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During the final day of this week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit, upcoming plans for the Mir Display Server were shared as it pertains to performance optimizations and yet-to-be-implemented features.

The top Linux developers are getting older and The Linux Foundation is addressing the issue. It's not that Linux's core developers are "old." After all, Linus Torvalds, Mr. Linux himself, is only 42. But for a few years now, the core Linux kernel developers have been aware that the top programmers have been getting older.

While x86_64 hardware has been very common for years and it's now almost impossible to find new PC hardware that is x86-only, the Ubuntu download pages have continued to recommend the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Linux by default for new desktop installations. Fortunately, that may finally change.

In large part because of Canonical's new focus around Ubuntu Touch on phone/tablet devices, the Ubuntu developers are wanting a new revocable memory API for the Linux kernel to help in low-memory scenarios.

Here's how you can install App Grid, an alternative to the Ubuntu Software Center, in Ubuntu 13.04. You can filter apps by name and rating, categories, as well as installed or pending installation. Sign in with your Ubuntu One account to buy apps or post reviews.

The GNOME Web Browser will no longer be using Google as its default search engine but they have struck a deal to use DuckDuckGo as its new search engine.

Use Darling to run OS X applications on your Linux Mint computer

For those curious about the performance of Intel's 520 Series Serial ATA 3.0 solid-state drives under Linux, here are a couple open-source disk performance benchmarks comparing the 120GB Intel SSDSC2CW12 to a few other HDD/SSDs.

Cube Trains is a free puzzle game where you build elevated railways in a city. It features 3D puzzles, unlimited undo/redo, and smart placement of pieces. The non-linear level graph means you don't have to beat a level before unlocking the next one. The game comes with a built-in level editor, so you can build and share your own corners of the city.

The GNOME developers announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME System Monitor 3.10 application.

July seemed like it was a long time ago, but it's time to take a look back at the best month opensource.com has had to date. We start with a list of the top five articles, then move on to other hot topics, like OSCON, licensing, text editors, OpenStack, and other open source news. Aloha!

The GNOME Project announced the availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Chess 3.10 application for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.

The GNOME developers announced a few day ago the immediate availability for download and testing of another development version (2.37.6) of the GLib library for the GNOME desktop environment.

Simplicity Linux 13.10 alphas are now available. 13.10 is based on Raring Puppy 3.9.9.1 by Pemasu. The kernel is 3.9.9.1, as you might guess, and it is a non-PAE kernel, meaning you do not need a machine with PAE to be able to run it. The window manager is LXDE for all releases except Obsidian which uses Openbox (released tomorrow due to unforeseen problems). Desktop is our big release, it comes with media players, LibreOffice, and a lot of other software. Desktop is a full-featured Linux distro compared to the cut-down editions like Netbook and Obsidian, and less specialised than Media.

Linux has a few bootloaders to choose from. Usually, Linux administrators leave the distro's default bootloader installed. Sometimes administrators need to use a different one or the distro's installer gives the administrators a choice between bootloaders. Clearly, it helps to know about the different Linux bootloaders.

Drupal is one of the most popular open source content management systems today. Unfortunately the default Drupal installation often requires a lot of customization to meet an organization's needs, so you have to rely on Drupal's thousands of extensions to tailor the software to do exactly what you want, and that takes time. It would be easier if you could install Drupal with all the extensions that you want to use straight out of the box – and you can do just that by using Drupal distributions.

Some of you might already know Spirits, because it was featured on the Humble Bundle for Android 3 and it has been on the Linux store of Steam for quite some time now, but you might also have missed it like I did.

After many months of development, the ported open-source AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver from the Linux kernel has been merged into FreeBSD trunk. This AMD kernel graphics driver now provides modern Radeon/FirePro graphics support for BSD users with FreeBSD 10.0 but might be backported to FreeBSD 9.

There are various tools that allow you to edit the metadata in digital photos or pdf documents. ExifTool is a powerful command-line utility that can read or write meta information in a file. This tutorial describes how to view or edit metadata in pdf documents or digital pictures from the command line on Linux with ExifTool.

Open source evangelist Matt Asay, now a VP at 10gen, describes how the NoSQL database provider has been embracing partnerships with Amazon, IBM, Windows Azure, and plenty more.