Clement Lefebvre announced today the first beta release of the upcoming Linux Mint 3.0, codenamed Cassandra: " This is the first beta release of Cassandra. The system is stable but some work is ongoing in mintinstall, mintmenu and in the artwork. For this reason this is not considered a release candidate. A lot of changes went into Cassandra and we would like to encourage beta-testers to give us as much feedback as possible and as early as possible."

Highlights:

￭ Gnome 2.18 (speed improvements)
￭ Kernel 2.6.20 (better hardware support)
￭ Ubuntu Feisty innovations (restricted-manager, desktop-effects, windows migration assistant, avahi)
￭ OpenOffice 2.2 (complete suite)
￭ Thunderbird replaces Evolution as the default email reader
￭ the Gimp is installed by default
￭ Gnome-control-center replaces mintConfig as the default control center application
￭ Both mintDisk (for internal drives) and NTFS-Config (for external drives) are present for NTFS support
￭ Support for Gnome Templates in mintDesktop
￭ mintInstall replaces gnome-app-install
￭ Drag & Drop support in mintMenu with many other improvements
￭ Sun Java 6 replaces Sun Java 5
￭ Compiz, Beryl and Emerald installed by default

There is no exact date scheduled for the final version of Linux Mint 3.0, but Clement Lefebvre says it will be available somewhere at the end of this month or in early June; everything depends on the user feedback and on the progress made on mintinstall, mintmenu and mintart.

About Linux Mint

Linux Mint is an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution based on the very popular Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux distributions. It offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Free community support is also available from the forums and the IRC channel.

You can download Linux Mint 3.0 Beta 1 (Cassandra) now from Softpedia.

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

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