Friday, January 7, 2011

Linux Mint

 The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use. Started in 2006, Linux Mint is now the 4th most widely used home operating system behind Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Canonical's Ubuntu. Some of the reasons for the success of Linux Mint are:
  • It works out of the box, with full multimedia support and is extremely easy to use.
  • It's both free of cost and open source.
  • It's community-driven. Users are encouraged to send feedback to the project so that their ideas can be used to improve Linux Mint.
  • Based on Debian and Ubuntu, it provides about 30,000 packages and one of the best software managers.
  • It's safe and reliable. Thanks to a conservative approach to software updates, a unique Update Manager and the robustness of its Linux architecture, Linux Mint requires very little maintenance (no regressions, no antivirus, no anti-spyware...etc).

The Welcome Screen

Some people can't use DVDs and some people live in countries where magazines can't safely distribute codecs and patented technologies. It's a pity for a modern operating system such as Linux Mint that so many people just can't enjoy it in all its glory. Well, we've solved that problem and you won't get penalized by this anymore. No matter what media you're installing Linux Mint from, the Welcome Screen will now give you the opportunity to install the missing multimedia codecs and to upgrade to the DVD edition.


The Menu

The Linux Mint Menu received new features and usability improvements.
Highlighted newly installed applications: The menu highlights your newly installed applications and makes them easier to find.
Finding and installing applications: Available applications are easy to find too. The menu is aware of what's available in your repositories so you can search for software and install packages without opening the software manager.
Search engines: The menu isn't just the quickest way to open an application, it's also the quickest way to find just about anything. Whether you want to Google something up or find a Wikipedia article, just start typing and get there straight from the menu. You can also lookup words in the dictionary and find tutorials, software, hardware devices (from the online Linux Mint hardware database), ideas, and even Linux Mint users that way.

The Software Manager

The Software Manager gives you a nicer browsing experience, with a better categorization of software and the use of application icons.

The Update Manager

If you're not interested in receiving updates for a particular package, simply right click on it and tell the Update Manager to ignore updates for this package. The package will then be added to your "ignore" list and you won't receive any updates for it in the future.
Adobe Flash: Linux Mint comes with the latest Adobe Flash "Square", running in full 32-bit or 64-bit (depending on your edition of Linux Mint) native mode. This plugin is faster than its predecessor, especially in full-screen.
Oracle Virtualbox: A new metapackage called "virtualbox-nonfree" was introduced. This package points to the non-open-source version of Virtualbox and provides USB support.
Signed repositories: No more warning is given for the usage of signed repositories. Using unsigned repositories no longer issues a warning but a validation question.
Highlight: The "highlight" command, used by "apt" is now faster and more reliable.
Meta packages: Codecs are now tracked by "mint-meta-codecs" and applications included in the DVD edition are tracked by "mint-meta-gnome-dvd".
Adjustment system: The mintsystem adjustment system is now LSB compliant.

Download Mint

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