Linux Mint 5 x64 Edition released

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.

• Linux Mint x64 Edition was forked from Ubuntu Hardy as opposed to Ubuntu Edgy for the Main Edition,
• Linux Mint x64 Edition comes with a java plugin implemented by OpenJDK, as opposed to Sun for the Main Edition.
• Linux Mint x64 Edition comes with Xchat instead of Xchat-Gnome
• Linux Mint x64 Edition comes with Flash 9 instead of Flash 10

More packages are available for i386 than they are for amd64 and the Main edition is also slightly more stable than its 64 bit equivalent. The Main edition only recognizes a maximum of 4GB RAM though and even on computers with less than 4GB RAM the performance gain provided by x64 over the Main edition can significantly enhance the user’s experience.

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