14 DAY TRIAL // After announcing the release of the Cinnamon 2.6.8 desktop environment earlier today for the upcoming Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela) operating system, it would appear that Clement Lefebvre already published the ISO images of the Release Candidate (RC) version on the main servers.
At the moment of writing this article, there's no official announcement for Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela) Release Candidate, which comes with the latest Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, but we thought that you might like to get a head start and download the Live CDs ahead of the announcement.
The final release of Linux Mint 17.2 will be made available for download sometime in July 2015 and it will be a long-term support release supported with software updates and security patches until year 2019. As far as we know, it will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr).
Without further ado, those of you who want to test the Release Candidate version of the Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela) distribution can do so right now by downloading it from the official website or via Softpedia. Please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and that some issues are still present. Thus, we don't recommend it for production environments.