Gutsy should be released tomorrow and we will be looking at a brand new Ubuntu. A lot of great innovations have been implemented by the Ubuntu developers and a lot of new software made it to their repository. Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3 and Thunderbird 2.0 for instance are among them.

The Mint developers also put a lot of efforts into modernizing their tools.

MintInstall and MintDesktop should come with significant changes.  MintUpdate is ready and should be included in Daryna. And finally, innovations that were put into Celena will be ported to Daryna as well, this includes for instance mintAssistant and mintUpload.

Development on Daryna itself begun and the upgrade path to Gutsy proved very tricky.

Based on the 7.10 RC release the team didn’t manage to get a stable system yet.  Users are recommended to avoid upgrades to Gutsy. Among other known issues Firefox and Gdebi stop working… and sudo causes problems.

With Gutsy final being released tomorrow Daryna should become usable in the days to come and we should expect a BETA release soon enough.

The challenge for the Mint team will be the upgrade path which will  eventually determine whether it’s possible to upgrade from Celena to Daryna and whether Mint still uses Ubuntu to produce the liveCDs or start generating its own.

In brief.. things look very promising but there are still a few uncertainties.

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.