

Linux Mint 13 with the Cinnamon desktop environment The Linux Mint project has officially announced the release of version 13 of its popular Linux distribution. Code-named Maya, Linux Mint 13 uses the 3.2 Linux kernel and is available as two different editions, providing a choice of default desktop environment. The first of these includes version 1.4 of Cinnamon, the project's fork of the GNOME Shell interface used in GNOME 3, while the other features the 1.2 release of the MATE GNOME 2.x fork.

Both of editions of Maya are based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and, therefore, incorporate a number of changes and features from that release. Linux Mint 13 includes a new display manager called MDM (MDM Display Manager), which is based on version 2.20 of the GNOME Display Manager and, its developers say, "comes with more features than any other Display Manager currently available". Other changes include better support for GTK3 as well as updated Mint-X and Mint-Z themes.



Maya running the MATE desktop environment The distribution also sees the default search engine for a number of countries – including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, France and Spain – switch to Yahoo! as part of an income-raising partnership, which will provide revenue for the project to use toward development, hosting and other expenses. In Linux Mint 12 "Lisa", the project had previously partnered with search engine firm DuckDuckGo; while it is no longer the global default, DuckDuckGo is still available as an alternative search provider.

The developers do note that the Linux Mint boot splash screen is completely black "by design". In the known issues, the developers say that, because of an upstream issue, the included kernel can prevent the operating system from booting on systems with Broadcom b43 wireless chips. Users with b43 wireless cards are advised to boot the LiveDVD into "Compatibility mode" and add "b43.blacklist=yes" as a kernel argument to the boot options.

Further information can be found in the release notes and on the New features in Linux Mint 13 page. Linux Mint 13 can be downloaded from the project's site as a 32- or 64-bit DVD ISO image with either the Cinnamon or MATE desktop; "no-codecs" versions provides the same features as the standard versions, but without including proprietary software, patented technologies or support for restricted formats. Like Ubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint 13 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release and will be supported with updates until April 2017.

See also:

HealthCheck: Linux Mint, a feature from The H.

(crve)