On Monday, the 27th of February, Lead Linux Mint Developer Clem Lefebvre announced to the world that the Release Candidate (RC) of Linux Mint 12 LXDE has been released to the public. “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 12 LXDE RC,” said Lefebvre. “We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun testing the release candidate!” he added.

You can get the operating system and run it if your machine meets these system requirements: x86 processor, 256MB of Ram, 3GB of disk space, a graphics card capable of 800x600 resolution, and a CD/DVD drive or USB port. Multiple download links are available on the Linux Mint official blog here.

Before you go get Linux Mint 12 LXDE RC, perhaps you would like to find out what new bits and pieces the operating system has to offer. To keep things nice and short, here’s a list:

It features the LXDE desktop, known for being fast and lightweight.

• Hybrid ISO images to effortlessly make bootable USB sticks that act like a liveDVD (this is the first Linux Mint release to use Hybrid ISO images). The hybrid ISOs are compatible with Unetbootin and Startup Disk Creator.
• DuckDuckGo, the privacy-oriented search engine praised by Opera Software, is set as the default search engine. You can of course change the search engine to something else if you so desire. But if you take the time to find out what DuckDuckGo has to offer, chances are you will not want to change.
• Features these upstream components: Ubuntu 11.10, Linux 3.0, LXDE 0.5.0.

For additional information on what Linux Mint 12 LXDE has to offer, check out this “What’s new” webpage and for info on known issues check out the “Release notes.”