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Linux Mint 2.1 "Bea" BETA 023 [01/12/2006]

Bea screenshot

This release is based on Barbara. It is the first release candidate for Linux Mint 2.1 "Bea" which will be released on 20/12/2006.

Many thanks to the Linux Mint community from which we managed to gather precious ideas and feedback. We've brought a lot of changes into Bea and we hope you'll like it.

Improved Artwork

Bea comes with improved artwork and better branding. The Ubuntu branding was removed and replaced with artwork made for Linux Mint. The LiveCD, usplash, GDM and Gnome splash screens were redesigned. On the desktop, a few modifications were made to the icons and the login and logout events are accompanied with new sounds.

New Software

We received a lot of suggestions from the community and we decided to include the following new software in Bea:

  • Beagle, which makes it easy to find stuff from the desktop
  • Network-Manager, which manages your wired and wireless connections
  • Openoffice.org-Impress, thanks to which you can now see Impress and PowerPoint presentations
  • Xchat-gnome, which lets you chat on the IRC

Closer to the Community

As our community is growing, it seemed important that users could find help and support in the easiest possible way. To achieve this, some efforts were put into Bea. Xchat-Gnome was modified to automatically connect to the Linux Mint IRC channel, and Firefox now features Linux Mint bookmarks pointing at the website and forums. Unless the user is having a network connection problem, help will hopefully be one click away.

Better Web Browsing

Web browsing was good in Barbara, but it wasn't good enough. In Bea, Realplayer 10 was replaced with the Mplayer plugins so you can now enjoy Quicktime, AVI, MPG and a lot of other web content. And the Flash plugin was upgraded to version 9 Beta 2.

We also found it annoying that Firefox 2.0 didn't go back to the previous page when the backspace key was pressed, so we "fixed" that as well :)

A Few Surprises

For those of you who have nvidia cards there's a little surprise in Bea called envy. And for those of you who like playing with the terminal, we put a little surprise in there too :)