Linux Mint is a Linux distribution for desktop computers based on and compatible with Debian. The brand new shiny Linux Mint 5 hitting the streets late last Sunday evening around midnight UK time. Linux Mint 5, codename Elyssa, is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 8.04 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions.

For those already familiar with Mint, this new version may not seem very different at first glance, but one big difference between this release and pretty much every other Linux distro is the inclusion of Flash 10 beta. Flash on Linux has been a rather sluggish experience for a while now, but on our humble Pentium 4 testing machine, sites like Youtube and Hulu seemed to work just as well as they do on Windows. The rest of the changes are generally little tweaks and usability improvements.

In Elyssa mintMenu is making it easy to remove them. You don’t need to open synaptic or to launch a terminal anymore, if you want to uninstall an application, simply right-click on it in the menu and select “Uninstall”. Software updates are handled by the distro’s mintUpdate software. With mintUpdate, software updates are broken into different priority levels based on necessity and stability. Thus, Mint is available in two editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs, and a light edition, which doesn’t. Mint maintains its own repositories, and also includes the standard Ubuntu Main, Universe, Multiverse, and Restricted repositories as well. That means package availability is right on par with Ubuntu, with some additional Mint-specific packages thrown in. Download the Linux Mint 5 (Main Edition!) iso image from http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php, burn it onto a CD, and boot your computer from it

Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 10:19 am | by Kur-nia-one |