mintInstall 3.4 was released in Romeo and it's full of new features
Changes:
- GUI and HIG improvements: The graphical interface looks better and changes were made for it to follow the Gnome HIG guidelines
- GetDeb support: You can now search and launch the GetDeb portal from mintInstall. GDebi is used to install the .deb packages you click on. Warning: GetDeb shows packages for the latest Ubuntu version. If you're using an old version of Linux Mint there might be risks involved in using this. This will be explained in details within the upcoming Elyssa User Guide.
- APT support: You can now search the repositories for a package, show information for a particular package (including the list of files contained in it) or even install a package directly from mintInstall. This will save you opening Synaptic or a terminal and before you know it this will be your favorite feature ever, in the entire world..etc etc.. you were warned!
You can also visit the repository pages for Linux Mint and Ubuntu, and from there search a particular package across different repositories of the two distributions. - mintSystem framework: This is quite technical but it brings a huge improvement. A new package called mintSystem keeps track of your system version (which release you're running..etc). MintInstall doesn't keep its own sources.list anymore and it doesn't store its own release ID for use with the portal... it now asks mintSystem for it. Basically, in the past... if you were running Celena/Cassandra and installed a version of mintInstall made for Daryna ... the program would use the portal made for Daryna... whereas now, by asking mintSystem what release you're running it will use the appropriate portal. So it basically means you'll be able to install versions of mintInstall made for Elyssa (like this one for instance) without compromising your system. The portal will point at Daryna packages since even though it's an Elyssa-designed mintInstall, the version information is given by your Daryna-made mintSystem.... oh well, it's not that important. Just trust me on this, this will save a lot of potential headaches in the future
How to install it:
- Make sure to have the Romeo repository in your sources.list
- Upgrade to the newest mintinstall (apt update; apt install mintinstall), it should get something called mintsystem as a dependency.. if you upgrade to the latest mintinstall using mintupdate make sure to check the "dist-upgrade" option in the preferences.
- Launch mintInstall by clicking on "Software Portal" in mintMenu
Translations:
mintInstall 3.4 supports unicode and special characters. We want it to support as many languages as possible, so if you happen to speak anything else than English, please help us translate it.
Read this thread and participate in the translation effort: viewtopic.php?f=43&t=9110
Bugs and feedback:
This is going to be part of Elyssa, and a major component of the desktop so don't hesitate to report bugs or feedback by replying to this thread.
Status:
No additional work is planned on mintInstall for Elyssa. If Linspire releases the API for CNR early enough another version might be released. This is however uncertain and CNR support in Linux Mint 5 is likely to use a CNR client rather than mintInstall itself. This is hard to predict at this stage. Unless something change this will be planned for Linux Mint 6.
Screenshots:
I couldn't resist putting a few screenshots for this one:
Clem.
