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Linux Mint 12 is the latest edition of the popular Linux distribution. Not to be confused with Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), the version of Linux Mint that is based on Debian, Linux Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu Desktop. This release, code-named Lisa, comes with more desktop options than you would normally find on a Ubuntu-based distribution. That of course has much to do with the distribution’s developers attempt to find a compromise desktop for the mess that has become the GNOME line of desktop environments.

A non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture will hold its first camp in Melbourne on January 14.

Ever want to know exactly why it takes so long to push the latest Android operating system release to your phone? Motorola and Sony Ericsson attempted to explain it on Wednesday.

With some funding from Google and the U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line utilities to handle more complex types of data. Such updates are needed because "we now tend to have more model-based configuration languages that have meaningful constructs spanning more than one line," said Gabriel Weaver, a Dartmouth graduate student who, along with Dartmouth computer science professor Sean Smith, is creating the variants of grep and diff. Weaver presented the new utilities at a poster session at the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference, being held this week in Boston.

Ubuntu users who dislike the new Unity desktop have other alternatives besides sticking with & Maverick Meerkat& or jumping ship to Linux Mint or another distro. An illustrated DeviceGuru tutorial shows how to load the GNOME Shell on Ubuntu 11.10 and configure it to offer more of a GNOME 2.x experience....

Creating shell scripts is the lazy (smart) system administrator's way to automate and build intelligence into repetitive tasks. Continue reading →

KDE has announced today the release of the KDE SC 4.7.4 monthly point release, KDE 4.8 Beta 2, and KDE Telepathy 0.2...

While AMD still hasn't published Radeon HDMI audio patches for their open-source Linux driver to enable the audio support on their Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, the reverse-engineered community patches have quickly evolved...

Despite the wide range of definitions of success, developers place greater emphasis on getting a project done right than getting it done on time.

Red Hat revised its enterprise-focused Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution, claiming greater performance and scalability on multicore platforms. RHEL 6.2 offers enhancements to resource management, high availability, storage and file system performance, and identity management, and it scored an all-time-high 22,000 users on the SAP SD benchmark, the company says....

It's been a while since last looking at the state of power management for Radeon GPUs, but here's an updated look at the various options surrounding power management for modern ATI/AMD graphics processors and their effectiveness. Various drivers, graphics cards, and tuning options are compared.

GameMaker one of the popular game creators for Windows is coming to Linux it seems!

My main grievance against GNOME 3 and Unity is the elimination of all except a few applets. Both grudgingly allow some basic applets, such as a clock, but each lacks the ecosystem of applets that made GNOME so configurable. You only have to look at the rich assortment of applets in KDE -- which calls them widgets -- to see what GNOME and Unity are missing. If anything, KDE's widgets are even richer than GNOME 2's applets, with dozens of small pieces of functionality that range from the serious to the trivial and the basic to the expert and obscure, including everything from hardware indicators and system configuration tools to desktop enhancements and toys and educational software.

Fujitsu and SuVolta announced the successful demonstration of a CMOS technology that can cut SRAM (static random access memory) power consumption by more than half. The & PowerShrink& platform will be offered in 65nm products by Fujitsu in 2012, and is available for licensing by others, according to the companies....

Quoth The Maven evermore: “Prepare for Apple’s gentle rapping, a-tapping at your data center door.”

Should GNU/Linux distributions switch wholesale to GNOME 3 or should they make the transition gradually?

The ability to put massive amounts of RAM in servers is changing what we can do in real time and how we address business issues. Every developer is being affected

KDE Telepathy 0.2 The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce its second release. KDE Telepathy is a suite of applications that form an instant-messaging client for Jabber, Gmail, Facebook, MSN and more. KDE Telepathy stands out from previous instant messaging solutions by being able to integrate into the Plasma Workspaces, and can also be used like a traditional application. read more

Miguel de Icaza started the GNOME project back in 1997 along with Federico Mena. In recent years, my interactions with De Icaza have been all about Mono, the open source implementation of .NET. Even more recently, De Icaza's focus has narrowed further with his new startup Xamarin that is focused on mobile development.