thanks for the link, bang up to date, 16.04
bookmarked.

I'm making the jump to Ubuntu MATE, at least for the relatives i support that i previously switched to Mint.

I'm going to be running with Ubuntu MATE too until i see what Clem and the Mint team manage to pull out the hat.

Thursday night i also spun up a new Ubuntu 16.04 droplet on Digital Ocean and migrated my web sites and XMPP server from Debian. I've enough credit in my DO account to last another 6 months at which time i'll be switching my server to FreeBSD 11 hosted at Vultr.

Got my Ubuntu Mate set up and configured how i like it.
Only thing missing was the start up sound i had set up on previous version.
Thought i could live without it, but seems im missing it, i know, it's shallow of me

So if anyone else is wants it, its easy to do.

https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/how-...ogin-sound/677

Been trying out Kubuntu 16.04 on one of my systems.
I really like the look of the Plasma 5 desktop, but in other ways my dislike of KDE is making itself evident again.

I hadn't previously realised that KDE can't mount network shares in the file system, in the way that other DEs do.
This makes it very difficult for the likes of a music player such as Clementine to use a network share as it's library, as the music has to be located somewhere in the file system.
There's seemingly a way to mount them at boot up by adding them to fstab, but I haven't had any success so far. I know you use the 'noauto' option, so they are only mounted when required, but even so I am continually getting mounting error 13. Something to do with credentials I think?

I'll persevere for a while, but I think I'll be going back to a different DE that's much more straightforward in this area.
Maybe Mint 18, when it comes out?

I've always preferred Gnome based or Gnome forked DEs, but I like to give KDE a chance every now and again.


ETA: Another thing I've noticed recently, not just in KDE but in all my linux distros, is that they are asking for username and password for network shares, even when you have set them such that no passwords are required.
Perhaps there has been some change made to samba recently, but it's been years since I've had to mess around with smb.conf.

I've got a Netgear router with a USB 'readyshare' drive attached. I've checked in the router settings and it specifically says no username and no password.
But recently on linux I've had to use the username and password I use to access the settings in order to access this drive. Not the case in Windows.

Not bad for something that was just suppose to just keep the family happy
http://www.networkworld.com/article/...tml#tk.twt_nww
https://plus.google.com/communities/...79007926658904

Well, Kubuntu unfortunately decided to wig out on me. Was trying (again in vain) to get PCSX working. It went full screen, didn't do anything, then crashed back to the desktop whereupon it seemingly has borked the appearance. For some reason now the desktop is really blurry! I've tried resetting X and a couple of other fixes about the place, but nothing working.

Therefore, and after some serious plugging both here and in the Linux Action Show podcast, I'm going to give Ubuntu MATE a serious go.

So there, you win 1saintly!

Give Mednafen a try, it's in the repos.

I haven't tried it on Linux, but OpenEmu uses it on Mac OS as the PS1 emulator and it's run flawlessly for me (i recently played through Legend of Mana using it).

If you want a GUI for it on Linux though, you may have to compile one (Mednaffe, Phoenix).

Well I usually use Retroarch, which comes with Mednafen PSX but it's so fussy and has never worked for me despite correctly jumping through its hoops. Ah well, at least PSX works on my living room Android box.

Bug detection and rectification in Ubuntu Xenial Xerus:

GNOME Software Bug Doesn't Let Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Users Install Third-Party Debs. A patch has been released and will land soon in the repos.

Welcome to the Devuan GNU-Linux 'Jessie' distribution:

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

So, I did indeed give it a go. It's very nice, stable, no issues which is a massive plus. But for me I can't get past the Gnome 2-ness. It's just too old looking. I did try the different themes and things but they all look horrible to me. I admit it's a really rubbish reason to not install what is clearly a very polished and stable distro, but what can I say? I like the eye candy.

I installed mainline Ubuntu instead, and thankfully it seems just as stable so far. Yes I knew about the sideloading issue as reported above but it's pretty easy to drive round for now until it's fixed. So I'll play with this for now and see how it goes. Again...

Still using Kubuntu 16.04, found nvidia 161 drivers to be good for me, 164 gave me resume problems.

