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Last year, I installed and wrote a review for Linux Mint 13 Maya, the MATE version. It had worked really well on my laptop so even when Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" was released, I still kept using Maya. But after a year, I think its the time for an upgrade, and on the same occasion that Linux Mint 15 Olivia was recently out, I decided to download and install the new Linux Mint 15, MATE version.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 'Olivia'. Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML 5 and two new tools, 'Software Sources' and 'Driver Manager', make their first appearance in Linux Mint. MDM now features 3 greeters (i.e. login screen applications): a GTK+ greeter, a themeable GDM greeter for which hundreds of themes are available, and a brand-new HTML greeter, also themeable which supports a new generation of animated and interactive themes. Cinnamon and MATE screenshots are available.

The IP Commission Report on the "theft" of American IP is the gift that keeps on taking. We've already discussed the commission's suggestion that infringers' computers be loaded up with spyware and malware and the apparent "fact" that China has singlehandendly destroyed every IP-reliant industry in America. Hidden towards the bottom of the report is (yet another) terrible proposal, guided by the heavy hand of self-interest. It plainly spells out the commission's priorities: American IP above all else, even the health and well-being of other nations.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Digikam adds video properties search in Advanced Search tool; Okular better supports annotations in rotated pages; In KDE Workspace, sorting of tasks is possible by activity; the KDE Classic cursor theme becomes an image-based theme; Easier drag and drop of items in Dolphin Places; Network Management shows connection details; Skrooge adds a possibility to open report from dashboard widgets.

Disk encryption is one of those physical security features that determine whether I install a Linux distribution on any computer I use for serious computing. Whether it’s a server, notebook, ultrabook or any other type of *book, if it’s not a crash-and-burn unit, the hard disk drive (HDD) has to be encrypted. And no, it’s not because I have anything to hide, it’s just that personal data should be just that – personal, and private. If you are not authorized (by the owner) to see it, you don’t.

The announcement of the students accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) 2013 opens a new chapter in KDE contribution. KDE has participated in GSoC since its first season in 2005. Every year is special and exciting for both the students and the KDE Community. Outstanding students get to try their hands at real world programming, some for the first time and some as experts. They have the experience of working in a free software community, being part of a top technical team.

Canonical’s founder is making controversial moves which are helping Microsoft’s PR. The Shuttleworth position can be summarised as follows: 2004: come join me, we’ll beat an illegal monopoly together. 2013: I’m friends with Microsoft now, never mind that monopoly.

Google today put the squeeze on software vendors with a new policy for vulnerability disclosure that allows its researchers to provide details on zero-day bugs they find within seven days if the affected vendor hasn't provided an advisory or a patch. Google is now dramatically narrowing the patch window for the most dangerous zero-day bugs it discovers and get used in attacks in the wild.

A research team led by Bell Labs' Xiang Liu has published an article in Nature Photonics describing a way to send and receive information at 400Gbps across 12,800km of optical fiber – an enormous potential gain of both speed and effective distance compared to current technology.

The internet has long gone by the rules of the mob. The one with the most followers, the post with the most comments, the memes that won’t die. Every day millions more Netizens join the collective and throw their weight around in whatever way they choose. The web has been a great enabler of crowdsourcing. The millions and millions of eyes, ears and voices means that the collective power of people has been used to create Wikipedia and other archive sites, online dictionaries such as Urban Dictionary, even write a book.

As expected, earlier today (June 1, 2013), the Arch Linux developers unleashed the monthly dual CD ISO image of the Arch Linux operating system for new installations.

Criminals are using an old weakness in the Ruby on Rails web application framework to recruit vulnerable servers into a botnet. Developers running Ruby on Rails should install an update that was released in late January for a serious remote execution flaw that attackers began exploiting in the past week.

The discussion in the working group that is supposed to detail when Italy's public administrations should prefer open source over proprietary solutions, is stalling, says lawyer Ernesto Belisario, professor at University of Basilicata in the city of Potenza. "Some of the members think the law stipulates a technical and economical assessment, instead of reading it as a statement supporting open source."

So with June knocking at our doors it's time to just take a quick look back at what's been going on!

So, if you have installed Fedora 19 beta and were/are wondering what the heck that tboot entry in the boot menu is for, don’t worry about it. It’s just a bug. It will not show up in Fedora 19 final.

Haswell is here, Haswell is here, Haswell is here!!! After talking for months about the Linux kernel and driver development for Intel's Ivy Bridge successor, the heatsink can be lifted today on talking about Intel's Haswell processor. For the past few weeks I have been running and benchmarking an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor on Linux to mixed success. While the Haswell improvements are terrific, the Linux experience now is awaiting improvements.

The Drupal.org security team says it has discovered unauthorised access to Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org account information which has exposed user names, country, and email addresses along with hashed passwords. No credit card information was stored on the servers, but the investigation is ongoing and the team says it "may learn about other types of information compromised".According to Drupal.org, there are over 967,000 registered users on the Drupal.org.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of the finest metadata editors available for Linux. We have whittled the available range down to the top four superior tools for metadata management.

The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn't infringe on the design of the Apple iPad, according to reports. Although Apple does hold a European design patent, the Court has limited the applicability of the patent based on prior art. The iPad has predecessors, such as a Knight Ridder concept tablet dating back well over a decade before Apple's product was released. The iPad may have a "unique character," the court adds, but the Galaxy Tab is sufficiently different that an informed person can tell.

“uptime”, “w” & “top” commands are used to check the uptime of Linux Servers.