Linux Mint 2.2 "Bianca"

February 20, 2007

Release Notes

Bianca is out and available for download!

Many thanks to the Linux Mint community from which we managed to gather precious ideas and feedback. We've brought a lot of changes into Bianca and we hope you'll like it.

Here are the main changes:



Minty Artwork and a brand new desktop...

Bea was nice and blue but people complained that it still looked Ubuntu-ish and they couldn't see why Mint didn't look Green. So Bianca comes with two brand new themes; Bianca-Blue and Bianca-Green which give the distribution a whole new "minty" look.  Only one panel at the bottom, a Slab-like menu, new default icons... play with it and tell us what you think :)

New Innovations, New Software, New Repository

We've put a lot of efforts into Bianca and started writing our own applications and our own packages. A new repository was added to Bianca for users to be able to get the latest innovations through APT upgrades. It is also possible to upgrade from Bea to Bianca.

The following applications were added to Bianca:

- mintMenu, a replacement for the Gnome menu which is inspired by SUSE's Slab and based on USP.
- mintConfig, a Control Center application which is inspired by SUSE's configuration tool and based on UCP.
- mintDisk, a program which automatically mounts FAT32 and NTFS (Read/Write) partitions (which are not defined in fstab) and places a shortcut on the desktop.
- mintDesktop, a program which among other things "mounts" Windows network neighbourhoods.
- mintWifi, which contains a guide, a collection of drivers and a diagnostic tool to make it easy for you to set up your WIFI card without having to connect to the Internet.

And last but not least...

- inserting an ipod doesn't launch amarok anymore
- upgraded all packages including Firefox to version 2.0.0.1 and Amarok to version 1.4.5
- the live CD now supports 6 languages: English, French, Spanish, Greek, Swedish and Turkish.
- OpenOffice 2.1 comes with support for English, French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian and Turkish. Support for other languages was added to the repository.

"Bianca Light Edition"

March 29, 2007

Release Notes

The purpose of the Light Edition is to bring a version of Linux Mint which doesn't contain: In some countries where the legislation allows software patents to be enforced the Light Edition provides a way for users to legally download Linux Mint.

The following components are not present in the Light Edition:

"Bianca KDE Edition"

April 20, 2007

Release Notes

Bianca KDE Edition is out and available for download!

Many thanks to all the testers who participated in this release and gave us precious feedback. In particular we would like to thank Marius Nestor from Softpedia for his contributions to the look and feel and for helping us tweak domino to make this release one of the best looking KDE desktops available at the moment. 

As usual this release is desktop-ready and comes with support for most video codecs and web plugins. Mint applications couldn't be ported in time to KDE and are absent from this release, however mintdesktop's home folders were added to it.

The default selection of packages is large and very up to date: The default mail application is Kontact, the default web browser is Firefox and the default office suite is Koffice. Konqueror is still the default file explorer but Dolphin 0.8 was also added as a tech-preview. The KMenu was replaced with TastyMenu 0.7.  This KDE Edition uses the Bianca-Green theme and the Domino KDE Style with modifications from Marius Nestor.

Here are some of the software installed by default: For users who do not have a DVD burner we're also releasing a "miniKDE" Edition which fits on a CD. The following items are not present in the miniKDE Edition and we strongly encourage miniKDE Edition users to install them after they downloaded and installed from the CD:

Of course there was Ada, but this is our first stable release of a KDE desktop. We hope you like it. Mint applications will progressively be ported to KDE, then hit the Romeo repository and be backported to Bianca so you'll enjoy the innovations that made the Main Edition what it is today.

Copyright 2007 http://linuxmint.com/