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Linux Mint 15 'Olivia' Is Out
An anonymous reader writes "The Linux Mint blog today announced the full release of Linux Mint 15 'Olivia.' Here are the release notes and a list of new features. As before, it's available with either MATE or Cinnamon as a desktop environment. The included version of MATE has been upgrade to 1.6, which saw many old and deprecated packages replaced with newer technologies. Cinnamon has gone to 1.8, which improved the file manager, added support for 'desklets' (essentially desktop widgets), and completed the transition away from Gnome Control Center to Cinnamon's own settings panel. Other new features of Linux Mint 15 include improved login screen applications (one of which is an HTML greeter that supports HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and WebGL), a tool developed from the ground up to manage software sources in Mint, and a vastly improved driver manager. The project's website sums it up simply: 'Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project.'"
...I'm going to try it out later today.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
No?
Well at least now I have an excuse for why I didn't get any work done today.
I love it, I've been with Mint since Fedora switched up the UI too much for me with Gnome 3. Both my laser printer and USB wifi adapter worked turn-key and no problems with my Nvidia graphics card. Easy to install onto a fully encrypted LVM too for only a few extra minutes and a LiveDVD.
So when is Cinnamon going to support window grouping "out of the box"? I know there's a 3rd party applet for it, I tried it, it was buggy and kludgy. Despite members of the community clamoring for it, the devs claim that not having it is a "design decision". So it's a design decision to make it frustrating and difficult to find the right window when I have a many windows open, which I usually do, because I'm a software developer and power user? It's a design decision to ignore the requirements of the Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition community?/rant
Overall I have to say I've been very happy with Linux Mint. It really "just works" and I wouldn't even consider switching to another distro, the above complaint notwidthstanding. Cinnamon is mostly sexy and cool.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Even if you posted Lubuntu's releases (the distro I use) I would still be posting this. Why do we care about random distro releases?
Sure Linux Kernels, but beyond that, who cares?
If you are a fan of a specific distro, you probably already know a new one was released.
That Cinnamon Control Panel looks very similar to OS X's System Preferences.
On the one hand it is great that Linux allows people to innovate, and fork when the need arises.
On the other hand the Linux desktop has reached the point that I simply don't want to choose between the myriad of desktops and window managers any more. Just reading Wikipedia on MATE and Cinnamon leaves me shaking my head.
Seems to me that the massive fragmentation of the Linux desktop probably does work for the hard core geeks who can pick the one that scratches their itch. It also gives every programmer who wants to develop a desktop or window manager their own private little place to do it.
On the other hand, Linux on the desktop is pretty much doomed when it comes to any ordinary person just wanting to install it, use it and have it work if the first question they have to deal with is which of 20 UI's and desktops they should pick.
Not sure how you are going to maintain a critical mass of developers and users for testing when resources are scattered across so many, mostly, mediocre UI's and desktops. If you don't have that critical mass, chances are every effort will come up short quality wise.
Developer's thinking about developing a serious app with a lot of UI and desktop integration must cringe at the prospect of doing QA across so many desktop variations and either only support one or give up on supporting Linux all together.
Who would have figured that Android, running a Java front end, would be the one and only place that Linux would have any chance of making it as a consumer OS.
@de_machina
You Mean Mubuntu. I don't view mint as its own distro. It just piggy backs off of Ubuntu's success and hard work.
Would it, in principle, be possible to to provide cinnamon or mate as packages for other distributions, e.g. Ubuntu? I always liked about Linux that most software packages work on all distributions.
I like what Mint looks like but on my own computers I fear the implications of a move to another distro and on my work computers Ubuntu is a given. I can install my own packages but not change the distro.
Is there a good page that explains the technicalities behind all this and why it may not be possible to distribute the nice parts of Mint as packages for other distros?
I just run linux in a vm on top of Win7 enterprise. Sigh. Can't keep reinstalling my OS every so often; ain't nobody got time for that.
