mikael L.
  • $100, Gary C.
  • $100, Danny L.
  • $99.64, Wemmarus W.
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  • $70, Joseph L.
  • $66.43 (8th donation), Raymond E.
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  • $66.43, Kaj S.
  • $66.43, Carlos C. C.
  • $66.43, Christine T.
  • $66.43, F HOU2BERT
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  • $50 (49th donation), Matthew M.
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  • $50, Daniel S.
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  • $25 (31st donation), Ronald W.
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  • $19.93 (3rd donation), Roy S.
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  • $14.61, Ivy
  • $13.55, Andreas A.
  • $13.29 (10th donation), Mark W.
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  • $13.29 (5th donation), Rene Schwietzke aka “Rene S.“
  • $13.29 (3rd donation), anonymous
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  • $13 (2nd donation), John C.
  • $12, CHAZMAN
  • $10 (37th donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
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  • $10 (2nd donation), Darlan P. C.
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  • $10, Richard M. aka “Richmelk”
  • $10, Steve D.
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  • $10, Bobylev O. aka “QDesnic“
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  • $10, Breno B. T.
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  • $9.3, Fabian van B. aka “Nishe”
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  • $7 (7th donation), Christopher R.
  • $6.64 (28th donation), Marco aka “Dictionary-Maker“
  • $6.64 (4th donation), Theis Hinz
  • $6.64, Ferit O.
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  • $6.64, Oscar J. G. C.
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  • $6.64, Matthias M.
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  • $6.64, Rafael Kallis aka “rafael94b“
  • $6 (3rd donation), Nicolás Costa de la Colina aka “NCosta”
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  • $5 (7th donation), Mordi K. aka “Mordik”
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  • $5, Jerry L.
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  • $5, Dmitry Rutkov aka “Scanerdarkly“
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  • $5, Business Credit Workshop
  • $4.42 (2nd donation), Erick P.
  • $4, Helton B. T. P. J.
  • $3, Clayton S.
  • $3, Susan M.
  • $2.7, Thomas P.
  • $14.82 from 15 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 3792 (1st)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 5335th

Events:

  • The development team announced the release of Cinnamon 2.2 on Segfault

News and summary:

  • Many thanks to all the people who have sent us donations and to all our sponsors. You’re making it easy for us to focus on Linux Mint without worrying about anything else. In April, your help reached an all-time high. Not only did it surprise us, but we could see that donations had been high yet very stable since the beginning of the year. That put us in the very comfortable position where we were able to identify the reasons for our success and allocate a new budget to boost them even further. We get a lot of help from volunteers and people from our community who step up, get involved and join our teams. These people come with very different skills, very different interests, and they all have very different lives, jobs and availabilities. What they all have in common though, is that they love to help us with their spare time and when we look at the net result, their contribution to the overall Linux Mint project is simply amazing. Linux Mint 17 is just around the corner, and if I look at all the features that were developed for it, all the new improvements, I can see so many of them coming from volunteers. With this new budget, for the very first time, we’re funding these contributions. Money is given without asking anything in return to people who made a difference to our project. Ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, the sums involved aren’t large enough for volunteers to leave their jobs or to consider changing the way they live, but if their passion makes them work with us, it empowers them to have that spare time, to buy equipment if they need to, and to not worry about money, overtime, and whether they shouldn’t be doing something better with their spare time than helping Linux Mint. We’re also being very careful not to change the nature of these contributions. Linux Mint is not run like a company and it would lose a lot of flexibility if it was. Contributors are not entitled to funds and they are not expected to produce anything. We’re trying to get the best of both worlds with this new scheme, where people who are part of a team and actively make Linux Mint better also benefit from it financially, yet where the reason for their involvement remains the fact that they love what they’re doing and they’re not actually working but simply enjoying themselves. It’s only been a month but it seems to be working really well so far within the development team. The moderation team is currently discussing the idea and deciding whether or not they want to be part of it as well.
  • Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” passed QA yesterday. It was approved for an RC release which should come out either tomorrow or the day after. Some of the improvements featured in Linux Mint 17 came extremely late in the release cycle but they all managed to get in and we can’t wait to show you what’s new. Of course, you always find a lot of bugs during the RC process, and we’re ready for your feedback, we know we’re going to be busy. But in the meantime, I found the quality of this release to be outstanding. Everything is smooth, some bugs which affected multiple past releases (the shutdown sequence, the inability to install broadcom drivers offline..etc) have been fixed, and Qiana comes with the same traditional look-and-feel but implemented in a brand new Mint-X theme, so the experience feels very polished.
  • The decision was made to stick to LTS bases. In other words the development team will be focused on the very same package base used by Linux Mint 17 for the next 2 years. It will also be trivial to upgrade from version 17 to 17.1, then 17.2 and so on. Important applications will be backported and we expect this change to boost the pace of our development and reduce the amount of regressions in each new Linux Mint release. This makes Linux Mint 17.x very important to us, not just yet another release, but one that will receive security updates until 2019, one that will receive backports and new features until 2016 and even more importantly, the only package base besides LMDE which we’ll be focused on until 2016.
  • New equipment was acquired, including hidpi laptops for two members of the development team, a broadcom chipset (finally), a macbook pro and some NUC units sent by Intel.
  • Our traffic doubled lately and all our stats are on the raise, and we don’t know why. Maybe it’s related to the the end-of-life of Windows XP. We’re not really sure. The blog went down a few times, we’re addressing this by tuning its configuration. Post-release we’re likely to buy more servers to split services and scale our infrastructure.