Some welcome news from Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth:

After three years of Linux, Munich reveals draft of crunch report that could decide its open source future. The German city that underwent one of the world's largest switches away from Windows is suffering from a range of issues in how IT is run, according to a pivotal report.

^^^ Having read that article and some very apposite comments below it, I'd agree that it's been primarily an IT managment and competence issue over 50 geographic locations rather than a Linux vs. Windows one, e.g. there's no excuse for using outdated software especially when it's free and open source!

That said, I agree that it might have been better if Munich had gone down the route of using an already existing Linux distribution rather than developing their own (even if they didn't sign a maintenance contract) because there'd have been plenty of available IT staff knowledgeable about Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse.

the top most popular linux distributions for 2014/15 have remain typical for most lists charting the usual linux flavours, mint, ubuntu, centos, fedora, ect.
http://www.tecmint.com/10-top-most-p...tions-of-2015/

but a link near the top shows the predicted linux types to look out for in 2016. much more exotic then i would have expected. Veltos, papyrOS, Karora, SolusOS,
http://www.tecmint.com/top-linux-dis...rward-in-2016/

for me the rise of Ubuntu Mate, Kubuntu. maybe Elementary, Linux lite, Porteus-Mate, LXDE, Zorin. would have been more expected, imo

We have below some choice quotes about Microsoft's decision to mislead computer users by using an 'x' close down button to actually install Windows 10 on their equipment:

"My partner works for a small charity tied to a IT support team of 2 nerds, part of the office accommodation package that they rent. They were caught out by this yesterday when all their PCs and laptops went through the "upgrade" process, leaving them unable to do anything with them for hours. They then found that ther internet connection was unuseable and they couldn't access any of their files, which turned out to due to their bandwidth being completely overwhelmed by the automatic transfer of several years worth of local files onto Onedrive."

"I came back from a long business trip last Friday, and my wife who uses the PC in the office for emails, browsing, and bit of work related word processing had been tripped up by this while I was away. User interface all different, desktop icons gone, stuff moved and so she was understandably alarmed that she had been hacked or hoodwinked into giving stuff away and didn't touch it until I got back in the small hours. Please don't go on about how this or that can be disabled that is completely irrelevant to the fact that Microsoft are eroding trust in an every day tool."

I suspect and hope that that will lead to quite a few Windows ----> Linux conversions. Which reminds me:

Italian City Vicenza Is Adopting Zorin OS Linux And Replacing Windows. This Ubuntu-based operating system will replace the Windows computers and provide a Windows 7-like desktop environment to the users.

I have come across a number of cases within the past year where small/medium businesses have moved over to Linux Mint or Zorin because of the threat of malware or the sheer cost of Microsoft's licensing fees for the use of multiple copies of Windows. The move to online software services will only help to make that transition easier, e.g. Sage software, Google apps and the rest.

Since Italy has just been discussed, I thought I'd mention this:

The Italian Ministry of Defence expects to save 26-29 million Euro over the coming years by using LibreOffice. The LibreDifesa project aims to eventually migrate all of the organisation's well over 100,000 desktops to the open-source office productivity suite.

...and here it is:

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Redmond will support it inside Azure and send code back to the FreeBSD Foundation.

FreeBSD, a popular open-source Unix operating system with roots stretching back to the 1970s, is now available through the Azure Marketplace as a virtual-machine image for Azure, according to an Azure blog post.

Although they are now constructively sending coding improvements back to the FreeBSD development team, which is to be congratulated, I do disagree with Steven J Vaughan-Nichols article below because Microsoft is not yet actively embracing open source operating systems, e.g. porting over their proprietary products let alone creating and releasing distributions for public use. All they seem to be doing is at last recognising and accommodating the various Unix-like and derived operating systems that are out there and which now have majority market shares in many sectors, i.e. Microsoft has to adapt in order to remain profitable.

Why Microsoft is turning into an open-source company. Microsoft now has its own BSD Unix operating system, supports Ubuntu as a subsystem on Windows 10, and recently open-sourced the Xamarin software development kit. This is not Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer's Microsoft.