Replaced my 13 with 15 RC a few days ago. The new file manager is pretty nice. Right click to run with higher privileges pops open a new file browser window with a big red bar letting you know so you don't walk away and end up screwing something up when you get back. Also shows a small bar graph under each mounted partition so you can get a good idea how much space you have left at a glance. "Disk Utility" is replaced/merged with "Storage Device Manager" so I can just go to one place for all my partition renaming, automounting, and SMART options now, which seems to have gotten rid of a glitch that would always try to read my first two drives (sda, sdb) as identical drives for some reason. As of yesterday I still had a glitch with automounting my old Mint 13 partition at bootup but it mounts fine if I instead click on it in the file manager after booting. Mounts all the NTFS partitions with no problems. New applets organization makes it much easier to install applets without futzing with the terminal (This is important for newbies and out of the box experience.) but getting some of them to actually WORK after installation is another story. Having issues with the weather applet at the moment. In previous versions I also had issues with my firefox tabs locking up randomly, seemingly caused by a new song coming on the media player and the popup going over the tab button. Minimizing/maximizing the browser made it return to normal for a while. This glitch seems to have been fixed as well. Backed up and recopied one of my VM's to the new OS and it seemed to have spasms and refuse to shut the VM down but after a few cycles of update, force close, install guest additions, force close, startup again it went back to working order.
I like to keep my drivers close and my viruses closer.
Dumb question,
Why use Mint, an Ubuntu derivative, rather than just installing cinnamon (apt-get install cinnamon in 13.04)?
I don't get why so many people get all bent out of shape about this, with /home in it's own partition it's so easy to upgrade with a LiveDVD.
This indicates a CLEAR lack of experience on your part. Come back to us in a few years, after you have done a few installs with customized packages and configurations, that have worked untouched for a few years. How about your Postfix/antispam configuration, or your nightly backup schedule/app, or your UPS shutdown config, and much more? By then you will have completely forgotten half of what you have running, let alone all the custom configuration you've done. You do your upgrade and BAM nothing works anymore. When you've spent day/weeks reconfiguring, rebuilding, repairing and getting stuff back close to the way they were, you'll quickly tire or upgrades destroying your working setups.
Safe(!) in-place upgrades are mandatory for today's OSes. If yours doesn't have it, it sucks. If you don't see the need for it, your...
Anti-Semitic != Anti-Israel in all cases. Israel is a particular political entity who's actions are not above criticism.
Just because someone is in favor of Palestinians receiving statehood and not having their houses bulldozed doesn't make you anti-semitic.
I suppose you don't realise that Arab Palestineans are just as much Semites as Hebrew Jews are and certainly more so than, say, Jews of Indo-European or Negro origin.
I personally don't care much what the name of someone's religion is as long as they don't try to force others to live by their prejudices, but I did not support Apartheid in South Africa back in the 80s and I won't support it in the Levant today.
Slashdot has a new Linux distro release notice before Distrowatch.
I was looking for a new distro to upgrade an old netbook and installed the RC this weekend (with MATE desktop). It started out a little shakey as the keyboard didn't work, and the mouse wouldn't click (due to a hardware issue and trackpad clicks not enabled), but after a restart and some mouse settings, it's nice and snappy.
Previously had Ubuntu netbook remix and tried Ubuntu with Unity, but that was just so awkward to use with a tiny screen and trackpad, and somewhat sluggish when web browsing.
I'd never tried Linux Mint or MATE in the past, but it seems to be a good combination for a low power computer.
Even if you posted Lubuntu's releases (the distro I use) I would still be posting this. Why do we care about random distro releases?
Sure Linux Kernels, but beyond that, who cares?
If you are a fan of a specific distro, you probably already know a new one was released.
Other people may not know about it.
I'm getting ready to do a desktop upgrade. This is something I usually avoid because it always causes pain and after avoiding it for a few years, the pain is rather significant. So, when I bite the bullet and do the upgrade, I want to know I'm using the best, most usable, and longest lasting installation available.
