Clement Lefebvre and the Linux Mint community are proud to present today (January 21st) the first release candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition operating system. Powered by Linux kernel 2.6.31 and built on top of the KDE Software Compilation 4.3.4, Linux Mint 8 KDE RC1 comes with many improvements in various areas of interest. It is now based on the Kubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Linux distribution.

We kindly remind everyone that Linux Mint 8 (Helena) is based on the current stable release of the popular Ubuntu operating system, and has support for the EXT4 filesystem, various attractive improvements to the update manager and software manager, and many others. Linux Mint 8 KDE Community Edition also has new artwork, including the wallpaper (a custom version of Air Mint by dlkreations) and the brand-new logo redesigned by Henrique Perticarati.

"Community editions now use their own repositories and are now able to pin packages from the main edition. Dependencies were simplified and the Mint tools were made more modular. In particular they can now be installed on Ubuntu without any configuration. The branding used in the Mint tools was removed to make it easier for other distributions to use them and to give a more professional look to the desktop. An OEM installation can now be launched from the liveCD boot menu." - was stated in the official release notes.

The Linux Mint 8 KDE developers, recommend the following system requirements:

· A modern 32-bit processor;
· 512 MB of RAM;
· 10 GB free hard disk space (for installation);
· VGA video card capable of at least 800x600 resolution;
· A CD-ROM drive.

What is Linux Mint? Linux Mint is an elegant, easy-to-use, up-to-date, 100% free and comfortable Linux desktop distribution based on the very popular Ubuntu operating system. It offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Also, free community support is available from the forums and the IRC channel.

Download Linux Mint 8 KDE Edition RC1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is an unstable release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only! Please report bugs to the Linux Mint 8 RC1 KDE Community Edition bug thread on their forum.