Following the Ubuntu release (7.04) from yesterday, Linux Mint team has just announced a few minutes ago their new version based on the popular KDE desktop. In particular, I am very happy to announce this release as I was a part of it, and helped the team to tweak the look and feel of this distribution:

"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. "

Highlights of this release:

￭ KDE 3.5.6
￭ Amarok 1.4.5
￭ Koffice 1.6.2
￭ Firefox 2.0.0.3
￭ Domino KDE Style

Also, along with this new version of Bianca, the Linux Mint team released a light version, called miniKDE Edition, that contains fewer softwares but it fits on a regular CD (700 MB) as opposed to its "big brother" which has over 800 MB: "For users who do not have a DVD burner we're also releasing a "miniKDE" Edition which fits on a CD."

Based on the Bianca-Green theme, this KDE Edition features Kontact as the default mail application, Mozilla Firefox as the default web browser and Koffice as the default office suite (against the users' persistent demand for OpenOffice.org). Konqueror is still the default file manager, but Dolphin is there if you want to give it a try. This release brings software like:

￭ Krusader
￭ KFTPGrabber
￭ Scribus
￭ Inkscape
￭ KMyMoney
￭ K3B
￭ K9Copy
￭ KPowerSave and KNetworkManager
￭ The Gimp
￭ DigiKam
￭ Hugin
￭ Filelight
￭ Guarddog
￭ KPackage
￭ and many more...

You can download Linux Mint 2.2 KDE Edition now from Softpedia.

You can download Linux Mint 2.2 miniKDE Edition now from Softpedia.