LinuxMint 9 Isadora was released yesterday and it is 90 MB bigger than the Release Candidate of almost 3 weeks ago, requiring that you burn it to a DVD. I haven't had time to work with it beyond booting it in LiveCD mode, however I have been running the Release Candidate in VirtualBox where it has worked well.
In recent months, a number of Linux Distro's have moved to Ubuntu for their operating system base. One distro, Puppy Linux, I did not expect to see do that but suprise, this week, Puppy was released as Lucid Puppy based on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Lucid Puppy is "lean and fast" and notably only a 128 MB in size. This is not a "noobie" Linux as it does require some configuration tasks be performed such as network, sound, and printing using simple windows like tools, all of which requires at least a basic understanding on how things are done in Linux. Even the first boot of the LiveCD requires the user to make choices, particularly for the monitor or video capabilitities of the the computer, a wrong choice here may not be a positive experience for the noobie or casual user of Linux. But once it is configured, Lucid Puppy does provide a rich desktop experience and an application rich environment in which to use Linux.
05/29/2010 update: Puppy 500 had already been updated to 5.0.1 so that apt can now be installed but apt appears to still broken but more to come on this. One of the tasks at hand is to get the virtual machine additions installed on Puppy 5.0.1 which requires the kernel headers to be installed, a work in progress. I loaded it on an older laptop and it looks really good as a very lightweight desktop with a small footprint (CD is 128MB). I have not used the laptop in the last year or so because it "under powered" with only 256 MB of RAM a Pentium III logo-ed as "Designed for Windows XP" as long you are willing to wait on Windows. I really like this laptop because it is unique in that it has a 4:3 screen that is also a high resolution (1400 X 1040) display (Worked really well with Windows 2000). The real plus with Lucid Puppy came when I wanted to test connectivity to my WPA2 secured network and found that the wireless adapter card that I have been using as "linux compatible" for about 3 years now, only supports WEP security. I have had a D-Link Wireless G card sitting on the shelf for a couple years that was not natively compatible or supported by Linux, still in its original box, unused. I decided to try it with Lucid Puppy and found that it was not only supported natively now but it supports/connects to my WPA2 secured network! Cool! Release notes can now be found at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/puppylinux/puppy-5.0.1....
05/30/2010 Update: I installed 5.0.1 to to the same laptop with 5.0.1, it installed as a "dual boot" with Windows XP, which is straight forward startup using grub 1.5 using menu.lst for boot configurations. Also, very cool now is "Quickpet v2" which provides easy installation of applications such as the Gimp, Audacity, Wine, Firefox 3.6.3, Opera, Thunderbird, the JRE, Foxit PDF reader, and updates. Lucid Puppy also has its own full blown package manager, similar to Synaptic. I have a very usable system now with Thunderbird for my main email client, Firefox for web tasks including updating this blog. Getting Remote Desktop to work was a bit of a challenge as there are issues with Puppy's Package Manger in that it seems to work from a older database that doesn't have the current repository data for Lucid Lynx. I tried a number of work-a-rounds by downloading the needed files from the repositories using Lucid Lynx 10.04 on another computer and then copying the many supporting installation .deb files from its apt cache over to the Lucid Puppy computer using gFTP (included in Lucid Puppy). RDesktop now starts but doesn't seem to know about the VNC protocol, says "Not Supported" Anxious to get this work, I tried the Window's tightVNC viewer standalone executable using Wine as installed and that worked but seemed a bit sluggish. I then found xtightvnc viewer in the Lucid repositories and copied that .deb file over to the Lucid Puppy computer and it is fast! With that fix in place, I am able to use this old Pentium III computer with 256 MB of Ram efficiently, Definitely usable. Close to Netbook performance and a 4:3 screen with HD 1400 X 1050 resolution and I can use it for remote access to other computers. Wireless connectivity is awesome in supporting my over 5 year old D-Link PMCIA card using WPA2 security, and configuration of wireless is easy the system scans for wireless access points and automatically creates a profile based on the SSID. I have also been able to play media files including .wmv files attached to emails and music files. One negative I have observed in Lucid Puppy is the apparent lack of any monitoring of the battery level monitoring and no warning when it gets low, the system just goes off; on the positive side of this, the laptop ran on battery for over an hour on its "ancient" original battery, screen up and active for the entire time. For more information check out http://puppylinux.org/wikka/LucidPuppy and a full list of installed packages at http://www.diddywahdiddy.net/Puppy500/LP5-Release/Lucid_Pup_Packages
One other note: LinuxMint9 LXDE (light weight desktop) Release Candidate is out and it worked on this same computer that I installed Lucid Puppy to but it was very sluggish even to boot and not particularly usable.
For home theater or media center use, you might want to take a look at Element 1.2 which supports HDMI audio and has been stripped down of things like Compiz, optimized for the intended use.
More information on these releases and download links can be found on http://distrowatch.com