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We shall now commence the second review of Linux Mint 15 Olivia. In the first installment, we played with the distro on top of a T61 laptop, which comes with Intel graphics and two internal SSD. There were no cardinal issues, then again, neither there were any with Ubuntu, which later failed miserably when thrown against the HP machine and its Broadcom Wireless and Nvidia graphics.

All this makes today's effort all the more interesting. Especially since the behavior with other flavors of Ubuntu were not consistent. For example, I did not have any networking related problems with Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Likewise, the infamous kernel crashes only sporadically affected the latter. Nouveau was quiet on both, whereas it wrecked havoc on top of Unity. So with all these in mind, we begin the Cinnamon challenge [sic]. And remember, we will have a MATE review, all proper like, soon.

Apple has not released or provided Linux/Unix version for iTunes yet. But using emulation software like PlayOnLinux , we can install iTunes software on Ubuntu Linux. PlayOnLinux is a graphical tool to run windows-based applications(specially games ) on a Linux platform. The system provides wrapper shell scripts with a .pol filename extension which specify the configuration of Wine needed in order to install and run a particular application. PlayonLinux is basically a graphical frontend for Wine.

Peppermint OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that aims to be lightning fast and easy on system resources. By employing Mozilla's Prism technology Peppermint integrates seamlessly with Cloud and web-based applications. The distribution's other features include automatic updates, easy step-by-step installation, sleek and user-friendly interface, and increased mobility by integrating directly with Cloud-based applications.

Utilizing the core-avx2 CPU optimizations offered by the GCC 4.8 compiler can provide real benefits for the Intel Core i7 4770K processor and other new "Haswell" CPUs. For some computational workloads, the new Haswell instruction set extensions can offer tremendous speed-ups compared to what's offered by the previous-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs.

For a while now, the project Humble Bundle has been publishing, in addition to the Indie and the Android Bundles, the Humble Weekly Sale which usually contains several games from one game company. This time, the Humble Weekly Sale contains two games for Linux and Android from 11 bit studios. On the one hand, the award-wining real-time strategy game Anomaly: Warzone Earth including different add-ons and bonus content and, on the other hand, it also contains a beautiful adventure Sleepwalker's Journey.

Wearable gadgets have become a real trend. While the other giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are busying with their wearable gadget plans, Sony already has a smartwatch in the market. Although the small device didn’t get too much attention from the tech fans when it launched but it may get a little more from now with Sony’s recent announcement that its smartwatch has now become open-sourced.

It appears as if the folks in Redmond are being given the opportunity to learn some valuable lessons these days. For one thing, they’re learning that while owning 90 plus percent of the PC market is well and good, indeed it’s made them the big bad wolf that we all know and loathe, it also means the PC is theirs to lose.

QFusion is the game engine that's derived from the Quake 2 code-base but has advanced a great deal and presently powers the popular open-source Warsow first person shooter. Since Warsow 1.0, the QFusion engine has advanced a great deal and the code has now been released...

As a matter of course here at OStatic, we're committed to compiling documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications. After all, one of the most common critcisms of open source creations is the lack of official project documentation. One of the best ongoing projects for producing free open source-related documentation is FLOSS Manuals. It's an ongoing and ambitious effort to build online guides for open source software. Recently, the site has added useful documentation for some projects that may interest you, including Firefox and the interesting collaborative editor Etherpad.

We talk with SpaceX developer Ryan Lester about the past, present, and future, of his GPLv3 licensed music service Peer.fm.

Filmmakers and TV producers have long been harassed by Warner/Chappell Music, a subsidiary of Time Warner that enforces the copyright on "Happy Birthday," probably the most popular song in the world. If that song pops up in any TV show or movie, the creators are sure to get a hefty bill. The makers of the critically acclaimed 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams had to pay $5,000 for a scene of one of the protagonists' families singing the song. By 1996, Warner/Chappell was pulling in more than $2 million per year from licensing.

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that was launched in 2009 by original MySQL coder Ulf Michael "Monty" Widenius. It's meant to be a drop-in replacement, meaning any application that runs on MySQL should run unmodified on the MariaDB server. MariaDB does have one important characteristic that MySQL doesn't share, however: MariaDB isn't owned by Oracle.

With Canonical's planned adoption of their in-house Mir Display Server over the next year rather than using an X.Org Server or Wayland, derivatives such as KDE-based Kubuntu continue to fear the change and what exactly the options will be. KDE will not support Mir as long as it remains a one-distribution solution. With KDE not coming to Mir for the foreseeable future, Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu started a new technical discussion about non-Unity flavors and Mir.

awk is a splendid Unix scripting language for processing text files. The version included in most Linux distros is GNU awk, or gawk for short. I like it for pulling data from ordered data sets, such as text lists and CSV exports from spreadsheets. awk sees each line in a file as a separate record, and each item in a line as a separate field, which makes it possible to slice and dice your files in all kinds of flexible ways. The classic way to illustrate this is with /etc/passwd; this example prints the whole contents:

The second release candidate of Wine 1.6 is now available. Being in a code freeze now ahead of the Wine 1.6 official release in the coming weeks, no new features are coming but just bug-fixes.

I did a cursory search and was amazed at how easy it was to come up with search engines that don’t keep records or track their users. One of them, DuckDuckGo, I’d forgotten but had played around with it some time back and knew it had a good reputation among people I know in the San Francisco bay area.

While a lot of Linux gamers are waiting for the appereance of the linux-version of Dota 2, a very similar game Heroes of Newerth has been supported on Linux for a while now.

Even within the tech industry, there are opposing views as to whether corporate surveillance is a good thing. The American story of the web begins with “Father Of The Internet” Vint Cerf when he was at the U.S. Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He’s now Vice President and Internet Evangelist for Google and told Wired in an April 2012 interview, “We knew what we were unleashing on the world.”

The X.Org Foundation has finally announced the details concerning the 2013 X.Org Developers' Conference. XDC2013 is happening from 23 to 25 September in Portland, Oregon. The brief conference announcement was sent out yesterday by Keith Packard to the mailing lists. There's also a Wiki page for this development event that's not only about X.Org but also Mesa, Wayland, and surrounding projects.

The first beta of the forthcoming KDE 4.11 Software Compilation is now available. KDE 4.11 features greater use of Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces, KWin supports creating OpenGL 3.1 Core contexts, and KWin is beginning to work on Wayland.