The 64-bit Edition of Linux Mint 5 is Now Available

After more than four months of development, Clement Lefebvre proudly announced the day before yesterday, on his blog, the immediate availability of the Linux Mint 5 x64 Edition, for 64-bit processors. Linux Mint 5 (32-bit edition) was officially released this year on June 9th. Dubbed Elyssa, it's based on Daryna (Linux Mint 4.0), and is compatible with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) and its repositories. Except for the fact that it works on AMD64/EM64T processors, the x64 edition of Linux Mint was forked from Ubuntu 8.04, and comes with an OpenJDK Java plugin, XChat and Adobe Flash Player 9.

"x64 is a brand new edition of Linux Mint. All the features and improvements introduced into Linux Mint since the start of the project were re-implemented on top of a modern Ubuntu Hardy base. Our packages were recompiled to support the X86_64 architecture, media codecs were added and plugins were coupled with a 64 bit version of Firefox 3." - said Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint developer.

The team also published a mini benchmark, which compares performance with the main edition. See here for more information.

Starting with the Linux Mint 6 (Felicia), the x64 edition will be released along with the main and light editions.

What is Linux Mint? Linux Mint is an elegant, easy to use, up-to-date, 100% free and comfortable Linux desktop distribution based on the very popular Ubuntu operating system. It offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Also, free community support is available from the forums and the IRC channel.

Highlights of Linux Mint 5:

· mintMenu improvements;
· mintUpdate enhancements;
· mintInstall improvements;
· Lots of desktop improvements;
· The possibility to activate/deactivate GNOME's own compositing manager;
· Performance improvements;
· Better look and feel;
· Five new themes: Peppermint, Aurora, Carbon, Wildmint and Lightning;
· Better documentation and localization;
· Upstream improvements;
· and, last but not least, Long Term Support!

If you have an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD64 processor, we suggest you grab the Linux Mint 5 64-bit Edition right now from Softpedia.