This is Linux Mint 3.1, codename Celena, based on Cassandra and compatible with Ubuntu Feisty and its repositories.

What makes Celena ideal for the desktop?

• Out of the box multimedia support
• Microsoft Windows Integration (Dual-boot, NTFS read/write support, Migration Assistant)
• One-Click install system (Linux Mint Software Portal, mintInstall)
• Easy file-sharing (mintUpload)
• Desktop features, Control Center, mintMenu
• 3D Effects (Compiz and Beryl on top of AIGLX)
• Great configuration tools
• Great selection of default applications (OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Gimp, Pidgin, XChat, Amarok..etc)
• Solid package base (Google Earth, Picasa, Skype.. a lot of important software present in the repositories or in the Linux Mint Software Portal, compatibility with all Ubuntu Feisty repositories and most Debian packages)
• Solid code base (Debian distribution built on top of Ubuntu Edgy. Inherits all innovations put into Cassandra and Bianca and default configurations from Bea)

Celena is using Cassandra's base (kernel 2.6.20-15, Gnome 2.18).

What's new in Celena

1. mintAssistant

3. New Artwork
If you've spent a bit of time on the Linux Mint's forum you probably recognized Agust's style in the new Celena. We've got a new artist, Agustin J. Verdegal T. and as you can see we're very proud of him. In Celena, not only did we build the whole theme around his work but we also introduced a new graphical Grub menu using Gfxboot.

Notifications and power-management icons were also tweaked to integrate better with the new artwork.

See a Full Screen Shot Tour at http://www.linuxmint.com/screenshots.html

4. Print to PDF
Whether it's an email in Thunderbird, a Web page in Firefox or even a text-file in Gedit, no matter what it is or which application you view it from, Celena will let you print it as a PDF document. The resulting PDF file will automatically be saved within your Home/Documents folder.

5. Improved Stability

The Update Manager and Update Notifier were removed from Celena so users would not perform un-educated upgrades. With more than 2 releases a year and many modules affected by upgrades, stability was preferred to security in Celena. No more pop-ups telling you a new version of Ubuntu became available, no more pop-ups telling you to download the latest kernel... your system is stable, tested and it should stay that way.

For more information about this read the following blog entry: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=54

6. Improved Performance

Beagle is gone. A recent survey showed that a vast majority of Linux Mint users never actually used it. The search engine was resource-hungry and its indexation methods made Linux Mint extremely slow on older hardware specs. This should come as a very good news to people with slower machines and make Linux Mint installable on computers with 256MB of RAM.

7. New tools and upgrades

• Firefox was upgraded to version 2.0.0.6 and is now maintained by us (it was maintained by Ubuntu before and upgrades caused the start page to change).
• Pidgin was upgraded to version 2.1.1
• MintMenu and mintInstall were upgraded to the latest version
• Tomboy Notes was fixed in order not to show the start note the first time Linux Mint is run
• AptOnCD is now installed by default to let the user backup his selection of packages
• Command-not-Found was also added to improve the Terminal experience
• A new apt command which provides all main features from apt-get, apt-cache and aptitude