mintCast 195 – More News

• Linux Mint Debian 201403 released! – Highlights include Update Pack 8, Cinnamon 2.0, MATE 1.6, Latest Mint tools and improvements, and Support for EFI and GPT . (blog.linuxmint.com)

• What Makes a Classic Linux Desktop ‘Classic’? – Based on the figures in LinuxQuestions’ Members Choice Awards, 84% of Linux desktop users prefer a classic desktop. By contrast, innovations like GNOME 3 or Ubuntu’s Unity lag far behind. Which raises the question: what accounts for the popularity of the classic desktop, and what are the implications for the design of graphical interfaces? (datamation.com)

• Ubuntu 14.04 Flavours Release First Beta – Ubuntu’s extended family have made their first beta releases of the 14.04 development cycle available for download. Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME are among the spins participating in this release. Regular Ubuntu is set to take part in the second beta, due March 27. (omgubuntu.co.uk) (zdnet.com)

• Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is sticking with MySQL – One major reason why Ubuntu is sticking with Oracle’s MySQL is that Oracle made the effort to get MySQL 5.6 to work properly with Debian and Ubuntu. Yngve Svendsen, Oracle’s Director of MySQL Engineering Services, apologized in a blog posting for Oracle’s neglect of some Linux distributions in the past. Svendsen wrote, “We closed a gaping hole in our distribution on Linux.” (zdnet.com)

• Two Ubuntu Phones Coming This Year, Here’s Who’s Making Them – Two manufacturers, China based Meizu and Spanish OEM BQ Readers, are both set to release Ubuntu-powered handsets at some point ‘within 2014’. Devices made by more established manufacturers with ‘household names’ are, we’re told, expected to follow 2015.
  (omgubuntu.co.uk)

• Debian gets a OpenRISC port– A Debian port is now available for OpenRISC. Glibc and other components were ported to OpenRISC by Christian Svensson and then he continued to make a Debian port for the open-source CPU architecture. OpenRISC was developed by the OpenCores community as a general purpose open-source RISC CPU architecture. (opencores.org)

• Raspberry Pi marks 2nd birthday with plan for open source graphics driver – “… we will pay a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers”. (arstechnica.com)

• Samsung smartwatches run on Tizen – Samsung unveiled three Tizen-based watches – the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, and Gear Fit – while Google is rumored to be readying an LG-made Nexus smartwatch. (linuxgizmos.com)

• Education ministry Romania endorses Ubuntu – Romania’s Ministry of Education urges the country’s schools to consider switching to open source solutions such as the Ubuntu distribution. This will help the schools to avoid legal problems with using unlicensed copies of proprietary software, the ministry confirmed today. (europa.eu)

• Munich chooses open source groupware solution– The German city of Munich will implement Kolab, an open source mail server, calendaring and groupware solution. The consortium of IT service providers that won the city’s public tender on Tuesday announced that Munich will implement Kolab across its 15,000 desktops, including about 1000 still using a proprietary operating system. (europa.eu)

• More and more Linux in Riga children hospital – The Children’s Hospital in Riga, Latvia, is using the Ubuntu Linux distribution for an increasing number of tasks. About half of the hospital’s 600 workstations are now running Ubuntu, says Juris Alins, working in the hospital’s IT department. (europa.eu)

• I Love Leonard Cohen by Robin Grey (Jamendo.com)

• Yesterday’s Conversation by Angus Wallace (Jamendo.com)

• The Red Stone by Ground & Leaves (Jamendo.com)

• Northeast Linux Fest is being held on April 5 at Harvard University. (northeastlinuxfest.org)

• Linuxfest Northwest is being held April 26th & 27th at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington. (linuxfestnorthwest.org)

• Reprisal, Book III of The Time Weaver Chronicles by Thomas A Knight is being released today, March 3rd. (amazon.com)

• chattr, fiftyonefifty, honkeymagoo & KWisher are starting a new on-line LUG/podcast. (linuxlugcast.com)

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
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Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.