Though I am aware of Mint, I have not used it, nor have I been following its development. I know that my distro is no longer good enough and that although Ubuntu is the common favorite, Unity SUCKS and I won;t be switching to Ubuntu.
But, hey, a new version of Mint just dropped! It has the Ubuntu goodness without Unity. I think I'll give it a try and see if I want to use it for my impending upgrade.
You see, way back when, Slashdot was "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." The announcement of a new version of Mint, DistroWatch's #1 for the past year or more, definitely qualifies as "News for nerds. Stuff that matters".
It might be time for a Mac.
There, I said it!
Tried it last weekend, but I've had to come back to Ubuntu because my Ironkey did not work.
This distro doesn't have KDE? Why?
I don't use Linux Mint but Clem sounds perfectly reasonable there. Go fuck yourself.
Heil Hitler!
Personally I think the Israeli government should be lined up against the wall they're building. And shot. We can then line up the leaders of the various Palestinian groups, and shoot them as well. And then take out the various Israeli party heads. And for an encore, we can shoot all the leaders of all the major corporations, and all the states of all the world!
HOW ABOUT A BIT OF ANARCHY AND FREEDOM AROUND HERE THEN?!
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Sure, right after shooting you too.
I've always been afraid to use upgrade-in-place due to lack of confidence in open source types to accomplish such a feat without screwing something up. ...and indeed, after ten years of refusing to use it, I once decided to allow Ubuntu to do it, and it killed itself. So it doesn't matter if the feature exists or not as I'll never use it again anyway.
Now if they could bother themselves to cease to strip out Debian's support for full disk encryption, that I'd be excited about. Also, if they could do it correctly, by also encrypting the temp and swap partitions with a random key at each boot, that would leave me positively ecstatic. Presently, if I want full disk encryption, I'm forced to use Debian, which I'd rather avoid since it's a bit too freetarded. While Debian won't set up full disk encryption correctly by default, it's partition & LVM tool is sophisticated enough to allow you to do it manually.
MATE has been upgrade to 1.6, which saw many old and deprecated packages replaced with newer technologies
oh no! things were removed! Better fork MATE so I can have it be exactly the same as a previous version!
Freedom for those left alive?
Can't remote to my company desktop. Thats the last nail in coffin..for me. sad day, really.
Here is the problem..
In 36-45, The Israeli's - Jews - insert your chosen rhetorical names - were indeed put against the walls and they were shot. And they got shunted into trains and into ovens and into gas chambers. 7 million of them.
The UN mandated Israel, and within hours Arabic and Palestinian armies, contrary to UN and international law decided to launch a mass invasion, and once again the put the israeli against the wall loomed. The Arab world and the Palestinians were quite happy with this, because they were under the illusion that they were about to wipe israel off the map. It did not go that way.
And multiple attempts later, the map is the same, and so are the politics. Arab and Palestinian now appeal to the laws and international community they were so brazen to ignore when they believed they would win.
The Israeli's decided long ago that no one was going to put them against the walls or in the ovens again. And if that meant telling the world where to go, thats what they would do.
I do not have any like or love of Israel or the jewish people. They have for most of their history been on the recieveing end, and having made a home for themselves they now hold a somewhat extreme view on this world, its make up, and where they sit in it. I have no liking for either side. I frankly blame the arab and palestinians for making a complete bouncing balls up in 48, and since then they have been crying like babies and have spent decades being fed AK47s and reading mein kampf. Anyone who things magic-ing away Israel would somehow make that part of the human armpit a better place is under drug induced stupidity.
As much as I dislike Israel - I dislike fascist islam and its armed fuckheads more.
Post WWII, there was going to be no peace. The Jews were going to take a homeland, and the palestinians and arab world with extreme xenophobia and racism were not going to accept it.
I don't accept that this is a one side is evil equasion - there you have my two penneth.
We`re all equal
You want to follow Hitler? Then go and blow your brains out, like he did.
