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Gauchito returns after 35 years! LinuxBBQ “Argentina78? is featuring the brand-new MATE 1.4.2 desktop environment and kernel 3.7. “Yo’ Mama is so fat she even has her own distro” If you have no Xmas present yet for your mum, grab this copy and customize it, with a “Me as toddler” wallpaper and her favourite radio stations in the tray. Add some ebooks, her wedding photos from 1783 and you are good to go.

The popularity of Arch Linux, combined with the project's philosophy that appeals to more advanced Linux users, has resulted in an explosion of Arch-based distributions with a variety of desktop environments and user-friendly features. One of them is Cinnarch, a live distro that marries Arch Linux with Cinnamon (Linux Mint's ambitious fork of GNOME Shell). The result is an interesting rolling-release distribution which is still undergoing rapid development, but which has a potential to deliver a traditional desktop user interface built from cutting-edge software.

Salix Xfce 14.0 is ready! With Xfce 4.10 being the centerpiece of this release, iso images for i686 and x86_64 architectures are available for immediate download. Apart from Xfce 4.10, the software that comes installed includes Linux kernel 3.2.29, Midori 0.4.7 is the default web brower, Claws-Mail 3.8.1 is the application to use for accessing your e-mail accounts, LibreOffice 3.6.3 for all your office needs, Gimp 2.8.2 for everything that has to do with image editing and manipulation, Viewnior 1.3 is the default image viewer, Parole 0.3.0.3 is the default movie player, Exaile 3.3.0 is the application to use for managing your music collection and more.

South Korean behemoth Samsung has announced over five million units have been shipped of its Note II device, with the 4G version to arrive on Australian shores very shorty. Worldwide sales of the controversial phone have now exceeded 5 million, proving naysayers well and truly wrong, who said the original phone was too big and without a targeted purpose.

Red Hat has announced that the call for papers is now open for the ninth-annual Red Hat Summit, to be held June 10-14, 2013 in Boston.

Many systems administrators expect IT budgets next year to decrease or, at best, remain flat even though they say they face problems because of the rising costs and increasing complexity of systems. The administrators say that despite facing growing pressure and demand they cannot rely on increased budget to ease their concerns, with 82 percent of them indicating in a recent survey that software to manage IT systems is getting more expensive and complex.

With the many high-profile efforts to bring Linux to desktop computers, it's easy to forget that Linux has been dominating other certain areas of computing, such as servers, for many years. Yet, server-oriented Linux distributions are relatively rare. The Slackware-based Superb Mini Server is one notable exception, focusing exclusively on server deployments and configuration through the intuitive Webmin web-based interface that can be accessed from any web browser. Also in this issue, an update on Secure Boot that seems to be universally present on most new computers...

I will say that it is extremely irresponsible of Phoronix to make a big deal about this this before giving anyone knowledgeable (which unfortunately does not include any Ubuntu kernel engineers, since as far as I know they don't have any file system specialists on staff) to comment on the bug.

After a day and a half of using Ubuntu 12.10 it was an internal struggle not to wipe my hard drive and just find another distribution to review. During the first twenty-four hours Ubuntu spied on me, provided performance which was distinctly sub par, the interface regularly popped up errors (sometimes so frequently the first pop-up wouldn't have faded out of view before the next one appeared), the update notification didn't work and it wasn't possible to turn off accessibility features through the graphical interface. Adding insult to injury, the Unity dash kept locking up or losing focus while I was trying to use it and the operating system crashed more times than not while trying to shutdown or logout.

“The requirements of small-screen mobile devices are incompatible with those of large-screen fixed devices,” Norman says. “Windows 8 has a problem. The real business workhorses of Microsoft Office are not well supported by the mobile apps. So Microsoft had to provide a backwards-compatibility mode, which provides the necessary power, but makes things even more confusing.”

[Not FOSS, but still of interest to LXer readers]

There seems to be no end in sight to the march of the tiny, sub-$100 Linux PCs arriving on the market this year, and recently two more contenders were added to the mix.

I have a new Linux blog, one which will have articles I would have published at O'Reilly Broadcast (or O'Reilly News or Linux Dev Center) in the past. As most of you know, I wrote/blogged for O'Reilly about Linux from 2006 until May, 2012. O'Reilly's blog sites are still there but they've done away with Linux blogging. I've also written features for DistroWatch but my involvement in the development of a Linux distribution makes continuing there appear to be a conflict of interest.

Lately we’ve been treated to (or bombarded by) a slew of articles and blog posts proclaiming the failure and/or the death of Linux on the desktop. I could describe what I really think of these articles but my language would be a bit more colorful than would be appropriate. Suffice it to say it’s all bunk as far as I am concerned.

The Allwinner A10 is a low power ARM Cortex-A8 processor with Mali 400 graphics. It’s used in a number of inexpensive Android tablets, including most of Coby’s latest devices. But it’s also a popular chip for Android-powered set-top-boxes (or mini PCs) such as the MK802, Mele A1000, or Mini X. You can pick up any of those little boxes for less than $100, hook up a keyboard, mouse, and TV, and play Android games, surf the web, and even stream video from Netflix. The little boxes also run Ubuntu, Fedora, and other desktop Linux operating systems surprisingly well.

Starting with Ubuntu 12.10, users of the popular Linux-based operating system will be able to install and run web apps as if they were desktop applications. That’s thanks to a new feature called Ubuntu Web Apps.

The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE. FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE is the first release on new branch of code that incorporates tighter integration between the ZFS command line and the FreeNAS GUI. This release also features the ability to run arbitrary services and interact with them through the FreeNAS GUI in a FreeBSD jail. This jail allows a wide range of third party software to be run on top of FreeNAS, using the PBI format from PC-BSD or FreeBSD packages or ports, as well as official FreeNAS plugins.

We are glad to let you know that Zentyal has already entered the feature freeze period for 3.0, meaning that from now on we will be focused on polishing and bugfixing until September. To celebrate this, we bring you a new installer including new versions of most of the packages. This means that in this release you can find almost all the functionality that will be present in the final Zentyal 3.0, but it's still a beta with lots of rough edges.

AMD isn’t expected to bring its new low power processors aimed at tablets to market until 2013. But according to Hexus, AMD will show off the first chips with its new low power “Jaguar” cores at the Hot Chips Symposium on August 28th.

The Raspberry Pi is often described as an inexpensive, low-power computer. But really, at this point it’s pretty much a low power motherboard, memory, and processor.

For $35 you can pick up a Raspberry Pi with a 700 MHz ARM11 processor and 256MB of RAM, but it doesn’t include any storage space… or a protective case.

Mozilla has plugged a privacy-related security hole in Firefox 13 and released a fixed version of its web browser. The flaw allowed the software's speed-dial-alike "new tab" feature to take snapshots of supposedly secure HTTPS sessions. Punters sounded the alarm over the feature that, for example, revealed online bank account details or private messages in webmail sessions to the next user of a shared PC.