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Ola, guys. Let us review Sabayon 11. This time though, I will be deviating from my usual KDE experience and check whether this semi-monster Gentoo-based distro can deliver equally fun results when blessed with a less mainstream desktop environment. Anyhow, my past reviews with Sabayon have gone from stupendous to buggy to somewhat boring. My feeling is that the distribution has lost its passion and momentum, and that is now merely trying to make Gentoo more presentable, while wallowing in lost identity. That's what version 8 has taught me. So let us see what version 11 can do.

I almost feel tempted to start with a quote from the Wheel of Time series, something like there are no beginnings and ends, but it was a beginning. Indeed, the guys behind the elementary OS have created their own version of what the next, future desktop for Linux ought to be. There is not much detail about Pantheon going about the Internet, and it does not seem to have drawn much attention since being launched. Which does not bode well for this young project. Still, I decided to see whether this lightweight and modular environment written in Vala and GTK+ can bring fresh merit to the Linux world. Let us see indeed.

It is almost weekend and you want to try another Linux distribution? We’ve got you covered! The Linux ecosystem is a varied one with hundreds of distributions, each having their unique set of abilities and limitations. Some compile the source on your system, others let you choose between init systems, try to be as small as possible, experiment with security solutions and more. There is also variation in governance: some are strongly top-down organized, others decide in a meritocratic way or vote. Some have strong corporate sponsor pushing decisions – others don’t. Some care to collaborate, others don’t value the wider ecosystem much and go their own way.

openSUSE 12.3 was released last week and it continues to keep the desktop what it should be – a powerful 'computer'. openSUSE is while known for its professional design and polish there are certain things that you may want to do to get the best of of this great open source operating system.

gnome 3.8 is on track to be released on time as usual (the release candidate will be out later today): it’s a great incremental release with improvements all over the place, but I’ll let the release notes speak.

For my own part, I put my fingers here and there either making patches or trying to help (annoy?) people doing the real hard work with reviews and suggestions.

It seems like every time Ubuntu makes any sort of change, the Linux community finds itself up in arms as if the world is about to end. First, they expressed concern over Unity, then the Amazon search results inclusion and now Mir vs Wayland. Admittedly, I don't personally use Unity as my default desktop these days, as I don't use any of its features. That said, however, I'm a big fan of the Ubuntu base that I run with XFCE. This desktop environment serves me well, and my experience with the Ubuntu base has never given me any serious problems. In this article, I'll examine some of the most common fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) surrounding Ubuntu, areas where Ubuntu has accomplished seemingly impossible feats and some other important considerations.

Well folks, the ARM-powered Chromebook built by Samsung can finally be bought in the Netherlands, and this raises a hairy question. Should I buy one and have a real-life target for my ARM port of Slackware which has been on the backburner for a year? As you may remember, I started an ARM port of Slackware which is different from SlackwareARM.The design goals I have set for my own port are:

Eleven years ago, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote a blog post and a follow-up listing a number of reasons why “Free Software usability tends to suck”, as well as an update six years later. Have things improved since then? In the absence of actual research, I can only recount my own experiences. I hope I won’t regurgitate too much of MPT’s writing.

The GNOME Project is proud to announce the imminent release of GNOME 3.8 in less than two weeks. As with every release, there are many new features and technical improvements. We asked William Jon McCann, a GNOME designer, about the direction of the project and what he is anticipating for GNOME in the future.

Our community is at the heart of how we build Ubuntu. Recently there were some concerns expressed about some aspects of our community and I have been working with various community members and internally at Canonical to resolve some of these issues to make things smoother.

Apart from the architectural differences between them, which I've covered previously, Mir and Wayland also have quite different project goals. Since a number of people seem to be confused as to what Wayland actually is - and that's not unreasonable, because it's a bit complicated - I'll give a run-down as to what all these various projects are and aim to do, throwing in X11 as a reference point.

