• Evolve OS Beta 1 Screenshot Tour

• GParted Live 0.21.0-1 Screenshot Tour

Linux newbies have probably heard a lot about Ubuntu, but it isn’t the only Linux distribution. In fact, Ubuntu’s standard Unity desktop is still controversial among long-time Linux users today.

Many Linux users prefer a more traditional desktop interface, and Linux Mint offers that. As Ubuntu focuses more on Ubuntu for phones, Linux Mint may be an even clearer choice in the future.

No, Ubuntu isn’t terrible. Some people prefer Ubuntu’s Unity desktop and love it. But you’ll probably have an easier time getting to grips with Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu.

GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0. https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

Gobs of new open source projects are released every year, but only a few really capture the imaginations of businesses and developers.

Open source software management company Black Duck tries to spot these, measuring which projects attract the most contributors, produce the most code, and garner the most attention from the developer world at large.

There once was a time when video editing on Linux was an elusive beast.

Well, that's not exactly true. Professional-level video editing on Linux has been solid and mature for many years now, with the likes of Lightworks, Cinelerra and Blender. But the "hobbyist" video editor market just wasn't very well-served. There were video editors out there… but they were often buggy and lacking in critical features.

Going along with many DRM graphics driver improvements for Linux 3.20 is the seemingly never-ending work on atomic mode-setting.

Atomic mode-setting/display support has been talked about for years but is finally nearing a reality within the mainline Linux kernel with drivers like the Tegra DRM driver adding initial support.

With Linux 3.20 there's the actual Linux DRM Atomic IOCTL and along with other changes means that Linux user-space can start accessing the atomic support, albeit it's hidden for now behind the experimental drm-atomic=1 flag.

The Acnodes “FES8670″ is a rugged industrial box-PC that runs Linux on a 4th Gen Core CPU, and offers four GbE ports and numerous storage and display ports.

So far, we’ve still only seen one company (Congatec) announce products based on Intel’s new 5th Generation Core (“Broadwell”) processors, although we expect many more to break cover at Embedded World next month. Yet, there’s still plenty of juice left in the 4th Gen Haswell Core chips, which drive Acnodes’s powerhouse FES8670. Earlier Acnodes industrial PCs have included the Atom D2550-based FES2215.

On November 11, 2014 Mozilla announced the Polaris Privacy Initiative. One key part of the initiative is us supporting the tor network by deploying tor middle relay nodes. On January 15, 2015 our first proof of concept (POC) went live.

Also: Get Smart On International Data Privacy Day

The table is made of aircraft-grade aluminum and the table top is only 2.4-inches / 60mm in thickness. On the Windows side, the panel can detect up to 60 distinct touch points, while on the Android one there are only 12.

As we told you above, the table can essentially offer the perks of both Android and Windows in the same machine. The Android system is supported by a quad-core Rockchip RK3288 clocked at 2.0GHz fitted with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internals storage. The type of Android you’ll see here is version 4.4 KitKat.

And yes – let me get this clear right from the start: this Plasma 5.2.0 desktop environment will replace the KDE 4 packages you have installed.

Older: Waiting for KDE 5 (Plasma 5)?

The ARM CPU used in the BeagleBone Black and other single board computers is designed to interface with half to a few gigabytes of RAM and allow a full operating system such as Linux to be run on the computer. (See my long series of reviews on Linux.com of ARM-based computers that run Linux). By contrast the ARM Cortex-M is a microcontroller level chip which might run at 16-100Mhz, contain 2-100kb of RAM, and some flash memory to contain only the program that you want to execute.

These are just two examples of serious flagship projects, but even on a day-to-day level there are plenty of opportunities for systems librarians to interact with open source software. A large amount of vendor software runs on Linux, so there’s plenty of systems administration to do. I work in a relatively small library, and even here we run five Drupal websites: one as a portal for library services, one as the primary repository for our archive, another provides the public interface for an aboriginal research center, and one to manage safety information for our bio sciences lab.

What can you say? In a few short years, that other OS has gone from mainstream to niche and Android/Linux and GNU/Linux are stepping up to displace it as the goto OS of the world. It’s all good. This is the right way to do IT with the world making its own software throughout the whole stack: OS on client and server and a ton of applications too. There is no need for a monopoly in IT. The world wants a revolution not lock-in.

Ahead of the parliamentary elections in Greece last week, the Greek Free/Open Source Software Society (GFOSS) contacted all political parties to ask about their positions [in Greek] with regard to open software, open data, open hardware and open government. The four parties to respond all came out generally in favour of openness. Some of them were even able to present very detailed planning on how to improve the current institutional and legislative framework and outlined how openness could help reconstruct Greek productivity.

• The Openwashing of Microsoft is Now Threatening to Eliminate the Identity of Free Software
• Qualys Starts Self-Promotional FUD Campaign, Naming a Bug That Was Already Fixed 2 Years Ago and Distros Have Covered With Patches
• Links 27/1/2015: Plasma 5.2, Dell Precision With GNU/Linux