They always appear on the heanet server first. You are right about LMDE though.

I'm with this guy sadly. The new openSUSE is pretty terrible. Freezes and crashes, and still no proper Nvidia driver available. If you want it, you have to manually install it. Easy enough, but too much hassle down the line when kernel update time comes and your desktop borks. The official line is "the Nvidia repo is coming. You have to wait." but why release it when these things aren't ready? Why wait when other distros are ready to go?

Nuts to it, I'm off.

"Valve joins the Linux Foundation"
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...machine-gaming

An interesting move considering manufacturers may be getting increasingly sidelined by Microsoft.

"allowing any manufacturer to build a compatible system and install the Linux-based Steam OS on top of it."

i think Valve would like to drop MS like a stone, but they know at the moment that they can't as. Joining the Linux foundation shows that Valve is serious about Linux.

good for them i say.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/12/10/a...=rss_truncated

More 'noise' from the Linux Foundation.
This time "LG, Sharp, Qualcomm and others team up" with them for an open cross platform framework.

Very pleased to report that despite my earlier outburst, openSUSE has now uploaded their Nvidia repository for the 13.1 release. Very pleased I decided to wait and not be such a mardy. I installed it earlier and no problems whatsoever. Makes 13.1 a really nice release. The new Gnome 3.10 is seriously, seriously gorgeous, and I iz now 'appy and not so mardy.

I have an old laptop running on Ubuntu 12.10 or could be 04 not got access to it at the moment.
I tried plugging an old hard drive from a windows pc but how do I see what is on the hard drive..?

Well in order to access the drive Linux has to mount it. It should do that automatically for USB drives, but I suppose there are various reasons why it might not have done.
I presume when you say you plugged it in, that was via a USB caddy? Or did you connect it into the laptop?

Open up the file browser in Ubuntu and look for the drive in the left hand column. If you've plugged it in by USB then it should be obvious; if you've connected it as an internal drive you'll have to identify it by it's size (Linux doesn't use drive letters).

If it opens then you'll be able to browse it, if not then you could report the error message.
Ubuntu nowadays can work quite happily with the Windows NTFS file system using the ntfs-3g driver, so shouldn't present any problems, as long as the drive isn't corrupted and was unmounted cleanly in Windows.

Connected via usb caddy but couldn't see the drive.. Will try again later,, thanks

If you can't see the drive in the file browser (try unplugging and replugging USB), then open up GParted (install through Ubuntu Software Centre if necessary), and see what it is saying about the drive, if it can see it.

Thanks, i'll try later..

For the first time in quite some time the well known blogger dedoimedo has given a perfect 10/10 score for a linux distro. It's for Linux Mint 16 Petra cinnamon edition

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/l...int-petra.html

Clem claims he has been asked by Canonical's legal department to license the binary packages used by Ubuntu. To me this is a scary thought. Ubuntu is a base distribution for many projects, some of them (such as Mint and Kubuntu) are quite successful.

Clem responded, "Money isn't a primary concern. Although the original fee was in the hundreds of thousands pounds, it was easily reduced to a single digit figure. The licensing aims at restricting what Mint can and cannot do, mostly in relation to the OEM market, to prevent Mint from competing with Canonical in front of the same commercial partners."


Quotes taken from
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20131209#qa

That really does shows there is a need for a Google like Kingpin.
Those binary compilations could be centralised for starters.

http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/


http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTU0Mzc
Good news about ex nvidia getting involved.

Maybe people have finally settled on a OS and stuck with it, and are happy with it.

Just reading what Mint have done with the new release of Xfce

quote...
Linux Mint 16 focuses on the task at hand, it does less and does it better than before. It features many speed and performance improvements:

The boot and login sequence no longer scan your system for btrfs partitions.
The MDM display manager no longer listens or communicates over the network.
The Update Manager is now started with a delay to make it faster for the session to load.
The Software Manager features significant speed improvements.
The Linux Mint 16 ISO images are not as compressed as before. They take more space and are bigger to download but also easier on the system and faster to decompress during the live session.
end quote.

Maybe a few other releases should take a leave out of Mints book.

Just hold back for a year on new features, take a breather.

