LXer Weekly Roundup for 27-Jan-2013

LXer Feature: 27-Jan-2013 The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Fedora 18 Spherical Cow review - Bad bad bad: Encouraged by the very positive trend shown in the last release, I decided to see how well Fedora 18 would behave. As you guess most correctly, this is a first of several reviews. We will follow up with Cinnamon and MATE articles, too. For the time being, let's do KDE, as the Gnome version is out of the question. Shall we commence?

Lenovo, Linux, and the Coming of the Chromebooks: However great the strides made by user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu and Mint in recent years, it seems fair to say that Linux has not yet enjoyed any sweeping successes on the desktop the way it has on the mobile side with Android. That, however, may be changing. Thanks once again to none other than Google, Linux is now appearing with increasing frequency in the PC lineups of hardware makers.

KDE 4.10's third and final release candidate arrives: KDE 4.10 is into the final stages of development after the final release was delayed. A new, third, release candidate, which should be the last, is now available for testing

Introduction to GNU R on Linux Operating System: This article will deal mainly with the installation of R on Linux, but also will provide a simple example on how to use R for plotting. This is the first article of the series of R articles so subscribe to our RSS feed for regular updates. Everyone, who is interested in using R for their work or is simply interested in this software is invited to follow this series of articles. The main objective of these articles is to provide a quick reference to R with illustrative examples.

Your First Bite of Raspberry Pi: I have to give Kyle Rankin all the credit for my Raspberry Pi collection. I never really felt geeky enough to do anything with an Arduino, and for some reason I mentally lumped the RPi into the same world. Boy was I short-sighted! Thankfully Kyle showed me the light, and I managed to snag some of the new 512MB model B units. You'll be hearing about the Raspberry Pi from Kyle as well, but this month, I want to introduce the RPi to those folks who have been hesitant to buy one, thinking they weren't geeky enough. I had to ask a lot of dumb questions when my Raspberry Pis arrived; hopefully, I can save you that embarrassment.

Rsync guide & tutorial: Well, you have probably read a million guides on how to backup your personal data using rsync, a highly useful and versatile data copying tool. Here's another one. I would like to show you some basic tips and tricks for smart and safe rsync usage, how to make a flexible and useful setup, and how to automate your backup procedure, as a part of a comprehensive backup strategy, which you must have.

Ubuntu May Become Rolling Release With 14.04: Watchers of Ubuntu On Air, Ubuntu’s series of public Google Hangouts that detail some of the behind the scenes happenings, were greeted with some extremely interesting information. This information could potentialyl lead to the biggest (only) departure in the Ubuntu release model ever, and align it with Linux die-hard favorites such as Arch.

Microsoft refuses to release study challenging Munich Linux success: Microsoft and HP won't share a study claiming that the German city of Munich had its numbers wrong when it calculated switching from Windows to Linux saved the city millions - although an HP employee did provide the data to a German publication that reported on the results.

Kernel hacker Alan Cox quits Linux, Intel: Top Linux kernel contributor Alan Cox has announced that he is stepping down from his position at Intel and will no longer be involved with Linux development, citing family reasons. The British-born Cox, who makes his home in Swansea, Wales, has been one of the most active developers of the Linux kernel since the early days of the project, and at one time was often described as Linus Torvalds' "second in command."

Alan Cox Calls Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro": Alan Cox, the venerable Linux kernel developer presently employed by Intel and an avid open-source enthusiast, has lashed out against the recent release of Fedora 18. Cox calls the new Fedora release, "the worst Red Hat distro I've ever seen." Alan ended up switching to Ubuntu as a result of his disastrous experience with Fedora 18.

Cinnamon proposed to replace GNOME Shell as default DE on Fedora 19: But if this proposal is accepted, they will lose a major distro and, hopefully, will be forced to rethink the GNOME Shell.

GNOME 3.7 at the halfway mark: We are a bit past the midpoint of the development cycle for GNOME 3.8. That seems like a nice time to take a look at what new things are coming – most new features are visible at least in rudimentary form at this point.