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With Linux Mint, however, there is a particular focus on the Cinnamon desktop, which was created by the Linux Mint distribution itself. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key features of the Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon release.

Peter Lohrmann has been working on Valve's VOGL debugger to make it easier to use for developers looking to it for help.

Joonas Kuorilehto discovered that GnuTLS incorrectly handled Server Hello messages. A malicious remote server or a man in the middle could use this issue to cause GnuTLS to crash, resulting in a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code.

Cavium and Canonical have expanded their partnership to support ThunderX SoC solutions on Ubuntu Linux for OpenStack and the data center, which could open new doors for Ubuntu and open source on ARM64 devices, OpenStack cloud servers and other enterprise hardware.

Many newer, smaller laptops that are available these days no longer have an optical drive (i.e. a CD / DVD drive), so the easiest option to install Fedora on a new machine is to use a USB storage device.

linuxBean 14.04 is available. linuxBean is a new lightweight Japanese Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu.

Piwigo is open-source photo gallery software for the web, built by an active community of users and developers. Piwigo extensions make it easily customizable and highly flexible. Piwigo is free and open source software.

Amarok is installed by default with the KDE version of openSUSE but is it the best audio player or would you be better off installing Clementine instead?

Over the last few columns, we’ve looked at some fundamental concepts in Python, concerning objects, object- oriented programming and how objects are stored in memory. This issue, let’s take a look at the Raspberry Pi and one of the unique features not usually offered on single-board computers. Of course, I’m speaking of the GPIO pins. GPIO stands for general-purpose input/ output. The pins provide an interface between the Raspberry Pi and the outside world. They can act as either inputs into the computer, or outputs to the world. With the addition of these pins, the possibilities for the Raspberry Pi explode. It goes from being simply a single-board computer to a project platform.

The KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.

The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May 2012, by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and open source software movement developed its licenses.

In today's open source roundup: North Korea Linux 3.0 has been released. Plus: iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite users can search with DuckDuckGo, and Tim Cook smacks Android around.

Two releases from Samsung are making the headlines this week. And the headlines are centered around the Samsung Z Tizen OS smartphone and the Samsung Tizen OS TV SDK (Software Development Kit).

You have missed the openQRM Community Summit 2014? Now worries! We have recorded the talks for you so you can view them online now!

Samsung finally lifted the veil on the world’s first Tizen smartphone, the “Samsung Z,” and is showcasing it at this week’s Tizen Developer Conference. In its announcement of the Tizen Z, Samsung described it as being “built on top of unparalleled quality and the cutting-edge technology of Samsung’s latest premium smartphone.” Despite the rhetoric, the Z’s specs aren’t particularly spectacular — yet it still earns high marks for chutzpah, being the first mobile handset to venture down the untrodden Tizen smartphone path.

Obviously, there have been an awful lot of patent lawsuits in the past few years concerning smartphones and various software and hardware associated with smartphones. The folks over at law firm WilmerHale have now released a paper, which conservatively (and thoroughly) estimates that the patent royalties that need to be paid by smartphone manufacturers currently exceeds $120 per device -- which they note is right around the price of the components themselves (found via FOSS Patents, which notes that the estimates in the paper almost certainly lowball the patent royalties, so they may be much higher). Basically, more than half the cost of making a smartphone these days is in paying off patent holders.

The idea of OS convergence is starting to take a hold in the world and major companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical are working hard to achieve it. There seems to be a race going on and all the players want to reach the finish as soon as possible.

It's no secret to anyone paying attention to the video game industry that the graphics processor war has long been primarily waged between rivals Nvidia and AMD. What you may not realize is just how involved those two companies are with the developers that use their cards and tools. It makes sense, of course, that the two primary players in PC GPUs would want to get involved with game developers to make sure their code is optimized for the systems on which they'll be played. That way, gamers end up with games that run well on the cards in their systems, buy more games, buy more GPUs, and everyone is happy. According to AMD, however, Nvidia is attempting to lock out AMD's ability to get involved with developers who use the Nvidia GameWorks toolset, and the results can already be seen on the hottest game of the season thus far.

The only way to truly beat Hack 'n' Slash, a new video game from Double Fine Productions, is to reprogram it. But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack 'n' Slash makes manipulating the game's source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.

I’ve been watching HBO’s tech-startup spoof Silicon Valley. One of the reoccurring background jokes is that every software company, large and small, purports to be making the world a better place — usually as a sort of reflexive afterthought with no real meaning. In Fedora, we’re a little more modest with our claims, but we back them with both sincerity and action. We sometimes debate the relative positioning of our “Freedom, Friends, Features, First” foundations (of course we do — we’re a community-driven open source project, and so everything is always up for discussion), but our collective goal of leading the advancement of the free and open source world together is never in doubt.