As nothing is going to turn me away from Xfce, been running
http://manjaro.org/ for a while now.
Seems they have got to a bug free release, on my hardware anyway
But will have a look at Mint Xfce on spare drive.
http://linuxmint.com/

Absolutely the case for me. I'm still running Mint 16 Cinnamon as my main desktop, and still have zero complaints. It's awesome. I'm also still botting into Kubuntu 13.10 and openSUSE 13.1 Gnome (which I'm on right now). Love them all, no intention of fiddling any further until their respective next releases arrive.

I have been thinking about a couple of things RE Canonical recently.

First, the Canonical/Amazon partnership. They have an agreement where Amazon shopping results in the Unity dash but why not go further? Amazon have a line of tablets that are great pieces of hardware let down by the software. Canonical have an OS that is almost ready for mobile platforms and need a hardware manufacturer for it. Seems like a marriage made in heaven.

The 2nd thing is the opportunity provided by the imminent retirement of XP. Around the same time, Canonical will be releasing the latest LTS release of Ubuntu and should be running campaigns to encourage new users especially given the negative hype around Windows 8.

That is just my opinion though and not worth very much

I think you're absolutely bang on on both counts. Ubuntu really ought to be in a position now to take full advantage of XP's retirement. And Amazon could do much worse than let Ubuntu take care of their OS, especially as they aren't really full hog on the Android thing.

Had a play with Fedora 20 today, the Gnome release. Decided to take a Clonezilla backup of my openSUSE install and actually install Fedora to see if I like it. It's been a few years since I tried Fedora.

And it's nice, but the little things hurt it. Firstly, why is the installer so cryptic and terrifying? I gather it's better than the last one, but to me it was still a real nail-biter, as it doesn't have a final summary page. So any changes you've made to the setup get applied the instant you hit the OK button. It really needs an openSUSE style summary page that allows you to go back and check your changes, if only to make sure it isn't going to wipe the entire drive.

Once installed (thankfully it was fine) it's quite nice. I'm a big fan of Gnome 3 anyway and it's a carbon copy of the openSUSE variety here, perhaps missing one or two apps that are on the latter. My main issue, and the reason I'm typing this from openSUSE now after restoring it, is the installing of Nvidia drivers. You have to find a guide or you've no chance. You need the kernel-devel modules, then you need akmod-nvidia, kmod-nvidia, then you need to blacklist the open source nouveau driver. Then you'll need to re-enable the Plymouth grub screen or you just get a text boot. And maybe after all that, you'll get a working display.

I don't get it because openSUSE (and many others) takes care of all this automatically. All I had to do there was enable the Nvidia repo (easily done in the Software Management - you just tick a box), and install the driver. Done. I'd really like to see Fedora implement something like this.

I used something called Fedora Utils to get extra stuff, and this was good. In fact if it wasn't for that I don't think I could have updated the system, as the new Gnome Software thing didn't see any updates where the Utils did. If you're gonna try Fedora I'd recommend the Fedora Utils to get Flash, font improvements and all sorts of other extras.

But I'm back on openSUSE mainly because I find it easier to use without having to install extra stuff, and also because I couldn't find a way to restore the Plymouth boot screen. So sadly I removed Fedora. But I did like it and if they are intending on making it a better experience for end users then I will definitely look again in the future.

Woah long. Sorry.

Kal_El You could always look at
https://kororaproject.org/about

Not had a play with it myself yet, but its installed on a HD For a play tonight.

Dont get what all the fuss is about Fedora.

Like you say, for something that claims to be a cutting edge OS, it seems behind the times to me

Still using my,
XFCE
http://manjaro.org/

been stable and bug free for months, and its a rolling OS
cant see me moving away from it for a long time. (but doesnt stop me having a play with other Distros )

Yes I might have been better served with that. It's a shame though, as while I appreciate Fedora does not ship proprietary stuff, it could be made easier for the end user to decide for him/herself. It kinda reminded me of a post-install XP - having to go around the place finding all your programs and drivers.

I will take a look at Korora, thanks.

In fact I've just discovered Gnome Boxes, which is basically a virtual machine program. I'm currently installing an old copy of Windows XP in it to see how it works. I'll give Korora a go in that I reckon.

JUst been watching

http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/4...-3-las-s30e04/

fast forward to about 37mins.

a good watch about Gnome.

Makes me want load it up and play with it

I am using Manjaro Xfce at the moment, it is stable and fast, but not easy to use, installing software is a bit iffy and it is still a bit rough around the edges, but then it is based on Arch.

I think I still prefer mint.

$21 million losses for Canonical in 2013

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...to-21-million/

How long can they continue making losses like this?