The recently released Mint 16, nicknamed Petra, might be the perfect Linux desktop for newcomers. At its core is Ubuntu 13.10, but on top of this are desktops Mate and Cinnamon, the latter being the Mint project's homegrown user interface. Ubuntu gives a stable foundations on which to build, allowing the project to focus more on its desktops and less on the underpinnings. The result is a pair of desktops both worthy of consideration but with Cinnamon far more interesting as its hits version 2.0

Following the announcement of "Steam Machines" from Valve to "conquer" the living room, the first "Steam Machine" has been revealed recently. The American company iBuyPower has revealed its own vision of a Steam box to compete with the recently released game consoles from Microsoft and Sony.

Red Hat's newest enterprise Linux takes one giant step forward to its release and shifts from MySQL to MariaDB for its database management system needs.

Mere weeks after shipping the final version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5, Shadowman has announced the first public beta of RHEL 7.

In the era of "big data", large text files (GB or more) could be commonly encountered around us. A typical text editor may not be designed to deal with such large text files efficiently, and may simply get choked while attempting to open a big file, due to insufficient memory. If you are a savvy system admin, you can probably open or touch an arbitrary text file with a combination of cat, tail, grep, sed, awk, etc. In this tutorial, I will discuss more user-friendly ways to open (and possibly edit) a large text file on Linux.

The battle between the good guys and bad guys is a never-ending one. And as they say in the industry, if you have something that somebody wants to gain access to badly enough, they will keep taking shots at it until they succeed. The question is, when will you know that they have succeeded, during or after?

I have recently written an article about configuring multiple keyboard layouts in different Linux desktop environments: Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE.

That was a text version.

Today I will show you a video about keyboard layouts configuration in Xfce.

When the US Federal government shutdown from October 1 - 16 this year, a small Drupal shop in the Washington DC area turned a list of freelance gigs for furloughed employees in a Google doc into a website in five hours. Unfurlough.us went live at 1:00 am EST on October 4, accumulating 50,000 page views in a little over a week.

You can use the Raspberry Pi to do all kinds of geeky stuff, but one of the most interesting uses for the little device is that of a home theatre PC.

ownCloud, Inc. is proud to announce today, December 11, that the Community Edition of its highly anticipated ownCloud 6 open source DYI (Do It Yourself) cloud server software is now available for download/upgrade with an improved design.

It's been a while since last looking on the anti-aliasing performance of the R600 Gallium3D driver so for this article we have some fresh MSAA benchmarks of the driver from Mesa 10.1-devel and using a Cayman-based high-end AMD Radeon graphics card.

The MintBox 2 is here, and it’s more powerful than ever. Just how much power are you getting for nearly £400 though?

RadiumBoards announced a $50 “HD Camera Cape” for the BeagleBone Black with a 1.3-megapixel Aptina sensor that provides 720p, 30fps video and Linux and Android support. There’s now a second commercially available camera cape (add-on board) for the BeagleBone Black single board computer, following up on CircuitCo’s 3.1-megapixel BeagleBone 3.1MP Camera Cape. The $50 HD Camera Cape comes from RadiumBoards, a Haryana, India based subsidiary of VVDN Technologies, and provides 720p, 30 frames per second video capture.

Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to the problem than simply running out of honey. Bees are one of the most abundant pollinators in the natural world. They are the unsung, unpaid facilitators of human agricultural practices and have been for as long as we have sewn seeds. Their disappearance would spell disaster for our food supply, with some estimating our species lasting only four years on this planet without them. So, what can be done?

The microcontrollers allow any developer to “add vibrational feedback to all capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels on mobile computing and gaming devices, smart TV remotes, cameras, printers, industrial control panels, point-of-sale terminals and toys.”

The Book of Audacity is a fun to read, comprehensive guidebook to the popular free audio recording and editing program. The real value in this book? Tons of useful tips.

If you read the technology press today, odds are you already know about the launching of the AllSeen Alliance That’s not a surprise, because this is an important and ambitious project. But there’s a story behind the story that likely won’t get the attention that it deserves.

It kept nagging at me. Why was the "hot corner" in Debian's version of GNOME 3 so "sensitive," compared to the GNOME 3 desktop's hot corner in Fedora 19? I did a bit of searching and found out that "hot corner" sensitivity was something that the user can set, not in stock GNOME 3 but with the Activities Configurator extension.

Linux Mint Xfce, a modern, elegant, and comfortable operating system based on Ubuntu and Debian, has just reached version 16 RC.

The Joomla community announced Joomla Framework 1.0, making a major step forward for the Joomla project.

The Princess Bride remains quite the iconic book and movie for tons of people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s (and, hopefully, other ages as well... but I can only speak from experience). A huge number of lines have lived on from that movie and become mainstays in popular culture. And like all sorts of great culture, it has inspired plenty of additional creativity around the original as well.

In a Network Operation Centre (NOC) environment, setting up alerts is extremely important. As one of the most popular NOC monitoring systems, Nagios features powerful alerting services. Alerts generated by Nagios can be sent out in various means, so that they can be acted upon immediately. Email notification is the most common option used. This tutorial presents two other ways to send out Nagios alerts: (1) audio alerts via web browser, and (2) audio/vibration alerts via an Android app.

After one year of development, we're glad to announce the availability of Tango Studio 2.1 Live ISOs. This new version is based on Debian Wheezy 7.2 and contains a collection of the best open-source applications available for audio creation. Thanks to all who helped with making up this news ISOs ! (especially Lionel and those who tested the beta ISOs and reporting bugs).

The GNOME Project has announced a few days ago that immediate availability for download of the two new versions of the GNOME Software application, 3.10.4 and 3.11.2.

The Linux Foundation will be guiding consumer electronic players to one, universally compatible system of the Internet of Things.

Today in Open Source: Will Microsoft lose its Android revenue? Plus: Linux Mint 16 Xfce RC released, and a review of openSUSE 13.1 GNOME.

When Nokia completes the sale of its telephone business to Microsoft, a transfer of its substantial patent portfolio will be conspicuously absent from the deal. Microsoft got licenses to those patents but won't buy the patents themselves. That situation immediately led to speculation that Nokia was interested in doing standalone patent-licensing when it would be mostly immune to counterattack.

Despite the backing of the Linux Foundation, this is a cross-platform effort, supporting all major desktop and mobile operating systems, initially including Linux, Android, Arduino, iOS, OS/X, Windows 7/8/RT, the Unity game engine, and “thin clients.” Missing here are the many controller-oriented real-time operating systems (RTOSes) that will initially dominate IoT at the device level, but Allseen appears to be looking at the long haul and the higher end of the market. Advanced OSes like Linux and Android are expected to increasingly move into controller-like, low end embedded duty as demand increases for greater intelligence and Internet connectivity.

Get the free Circle app for your Android device.

Get the Monopoly Slots game free for Android