Linux Mint 5 Elyssa Revision 1 Main

Image

Image

Image


Main Edition (revision 1) Gnome CD [ISO]

This is Linux Mint 5, codename Elyssa, based on Daryna and compatible with Ubuntu Hardy and its repositories.

Linux Mint Description:

Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

Info:
This is by far the most user friendly and nice looking linux distro ever made.

List of new features
1. mintMenu improvements

In Daryna, mintInstall and the Software Portal made it easy to install applications. 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”.

Within the same context menu you can also choose whether you want that particular application to be automatically launched when you log in. It was already possible to do this with the "Session" tool from the Control Center, it's now possible directly from within mintMenu.

MintMenu now comes with a brand new configuration screen which lets you configure the following options:
Whether to show the sidepane (where parts of the menu end up after you hide them)
Whether to show recent documents
Whether to show comments for applications
Whether to swap names and generic names in the list of favorites
Whether to show icons for categories
Whether filtering should be done by clicking on categories or by hovering (mouse over)
The hover delay
Icon sizes for the main button, the applications and the favorites
Main button text and whether to show an icon
Custom colors for headings, borders and backgrounds
The number of columns in the favorites
The borders width

The "system tools" and "others" categories were merged in with "administration" to make the menu smaller and to bring less confusion as to where to find configuration tools.

The speed of the menu was also improved and its memory usage reduced.

Favorites now support drag and drop and can be moved around and arranged with the mouse.

2. mintUpdate improvements

MintUpdate was introduced in Daryna and quickly became one of the most popular tools on the Linux Mint desktop. It came to our attention that a lot of people weren't aware of how it worked internally (for instance, the difference between its user and admin runtime modes). For this reason we developed an information screen from which the active logs can be read, and the runtime mode and process id can be seen.

When you log in and mintUpdate starts in user mode it now checks for an Internet connection. If none is found it waits for 30 seconds before retrying to connect and eventually reporting the lack of connection. This new feature is particularly interesting for people whose connection to the Internet is activated at log in and sometimes after mintUpdate is started.

You can now manually refresh mintUpdate, and directly access its preferences and information screens by right clicking on the icon in the system tray.

A mintUpdate instance running in admin mode kills all other instances of mintUpdate. One running in user mode is only allowed to start if no admin-mode mintUpdate is already running. In a multi-user environment this created problems. MintUpdate now fails quietly in user mode and running it from the menu (admin mode) takes priority over all other instances.
3. mintInstall improvements

.mint files can be quite complex as there's almost nothing you can do in a terminal that a .mint file can't do. In practice though, 99% of the .mint files present in the Software Portal consist in describing the installation of an application using APT. Most of these files describe the installation of only one package, and in most cases this package is present in the default repositories. In Daryna mintInstall used to backup the local sources.list, define its own, and then restore things as they were. This resulted in APT being told to update twice. In Elyssa, the mintInstall client checks if the packages are present within the repositories defined on your system, if they are the client gives you the choice of whether you want to use your sources.list ("local repositories") or the one coming with the file ("default repositories"). The default selection is "local" and as it basically saves 2 APT updates the installation of the application via mintInstall is consequently much faster.

The search dialog now supports the GetDeb.net software portal. GetDeb uses raw DEB packages and no meta-information so downloads can be slow and dependencies (if any) won't be solved automatically, but it features packages that aren't available anywhere else on the Internet. The portal can be searched directly from mintInstall and the installation of the .DEB packages is handled by GDebi.




The search dialog now also supports APT itself. This is a convenient shortcut as mintInstall is much lighter than synaptic and more user friendly than the APT command line utilities. From mintInstall you can now search for a particular package, show its description (which also lists the files it contains) or even install it.



Improvements were made to the layout and the navigation within the Linux Mint Software Portal. A batch .mint maker was developed and the portal should feature about 10 times more applications than it did for Daryna. Applications are also organized in sub-categories and almost all of them now come with a screenshot.

Release-specific information was moved to a new package called mintsystem, so mintInstall is now release agnostic. This should make it easier for future versions of mintInstall to be backported on older releases or even used on compatible distributions (all distributions directly or indirectly based on Debian Testing or Debian Unstable).
4. Improvements in other tools

The network autobrowsing feature was removed from mintDesktop as it wasn't mature enough to be part of this LTS release.

Gnome 2.22 introduced its own compositing manager which can now be activated/deactivated from mintDesktop.

Mintupload's email feature was removed and replaced with a "Copy" button, which simply copies the shared URL to the buffer.
5. Desktop improvements

Gnome-Do doesn't just come installed by default in Elyssa, it's configured to run in the background. Press SUPER+SPACE and it should appear. From there you can quickly launch an application or use any of the advanced features provided by this tool. For more information about Gnome-Do visit this link
.




You can now change your wallpaper by right-clicking on an image and by selecting "Set as Wallpaper".

You can now check the MD5 signature of an ISO file by right-clicking on the file and by selecting "MD5 Sum".

You can now open a folder as root by right-clicking on that folder and by selecting "Open as root". This is a powerful but also a dangerous feature. A warning message will remind you that you're in root mode, a file browser called XFE will appear (the reason for it not being Nautilus is precisely because it looks different. This way you can associate the different look and feel with the fact that this application is run as root). From there on you've got unlimited powers so be careful because everything you launch from XFE, you launch as root.



The Gedit text editor was configured not to create "~" files anymore. This feature although sometimes useful was often annoying. It is still available from within Gedit but not activated by default.

MP3 could be decoded out of the box in Daryna. In Elyssa you can now also encode in this format without having to install any extra codecs.

Making things easier on the desktop means you don't need to rely on the terminal that often. But don't get us wrong, we do like our terminal! It's faster, more to the point, and the commands (not like the buttons and menus in graphical interfaces) are the same no matter what language you use. With each release of Linux Mint we improve the user experience with the terminal and this time we've added two things...

... more colors (see how the results of the grep are highlighted and how user and root modes use green and red so you know exactly in which mode you are?) ...


and much much more!