For me, Fedora 18 Spherical Cow was a big disappointment, mostly because Fedora 17 was a big positive surprise. It's like that woman who keeps smiling at you through the dinner and flirts with you, and then when you take her into your motel room, she suddenly starts crying. I mean what's up with that.Anyhow, I know upfront that MATE will not change anything in terms of how friendly and simple Fedora 18 is. Anaconda stays Anaconda and whatnot. KDE is also a fairly sweet desktop environment, so the fact it did not quite work for me with Spherical Cows does not mean that MATE will suddenly warm my heart. But, if you can ignore the initial woes, and I surely can, then let's see what happens when you plaster the Gnome 2 reborn desktop on the latest Fedora release. Fedora + MATE, take one.

For the past few years the X.Org Server has managed to get back on track for being released bi-annually and without too many delays. However, the server has also fallen into a habit where it's being released without all of the "blocker bugs" being cleared...

Last week when benchmarking the new F2FS file-system from Samsung that was introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel its performance was compared to Btrfs, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS. For those hoping to see file-system performance results of NILFS2, those results are available today.

Mint 201303 RC (Debian Cinnamon) is available. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It also adds a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, and a web-based package installation interface. Linux Mint is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories.

With this morning's release of mesa-demos 8.1, which provides updates to the commonly used glxinfo command, it's now easy to find out the version of the OpenGL Core Profile supported by your graphics driver/hardware...

David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system announced a few hours ago that he released the first Alpha version of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Server distribution.

The PowerPC architecture update for the Linux 3.9 kernel is made up mostly of bug-fixes and minor updates, but there are a few highlights. Most of the major work revolves around the yet-to-be-released POWER8 hardware.

Chakra 2013.02 Benz released. No new features implemented in Tribe, the graphical installation program, Kapudan, the first boot program, gets new features.

The GNOME Projects announced a couple of days ago the first Beta version of the GNOME Settings Daemon 3.8 package for the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.2 on a headless Fedora 18 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

WebRTC or Web Real-Time Communications is an open source project led by Mozilla and a number of other companies, aiming to enable the Web with Real Time Communication (RTC) capabilities including video calls and file-sharing (currently a Firefox first), between browsers that … Continue reading

So I have been sitting on the fence about The Humble Bundle Mojam 2 since they never say what games will get Linux or even Mac support until they put the builds up, but at least the Mojang games do and one is open source too!

Linux Game Publishing has quietly shutdown PenguinPlay, the game match-making service offered by the UK-based company that ported games to Linux...

Kademar 5 Beta 1 is available. The kademar Linux distribution is a complete desktop Linux operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Compared to its parent, it includes more intuitive system management and better hardware support, including support for Bluetooth, WiFi, ACPI power management, NTFS, Lightscribe, USB, web cams, TDT/DVB, and other devices.

Version 6.0.7 of Debian "Squeeze" was released on Saturday...

Tests are running full-speed this weekend on benchmarking the performance of the brand new Ubuntu Touch/Tablet Developer Preview with the Google Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices. Here's a preview with some initial findings from performance testing these mobile ARM devices using Ubuntu Linux...

The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename "squeeze"). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

Check out a great Linux subreddit about distrohopping.

The focus of this article is to select some of the finest Java books which help programmers master all aspects of this language. The books featured here help programmers of all levels take advantage of the rich tapestry of Java. All of the books are available to download for free.

The Pear OS developer, David Tavares, announced a few days ago that he works on a new project, called Pear OS 7 Server.