Free linux mint software for linux

Linux Mints purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.
Is Linux Mint suitable for companies?
Yes. Linux Mint offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Free community support is also available from the forums and the IRC channel. The main purpose of Linux Mint is to innovate and constantly bring the best desktop solutions to its users. For this reason, the release cycle is fast and a new version of Linux Mint can be released every month or every two months. All released versions of Linux Mint are actively supported and some of the releases (possibly Bianca or Cassandra) will come with a Long Term Support guarantee (a guarantee that our Support Center will support these releases for the years to come).
Is Linux Mint suitable for individuals?
Yes, definitely. We believe Linux is the best operating system on the market. There are more than 300 active Linux distributions and were working hard at becoming the best alternative for your desktop. This is a tough competition as there are other great desktop operating systems and distributions out there. We have faith in the quality of our desktop and a lot of great ideas. If your computer is a PC and you have more than 512MB RAM you should try Linux Mint and see what you think about it. If youre running a 5 years old non-free operating system such as Microsoft Windows XP you should definitely be impressed. We like hearing about your experience and taking your suggestions onboard so please give us your feedback.
Why is there a Light Edition and a Full Edition?
Linux Mint respects the GPL and it also respects the copyrights and licenses of the proprietary software it distributes. However it uses technologies that have been patented in some parts of the World. Most countries do not recognize the legitimacy of software patents so for most of our users this is not a problem. But if youre unlucky and you live in a country where software patents are legally enforcable, you need a version of Linux Mint which is free of patented technologies, and this is what the Light Edition is about.
Why does Linux Mint include proprietary drivers?
It doesnt. If it did, it would be legally wrong (because it would violate the GPL) or ethically wrong (if some dirty trick was used for the user to link the code to the kernel for instance).
What about proprietary software?
We believe in open source and release all our work with the corresponding source code. We owe a lot to the Free Software movement and to the GPL but we also owe a lot to all the developers who contributed ideas and tools and who made software better and better throughout the years. Some of them released their source code as well and thus granted us more freedom and more flexibility. Others released their software with proprietary licenses and although this didnt give us the freedom we would have liked it still contributed to make software better. We like Software in general, Free Software even more, but we do not believe in boycotting Proprietary Software.
Enhancements:
- The brand new "mintInstall" and the "Linux Mint Software Portal": http://www.linuxmint.com/software
- Gnome 2.18 (speed improvements)
- Kernel 2.6.20 (better hardware support)
- Ubuntu Feisty innovations (restricted-manager, desktop-effects, windows migration assistant, avahi)
- OpenOffice 2.2 (complete suite)
- Thunderbird replaces Evolution as the default email reader
- Pidgin replaces Gaim as the default messenger
- Sunbird is now installed by default
- The Gimp is installed by default
- Gnome-control-center replaces mintConfig as the default control center application
- Both mintDisk (for internal drives) and NTFS-Config (for external drives) are present for NTFS support
- Support for Gnome Templates in mintDesktop
- mintInstall replaces gnome-app-install and the upcoming Clickn Run.
- Drag & Drop support in mintMenu with many other improvements
- Sun Java 6 replaces Sun Java 5
- Compiz, Beryl and Emerald installed by default
- New artwork

Linux is an increasingly popular open source Unix-like operating system. These pages arent intended as a general guide (for that, check out our list of resources) but rather information specific to using Linux here at Boston University, and particularly to using our custom distribution, BU Linux.

BU Linux is based on Fedora Core Linux, but specifically tailored for the BU environment. Weve added security updates, made modifications to make software work better with the way things are set up here, and added some applications that we think you might like to have. For details, see the FAQ.

Linux Commander is a powerful file manager for the X Window System.

It is partially modelled after Window Commander for Windows.

Kwort Linux is an free operating system. Based on slackware, it provides a solid, simple and stable base system.

Kworts desktop and applications are completely based on the gtk2 toolkit. It uses the Xfce desktop as default with some modifications.

At the moment Kwort provides its own tools for retrieving packages from our mirrors called kpkg.

Linux MSN Messenger Engine is a fully asynchronous, and fully multithreaded MSN messenger engine.
Preliminary releases will be statically combined with an ncurses console-based EPIC4-like interface for instant messaging functionality.
Enhancements:
- Code cleanup

Linux distribution race is a cool car race for 4 players, cars are named by Linux distributions (Mandrake, SUSE, RedHat, Debian).

You can create maps in GIMP. Controls: WSAD, TGFH, IKJL, arrows.

Icepack linux is an independent Linux distribution built from scratch. Our objective is to offer you a user-friendly full-featured operating system, pre-configured, well structured and easy to work with, and filled with the latest stable versions of great Linux applications.

You dont need a profound Linux knowledge to install and use Icepack - our install manager guides you safely through the installation process, and the desktops and menus are self-explanatory!