Linux Mint 2.0 "Barbara"

November 13, 2006

This release is based on Ubuntu 6.10 and uses the Ubuntu installer.

The desktop is Gnome 2.16.1 and the kernel is 2.6.17.

Multimedia

Barbara comes with the following plugins:
- Macromedia Flash 9 beta
- Sun Java 1.5 Update 9
- Realplayer 10

Support for MP3, Windows and various codecs, encrypted DVDs is installed by default.

Software

Barbara comes with Amarok 1.4.4 instead of Rhythmbox.

Artwork

The default artwork is a blue version of the "Human" theme.

Linux Mint 2.1 "Bea"

December 20, 2006

Release Notes

Happy Christmas! Linux Mint 2.1 codename "Bea" is out and available for download :)

Many thanks to all the people who contributed to the project and to the users who posted their feedback and suggestions on the forums. Bea is a huge step forward and comes with a lot of changes compared to the last release.

New Software

Two new applications made their way into Linux Mint:

OpenOffice 2.1-Impress (Calc and Writer also got upgraded to version 2.1)
Xchat-gnome

Better desktop

This is probably the biggest improvement in Bea: A brand new desktop. Linux Mint 2.1 comes with mintDesktop, which adds a lot of desktop improvements:

Quick access to the computer and home places
Quick access to the terminal from the context menu
Ability to delete files directly without sending them to the Trash
mintDesktop home folders
Beagle search
Tomboy notes
Network manager

Better Wifi support

Bea comes with mintWifi, which purpose is to allow you to configure your wireless card without an Internet connection. mintWifi comes with the following:

Ndiswrapper and Ndisgtk
Cabextractor and unshield
Tutorials to install and configure your Wifi card
A collection of Wifi drivers to support about 40 different wireless card models

Better branding

Bea comes with new artwork: new LiveCD splash, new usplash and GDM screens.
Help is now "one click away". As our community is growing it seemed important that users could find help and support in the easiest possible way. To achieve this Xchat-Gnome was modified to automatically connect to the Linux Mint IRC channel, and Firefox now features Linux Mint bookmarks pointing at the website and forums.

Better Web browsing

Web browsing was good in Barbara, but as some of you pointed out, it wasn't good enough:

Realplayer 10 was replaced with the Mplayer plugins so you can now enjoy Quicktime, AVI, MPG and a lot of other web content.
The Flash plugin was upgraded to version 9 Beta 2.
Support for ipv6 was disabled to make your Internet connection and Web browsing faster
Firefox 2.0 was tweaked so that it does go back to the previous page when you press the backspace key

And a few surprises...

For those of you who have nvidia cards there's a little surprise in Bea called envy
For those of you who like to mount stuff, PyMou was added to the command line
For those of you who love using Amarok we added support for MusicBrainz tagging
For those of you who need to extract RAR archives we included unrar
For those of you who really like Flash, we included the Flash player
And for those of you who like playing with the terminal, we put a little surprise in there too :)