The popular Linux distro ‘Mint’, known for its out-of-the-box working and preinstalled utility applications today released a major update. Moving on to version 8 now, the newest edition of the distro has been codenamed Helena, following the alphabetical naming scheme. Linux Mint 8 is based on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

Apart from the regular edition, a new Universal Edition is also launched. The Universal Edition is available as a Live DVD and includes packages for several languages, thus enabling easy localization of the operating system. On the other hand, it won’t contain any proprietary audio or video codecs. This is done to “to facilitate the distribution of Linux Mint in countries where software patents are enforceable”. However, the Universal Edition will come with an extra feature that will allow the user to download all the missing codecs in one go.

Linux Kernel 2.6.31 has been put to use with this release and the system comes with Gnome 2.28 and X.Org 7.4. The spotlight of this update has been given to GUI modification and tweaking to make it more usable and productive. Several new nifty features have been added for better accessibility and computing experience. Apart from the that, major improvements have been made over “OEM installation, possibility to ignore updates, configurable menu places, multiple selection in the Software Manager, new system tray File Uploader with support for drag and drop and mutiple files uploads.”

[Download Linux Mint 8] We recommend you download using BitTorrent so as to avoid slow downloading speed caused be heavy load on their servers.