At AsiaBSDCon, Eric Faurot (eric@) has announced the release of OpenSMTPD 5.3 which is the first stable and production-ready release of OpenSMTPD.

It will also be shipping with OpenBSD 5.3.

We would like to thank the OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD community for their help in testing the snapshots, reporting bugs, contributing code and packaging for other systems.

My experience with the Enlightenment desktop slash window manager hails back to 2007, when I started exploring distributions like openGEU and friends. Then, fast forward two years, I’ve had my first encounter with Bodhi Linux, which comes with E17 as its default desktop. Fast forward some more, and we enter the year 2013, with yet another review of Bodhi.

This is the Qt port of PCManFM with desktop management feature turned on. The desktop icons and the wallpaper were painted by PCManFM-Qt, just like the gtk+ version of the original PCManFM. The new Qt port is in a pretty good shape now. Although it’s not yet ready for production use, it’s almost there. About 85% of the planned features are finished.

There are some major changes happening at Ubuntu which pans from changing base technologies to community involvement. Ubuntu has quite some flavour and derivatives and there was some concern among the users how these changes will impact these distributions, so we reached out to two major distributions which are based on Ubuntu - Linux Mint and Kubuntu. In this interview Jonathan Riddell the team lead of Kubuntu talks about these changes and Kubuntu's relationship with Canonical.

Emacs version 24.3 is now released to the public. This release, unlike 24.2, is chock full of goodies. I’ve taken the liberty of annotating things that’re relevant to me — and hopefully you, too, dear reader — but I’ve limited my commentary to things I’m familiar with. Always keen to hear what you think about the changes in the comments.

So I think out of all of the feedback we got about the Anaconda UI redesign, the one piece of the UI that’s received the most negative feedback is the RAID configuration piece of the custom partitioning UI. The designs for how this UI ended up getting implemented in Fedora 18 was posted to this blog in December 2011. I really wish we’d received the level of feedback we received post F18-Beta and post F18-GA at that point, so the design could have been modified before it was implemented! That being said – I’m not placing blame with anybody but myself – I got this design wrong, and for that I am sincerely sorry.

Two and a half years ago, I bought myself a dandy little netbook, and then loaded it with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx netbook edition, which it ran until about a week ago. With three years of long term support closing to an end, I had to decide which Linux distribution I would use for this machine, given its limited power and somewhat advanced age.

And so I decided - something simple and lightweight. And while I was tempted to try Ubuntu with Unity, Kubuntu Plasma and Cinnamon, I decided to forgo all the performance games and go for a proven solution. So I settled for Xubuntu 12.04, the latest LTS, which has impressed me a lot. And even though Xubuntu Quetzal is even better, it has a shorter life span, too short for my needs. So let's see what gives.

It’s been two weeks since Rick Spencer made the case for a rolling release approach in Ubuntu. Having a rolling release is one of the very top suggestions from the hardcore Ubuntu user community, and after years of it being mooted by all and sundry I thought it deserved the deep consideration that Rick and his team, who represent most of Canonical’s direct contributions to Ubuntu, brought to the analysis.

It’s obviously not helpful to have mass hysteria break out when ideas like this get floated, so I would like to thank everyone who calmly provided feedback on the proposal, and blow a fat raspberry at those of you who felt obliged to mount soapboxes and opine on The End Of the World As We Know It. Sensible people the world over will appreciate the dilemma at being asked to take user feedback seriously, and being accused of unilateralism when exploring options.

Change is warranted. If we want to deliver on our mission, we have to be willing to stare controversy in the face and do the right thing anyway, recognising that we won’t know if it’s the right thing until much later, and for most of the intervening time, friends and enemies alike will go various degrees of apoplectic. Our best defense against getting it wrong is to have a strong meritocracy, which I think we do. That means letting people like Rick, who have earned their leadership roles, explore controversial territory.

So, where do we stand? And where do I stand? What’s the next step?

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-6.4 install media for i386 and x86_64 Architectures. Release Notes for 6.4 are available at http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.4 -