No-one here wants to persecute Jews, they are just opposed to how the Israelis are treating the Palestinians.
Could someone explain the implications for this? Having just battled with getting LTSP under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, I understand it's because non-execute functionality is tied to PAE. But I have a bunch of machines that don't have PAE and they would be worthless moving forward. So I modified LTSP to create non-PAE kernels.
The biggest problem is that the Israeli government continues to expand the borders of "Israel". All these settlements? Those are government sanctioned or supported, or government "turned a blind eye to"'d.
No, let me correct myself. The biggest problem is the lack of anarchism and freedom the world over. Shoot the bosses. Eat the rich. Skim the scum.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Exactly what I was looking for - very helpful!
In case you didn't get it. I am opposed to racism, and I never advocated killing all the Jews. Just the government.
And regardless of history, the fact remains that the current Israeli government does a lot of things that the Nazi German government did too. Like, govern. Oh, and looking for extra living space. And pretend like their people are the chosen people, and therefore have the rights to clear the bit of land they want of the people currently living there.
But no country has no blood on its hands. So let's do away with them altogether.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
I know you're just being snarky, but really why is it so hard to keep my desktop the same while still getting security updates for the over all system and new versions of my apps when they upgrade? Why?
I hate to give Microsoft credit for anything, but at least they had enough insight to keep the option to switch back to the previous version of the desktop available for many many releases afterwards. Up until fairly recently it was pretty easy to go back to your preferred work space in Windows. From Win95--Windows 2000 you could still get Progman.exe to run. You could still revert the taskbar and themes from Fisherprice to the 'standard' look that carried over from Win95 all the way through Windows XP to Windows 7.
Why is it so unreasonable to expect the same in Linux?
Oh and I'm one of those people who prefer MATE over the mess that Gnome 3.0 has become with its intentional breaking of the system to prevent people from keeping what they had before, but if these changes actually ruin the desktop you can be sure that people will indeed fork MATE.
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Great distro. Had everything up and running, network connection, software in 2 hours. I am really impressed with Mint. 15 is the best one so far. Good work, Clem :)
My two bits
Linux Mint 15 is based on Ubuntu.
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) has most of the mint patches applied to the source Debian packages instead of the Ubuntu packages (which are derivatives of Debian).
LMDE is a semi-rolling upgradeable release rather than the standard Mint releases. It is binary compatible with the Debian repositories.
This is relevant why?
Some of the above is true.
When the Israeli's pulled back in Gaza, and they brutally removed their own people's settlements via an agreement to try to change the above fair comments, the response was and has been to use that repartriated land to fire rockets into civilian Israeli areas..
Its a war, I expect nothing less. But expecting the Israeli's to be angelic is cloud cookoo land.
We`re all equal
That convinces me to support Mint. I don't like RMS' jihad against Open Source, Proprietary Software, Coca Cola, ID Cards or even Israel. The link didn't say anything about what Mint is guilty of, but if Mint happens to be pro-Israel by implication, it has my support, even if I don't have it on my computer.
Israel is a COUNTRY, you imbecile! Not a particular political entity. The Palestinian Authority is a political entity, as is Hamas, Fatah, Hizbullah and so on
Oh, never mind. So Clem is one of the Mint creators, and a pro-Jihad activist? I don't have Mint - wasn't planning to anyway, since any of the other Ubuntu based Linux distros w/ KDE or Razor-qt would work for me, as would PC-BSD.
One thing did stick out. Firefox in Mint 15 came with no Flash Player installed. It’s a little bothersome as you would expect it to come installed in addition to the GStreamer codecs if you download the ISO with codecs installed.
I was running Linux Mint 12 and hesitated upgrading for the thought of a reinstall. But I went ahead and did it, and it was a very pleasant surprise. In a little over an hour I was back up and running with everything in place. This was tremendous. I defy anyone to do this with any version of Windows. Or pretty much any other upgrade for that matter. This is a tremendous operating system and it just works. Keep up the good work.