The final release will be available at the end of the month!

Nov 14, 2011 08:40 GMT  ·  By

Right after our first look aticle of Linux Mint 12, Clement Lefebvre proudly announced on his blog that the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 operating system is available for download and testing.

Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) RC is here for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, and distributed as Live CDs with no multimedia codecs included, and Live DVD ISO images with everything included (see download link below).

Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) RC also features a new user interface called MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions), which will look like a normal desktop. It is also the first Linux Mint distribution built on top of the new GNOME 3.2 desktop environment.

The new user interface of Linux Mint 12 will feature a bottom panel, an application launcher, a window list with currently running apps, a task-centric desktop (i.e. you switch between windows, not applications) and visible system tray icons.

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The task-centric Alt-Tab in Linux Mint 12's interface
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The new Menu in Linux Mint 12
Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) will also features MATE, a GNOME 2 fork compatible with the GNOME 3 desktop environment, available only in the DVD edition.

A new theme, based on Zukitwo and Mint-X, and called Mint-Z, has been added in Linux Mint 12. New quality background images were also added.

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The Mint-Z desktop theme in Linux Mint 12
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The new quality backgrounds in Linux Mint 12
The following known problems are present in Linux Mint 12 RC:

· MATE; · Nautilus actions; · Adding PPA repositories; · Apturl and apt://; · Moonlight; · Upstream issues.

The final version of the Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) operating system will be released in about one week, around November 20th.

Until then, download and test the Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Please report bugs to the official Linux Mint Bug Tracker.