Not wishing to go off topic, but I'm just wanting to get your views on Manjaro. There's been a recent release and I decided to give the Cinnamon edition a spin via USB. So far it seems really impressive. What's your experience been with it? I'm really considering it as my main OS. It seems very polished indeed, but I'm a bit shaky about the Arch base as I don't want to end up having to deal with low-level issues in my daily PC life.

What think?

I've not used it but I've read and watched the good reviews. I think this is one of those situations where it's a case of 'find out by trying out' because what will suit one person won't necessarily suit another. Therefore, I'd suggest either carrying on for an extended time with the live USB sessions or do a dual boot set up (I should add I'm not too keen on virtual session testing because that doesn't test the operating system with the hardware).

Ah, you're all a bunch of slow-pokes. I've already gone and done it.

This is a very impressive system. Cinnamon has never been a slouch on my PC, but this is like lightning. So far I am really impressed. All the software I need is available (excepting Chrome which I haven't found yet, but I'm sure I will). Only downside is a lot of updates, and experience tells you that with lots of updates comes lots of risk. I read a review over on Distrowatch of an older version, and the reviewer said that it was fine for a while but in popped a kernel update one day and BOOM, knocked his whole system out.

I've nothing to lose at this point as it's installed and running. I'll post back up with no doubt hilarious antics as we trundle merrily along. At least Mint is out soon if it goes really tits up!

Minimal bugs so far. Have installed pretty much most of my favourite stuff and even had a kernel upgrade but no real issues thus far. Cairo Dock isn't the same as it was before, but I've switched to Docky for the moment to see how that goes and I like it just fine tbh. There seems to be a couple of Cinnamon bugs - one is the right click context menu on menu items doesn't work. Well it appears but say I select add to desktop, nothing happens. Also, on the laptop I cannot enable vertical edge scrolling on the touchpad. Two finger scrolling works fine but not edge. Oddly, this works on the latest Mint with the same version of Cinnamon. I'll probably report these soon.

Please do keep us posted with progress reports because it'll be interesting to see how this popular Linux OS performs.

For anyone else who's looking into this particular distribution, here's a video to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4DKR5TeorQ

No probs. At the very least I imagine I'll be using it for the next week or so, at least until Mint 18 is released.

Discovered that it wasn't using MDM as login manager and is rather using GDM, so thought I'd switch it over manually see if that breaks it. Nope, followed this guide, and it's fine. Dunno why it isn't used as default.

Got Retroarch running beautifully. Not tried Steam yet, but certainly will do at some point. But I'm not a heavy PC gamer, generally only for retro preservation.

Well, it's been an interesting week so far with Manjaro Cinnamon. Mostly, you have to say it's largely trouble free. There's a huge amount of software available in the package manager (Pamac), which even lets you search the Arch user repository. This bit can be a bit geeky and I've had mixed results. It's one thing the program saying it's available, it's quite another to see it working.

Chrome installed from AUR just fine, but I tried some of the more left-field apps and sometimes they just wouldn't build, or at least not without user intervention (nuts to that). It really helps to be familiar with the build process when using AUR, so if you're a total lightweight like me, you'll be slowly backing out of the room a la Homer Simpson. You can click a check box in Pamac and tell it to build without user intervention, but that may not always work...

But the reality is that Manjaro is lacking so very little that you will only rarely need to use AUR. Chrome is really the biggest example I can think of, and that works no problem at all.

Will I be sticking with it? Dunno yet. The forum is a bit unfriendly - I just love it when they tell you to "do a search before posting" - yup, that's right, patronise a newcomer. I took the time to install the OS, register and then post, you think I wouldn't have searched before committing to that? Jaysus. But the jury is out so far still. Mint 18's quality will probably be the deciding factor.

Just out of interest, how user-friendly is that package manager? For example, is it more like a Software Center or more like Synaptic? Thanks.

Sad to hear of the unfriendly forum though - I try to give helpful and non-judgemental replies in this particular forum.

In truth it's probably a bit between, but it leans more towards Synaptic. It's friendly enough though - I can use it, put it that way! It reminds me a bit of openSUSE's YasT thing, only less fussy really and doesn't mither you about dependencies all the time.

I'm sure they are OK on the forum really, it just puts my back up when regular users trot out the same tropes as if you are a moron. It annoyed me so much I had to respond before going to bed last night!