Linux Mint 17 Qiana launched

The latest iteration of Linux Mint, a.k.a. ‘Qiana’, has finally been released by creator Clement Lefebvre. Both the Cinnamon and Mate versions are now available for download with the KDE and XFCE versions coming out as well. Leaving behind a lot of the annoying traits of its previous versions, Linux Mint 16, also known as ‘Petra’, emerged as a solid release. With Linux Mint 17, the developers are trying to reach a new level. To start with, Qiana is an LTS release and the Mint team will support it until 2019.

While Linux Mint 16 was based on Ubuntu 13.10, Qiana is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The rock solid release (owing to its LTS nature) comes with a string of new improvements, particularly to the update manager, driver manager and the login screen. There is however no major overhaul in the design aspect. While Cinnamon and Mate users will feel at home, even Windows XP users could find Qiana a viable alternative.

However, Qiana does have a fair share of known bugs: It has issues with both Skype and DVD playback in VLC. In some configurations, Qiana will not boot or will freeze in the presence of an NVidia graphics card, with the Mint team not disclosing which cards are affected. The Mate version ships without Bluetooth support. Users will have to manually install a package to enable it. thereby not allowing real-time analysis of data. Whereas Spark lets you execute jobs in microbatches, five seconds or less apart. It also provides greater stability compared to Twitter Storm, a real-time, stream-oriented Hadoop framework. Spark can be used for a variety of jobs such as analysing live data. Features of the version 1.0 release include: A stable API that developers can use to interact with Spark though their own apps. A Spark SQL component for accessing structured data, etc. Spark is fully compatible with Hadoop’s Distributed File System ( HDFS), as also with other Hadoop components such as YARN and the HBase distributed database.