Linux Mint 8 RC1 released

The Linux Mint 8 desktop. Clement Lefebvre from the Mint development team has announced the availability of the first release candidate of Linux Mint 8, codenamed Helena. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to be user friendly and provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and various media CODECs.

The release candidate is based on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, X.org 7.4 and GNOME 2.28. In addition to a number of bug fixes and other improvements, the first release candidate features support for OEM installation, the ability to ignore updates, configurable menu places and a new system tray File Uploader with support for drag and drop and uploading multiple files. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. The developers ask users who find any bugs in the first release candidate to report them.

More details about the release, including a list of known issues, can be found on the what's new page and in the release notes. Linux Mint 8 is available to download as a 688MB ISO image file. The latest stable release of Linux Mint is version 7 from the end of May.

See also:

• Linux Mint 7 XFCE released, a report from The H.

(crve)