Linux Mint 12 KDE released
Just over two months have passed since the Gnome edition of Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” hit the servers, and now lead project developer Clement Lefebvre has announced the immediate availability of the KDE edition of the popular Linux operating system.
The distribution is based on Ubuntu 11.10 but uses KDE version 4.7.4 for its default desktop environment. Other new and updated packages include version 8 of Thunderbird email client, Firefox 8.0, LibreOffice 3.4.3, a newer version of Amarok music player and the ever-popular VLC player, now at version 1.1.12.
As a result of the projects first income-generating partnership, the search engine DuckDuckGo is also set as the default engine. It is worth noting that this search engine does not track or record searches or personal information, and therefore does not vary results between different users like other search engines.
This is the first Linux Mint release that utilizes hybrid ISO images, used to make a bootable USB stick using the “dd” command, removing the need to use software like UNetBootin to configure a bootable live USB stick. USB sticks will behave exactly like a traditional live CD/DVD, although the stick is not persistent. UNetBootin can provide users with persistent solutions should they be required though.
There is one known issue in the release notes. Moonlight has been removed due to bug that caused Firefox to crash. The bug has been fixed upstream and users can install the plugin from the project’s website.
The developers have also made changes to the splash screen. Users will find it is now all black and doesn’t show the logo and green dots like in past releases. This is an intended design and makes the boot sequence look more consistent across multiple computers.
Linux Mint 12 KDE edition is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit releases, from the Linux Mint release servers. For those of you running release candidate versions, you can update to the final version by applying any level 1 and 2 updates in the Update Manager.