ETA for a Mint 7 stable release?

I can see that’s the question on everybody’s lips right now.. “when is Mint 7 going to be released?”. You probably saw on twitter that LinuxMint-7-DEV-052.iso was approved by Exploder and that it passed all the tests… and yet, no sign of it in the mirrors and no announcements on the website

I just want to ask the community for a little more patience. There’s very little left to do before the release but we can’t afford to skip any steps.

– LinuxMint-7-DEV-052.iso wasn’t fully tested by myself, and although it was maintained by me and approved by Exploder, I still want to make sure about a few things before I approve it myself.

– The Universal edition is going to be released at the same time as the Main edition, so that needs to get approved as well. I’m testing LinuxMint-7-Universal-DEV-007.iso right now. It looks good but I need to make sure it passes all the tests and that it’s easily upgradable to a Main Edition with a single click of the mouse.

– The User Guide needs to be updated and that will take a day or two.

– Once everything is fine, it will take up to 48 hours for the ISOs to propagate on the download mirrors.

After that, we’ll be ready for a release.

The upgrade path from Mint 7 RC1 is working fine. The upgrade path from Mint 6 will need to be tested and the upgrader will eventually need to be updated. This won’t hold the release though and we’ll make an announcement for Mint 6 users a few days after the release.

Please be patient and my apologies for the time this is taking.