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Linux Mint 7 "Gloria"Linux Mint subscribes to Debian's "release when ready" philosophy. The Linux Mint team finished the development cycle of Mint 7 and released it at the end of May. According to statistics from the distribution's blog, Gloria reached new limits of popularity. It attracted enough DistroWatch surfers to put it in a leading position on the DistroWatch seven day list. The most important underlying change in version 7 is the Ubuntu 9.04 codebase, from which the new Mint is built. Therefore Gloria inherits all the new features of Ubuntu Jaunty, with slightly improved system tools and characteristic applications on top of that. Installing Linux Mint 7 is absolutely the same as an Ubuntu installation. The live installer is used in the same manner, with Windows installation functionality provided by Wubi, which has been rebranded to mint4win. 
The Mint desktop has been refreshed with a new theme. The very popular Shiki-Colors GNOME theme in a green variant is used by default, introducing the darker tones to the user interface, but remaining suitable for users who don't feel comfortable in classic dark themes. The new features and improvements are demonstrated from the first load. Mint now shows a welcome screen with initial pointers for new users, including an introduction to Mint, finding help and making contributions. The assumption that this innovation will actually help a new user wasn't tested due the lack of adequate number of newbies, but it seems reasonable, though. Beside the new theme, the Mint desktop looks very much the same as it did in the past - a one bottom panel setup, with a pretty elementary choice of applets. Simplicity is usually a good thing, but the lack of a Workspace Switcher leaves only a keyboard shortcut, which new users are unlikely to know about. MintMenu has a filtering feature to make it easier to find what you are looking for. Mint 7 extends this feature by adding a suggestion capability. If the filter does not produce any result the user will be prompted to search for a package on the Mint software portal or in the package repositories. The user may then show properties or install the package suggested. Software management is covered with custom Mint tools, which have been slightly improved. MintInstall is a package manager similar to Ubuntu's Add/Remove Applications GUI. It now has a 'More info' button which loads a popup window giving more information about the package. There is also a 'Featured applications' window which uses popcon (popularity contest) results to show the most popular packages. MintUpdate gives more information about the packages now, and follows Gnome usability guidelines in the system tray. 
Mint continues to deliver proprietary multimedia codecs out of the box, providing playback for most current media formats, so it is not a distribution for free software purists. Firefox is loaded with plugins which make it able to stream and play basically everything on the web, with the exception of Microsoft Silverlight 2 powered content. The Moonlight plugin plays only version 1 content. Thunderbird is shipped by default instead of Evolution, which may be the biggest difference among mainstream GNOME distributions. GNOME Do, Mplayer and GNOME Mplayer are also in the menus together with the more or less usual programs like the OpenOffice.org suite and GIMP. Inkscape is not there by default, though. Program versions are analogous to the ones in Ubuntu 9.04. Several smaller updates like SCP/SFTP support for mintUploader and simplification of the mintDesktop configuration tool close Gloria's new features showcase. Mint is encouraging the use of "RTFM", making it executable. The man command now has a link called rtfm. According to an explanation on Mint's site, "RTFM is not an insult anymore, it's now a command". Linux Mint 7 performed very well during the our tests. Hardware on the test machine was mostly found and configured automatically. The only exception was the Nvidia graphics card, for which setup was offered through the Jockey GUI. It is pure coincidence that Mint 7 was released in the midst of the Windows 7 marketing hype. It wouldn't be surprising to see Mint 8 before Windows 7 is finished. Mint continues to gain popularity and Gloria is improving Mint's progress, showing some real demand for GNU/Linux on the desktop. (Log in to post comments)
Eh? Posted Jun 11, 2009 4:22 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Never heard of it. Maybe a sentence at the outset saying what it is, where the hell it came from, and why it exists, would have helped reduce my feeling of oblivious confusion.
Codecs Posted Jun 11, 2009 6:35 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
Supporting multimedia codecs via open source implementations is not against any free software purists ideals. It's the software patents that put halt to distributing such distributions should this kind of more minor distribution become big at any point of time.
I believe they probably also include Adobe Flash, hopefully via the same downloading system Ubuntu does instead of any "we just ship it". That's proprietary technology which includes proprietary codecs, but to just write "deliver proprietary multimedia codecs out of the box" is quite wrong when also Mint probably delivers most of its multimedia codecs via Free implementations which just happen to be patent-encumbered because of the current (stupid) legal system.
Anyway, more introduction to Mint would have been welcome. I do know it's based on Ubuntu and it contains considerably more work than the 10 other Ubuntu-based "we changed background!" distributions, but still. History, infrastructure, security updates to those software they ship from their repositories instead of Ubuntu's (or do they have completely own repositories?) etc.
man Posted Jun 11, 2009 10:26 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Mint is encouraging the use of "RTFM", making it executable. The man command now has a link called rtfm.Good that they give "man" the respect it deserves. Historically it has been the main thing that has kept unix-type systems approachable. Too bad that Linux systems today come with lots of commands with no man page at all (or with a totally obsolete one).
man Posted Jun 11, 2009 14:19 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
I've noticed that this has gotten generally better over the years. In particular, there is much better support for "man <configfilename>" than there used to be. (Doesn't Debian *require* man pages?)