by ·182 Comments

Warnings

  • Update Packs are for LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) users only.
  • If you are using a regular edition of Linux Mint, do not follow the instructions below and ignore this post.

Introduction

Update Pack 8 was released as the “latest” update pack today. 

How to upgrade

1. Perform a system backup (otherwise you won’t be able to go back)

When things go wrong and you have a backup, the only thing you lose is time.

Make a backup of your system. We recommend the following tool: http://redobackup.org/

2. Switch to the official repositories (otherwise things will break)

Point to the official repositories to make sure everything is up to date:

  • Run “gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list” or “gksu pluma /etc/apt/sources.list” in a terminal to edit your APT sources.
  • Replace the content of the file with the lines below and save the file:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest testing main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/multimedia testing main non-free

3. Switch to an UP8 mirror (otherwise it will take forever)

As everyone downloads the UP, the official repositories will be extremely busy. You can safely point to a mirror as long as it is up to date with UP8.

Here is the current status of the LMDE mirrors:

  • UP8 (safe):
    • http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/
    • http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/linuxmint-debian/latest/
    • http://mirror.oss.maxcdn.com/linuxmint/debian/latest/
    • http://linuxmint-apt.killerhorse.eu/debian/latest/
    • http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/linuxmint-debian/latest/
    •  http://lmde-mirror.gwendallebihan.net/latest/
    •  http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest/
    • http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/debian.linuxmint.com/debian/latest/
    • http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/linuxmint/debian/latest/
    • http://mintlinux.mirror.triple-it.nl/debian/latest/
    • http://mirror.komsys.org/pub/linuxmint/debian/latest/
    • http://ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz/linux/mint/debian/latest/
    • http://mirrors.serverhost.ro/mint/debian/latest/
    • http://debian.lth.se/lmde/latest/
    • http://tux.rainside.sk/mint/debian/latest/
    • http://mirror.metrocast.net/linuxmint-debian/latest/
    • http://mirrors.xmission.com/linuxmint-debian/latest/

To select a mirror:

  • Run “gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list” or “gksu pluma /etc/apt/sources.list” in a terminal to edit your APT sources.
  • Replace http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/ with the mirror of your choice.
  • Save the file.
  • Run “apt update” in a terminal.

4. Check your APT sources

  1. In the Update Manager, click on the “Update Pack Info” button
  2. Make sure “Your system configuration” shows up as green and doesn’t show any warnings or errors.
  3. If you see a warning or an error, follow the instructions given and repeat the process until they’re gone.

5. Read about the Update Pack (otherwise you’ll be asking things we already answered)

In the “Update Pack Info” window of the Update Manager, make sure to read all the information related to Update Pack 8. Some of it might be irrelevant to you, but it will only take you a minute and it might save you hours.

6. Upgrade the packages

When you’re ready and you know all that there is to know, press the “Install Updates” button.

7. Join us

You can chat with other LMDE users or with the dev. team while the system is upgrading. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you encounter issues.

From the menu you can launch “Xchat”, or join #linuxmint-debian on irc.spotchat.org with any IRC client.

FAQ

Will LMDE get new ISO images with Update Pack 8?

Yes.