Of those items that do seem to be missing man pages, commands related to the various DE's seem the worst offenders. Presumably, the DE's are so awesome that the user doesn't need man pages. Then again, if that's the case, they should probably just remove Konsole, Gnome-Terminal, etc. from the official packages.
One last note: 'info' and its authors should be taken out and shot.
man Posted Jun 11, 2009 16:11 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Presumably and probably correctly, the authors of GUI applications assume
that users will find the "Help" menu item before they reach out for a command line to type 'man' or figure out the '#' shortcut in KDE's minicli (now, that's something that seems to have been lost in KDE4, the unified manual/info/help shortcut). Konsole comes with a quite nice handbook -- although improvements are possible, of course.
man Posted Jun 12, 2009 4:32 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Presumably and probably correctly, the authors of GUI applications assume that users will find the "Help" menu itemThis misses one of the most useful aspects of properly implemented "man": using it to discover what is available. Often I want do do something but don't quite remember what the relevant program is, so I type "man -k <subject>", and more often than not it comes up with useful suggestions. (Unfortunately, if TCL is installed, the output is often full of its functions, and man section selection does not work with "-k"; here is a thing to fix).
man Posted Jun 12, 2009 8:46 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
That's why the KDE help system also gives you the full contents of the help pages for all installed
packages.
man Posted Jun 15, 2009 15:44 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
However KDE does not provides useful manpages (if at all).
man Posted Jun 15, 2009 18:32 UTC (Mon) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Yes and? KDE is a gui environment and it provides manuals -- written to
the best of the abilities of the volunteer developers and writers -- available directly from the gui of the application.
That means that man pages are obsolete for KDE. man does not offer
man Posted Jun 16, 2009 6:01 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] man does not offer anything useful that is not offered by a proper help system. man is a proper help system.
man Posted Jun 16, 2009 7:17 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
> man is a proper help system.
Yes, yes! A thousand times yes.
man Posted Jun 16, 2009 7:28 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
Yeah, full of useful features like... screenshots? hyperlinks? Give up, I'm as nostalgic and
conservative a Unix user as the next forty-year old, but man as a help system for gui applications is just plain silly. We've got something better now and man is no longer a proper help system.
man Posted Jun 16, 2009 12:26 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Eh, what is your point? Manpages are integrated in KDE on multiple levels, like they should be. In the special case of applications with a GUI, there are very good reasons why they (should) have manpages: they have a CLI interface. RTFM.
man Posted Jun 16, 2009 13:28 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
KDE comes with numerous commands which are entirely undocumented, including command-line-only ones. Typically these would be executed by other programs, but not always, and not always successfully. Plus when you are looking for a command without remembering exactly what it's called, and tab-completion gives you loads of options for undocumented binaries in your $PATH, it's really annoying. Having at least a description of what the program is for and what its options are would be rather more pleasant than using 'strings' on the binary.
I realise this argument is somewhat weakened by the fact that I cannot remember off-hand what commands I've had these problems with, but they are a contributing factor to KDE4 annoyance.
On a related note, are the GUI parts of KDE4 mostly documented these days? Last time I tried with the KDE4 docs they were a combination of missing, outdated, and useless (that's not just a KDE4 thing though: loads of apps in KDE3.x for years kept documentation for versions long since gone). I know for certain that there are parts of KDE4 where there are confusing options with absolutely no description of what they do (try getting some documentation on the desktop effects settings in systemsettings).
man Posted Jun 11, 2009 21:00 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
info is awful, yes, but it's a format from the 1970s. *texinfo* is not
awful, nor are the other formats you can convert it into (HTML, PDF, et seq).
Debian philosophy? Mint? Posted Jun 11, 2009 17:28 UTC (Thu) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
"""
Linux Mint subscribes to Debian's "release when ready" philosophy. """
That's a bit of an odd way to start out an article about a distro which piggybacks Ubuntu, adding a few flourishes and wallpapers, and which typically releases about 2 weeks after Ubuntu's time-based releases, giving then just about enough time to repackage, recompile, and do some testing. That's no slight on either Mint or Ubuntu. In fact, it means that neither of those distros are likely to fall into the "Will Current+1 *ever* be released?!" trap of Debian Sarge fame.
Personally, I think that a well managed project, with reasonable feature inclusion goals, and with managers who are not afraid to say 'no' when appropriate, or to cut planned features when necessary, do a lot better than projects with wishy-washy goals and project management, which then try to hide behind "It's ready when it's ready!" month after month after month, when the real problem is the way their releases are managed.
Debian has done better with their last two releases than they did with Sarge, though. My impression is that they are informally shooting for about 18 months, time based. And are actually achieving about 22 months between releases. So even Debian has backed away some from 'Debian's "release when ready"' philosophy.
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