Episode 98: News With A Little Mint 12
News:
- Linux Mint 12 KDE RC released! (blog.linuxmint.com)
- Raspberry Pi released to manufacturing, available in weeks. (raspberrypi.org)
- Tizen project releases code, SDK preview – no longer vaporware. (phoronix.com)
- Corel introduces AfterShot Pro for Linux, Mac and Windows. (engadget.com)
- PulseAudio ported to Android. (phoronix.com) (arunraghavan.net)
- More reasons to dislike Microsoft:
- Microsoft Lobbying helps to swing UK Government on Open-Standards policy. (computerweekly.com)
- Microsoft uses UEFI to lock down ARM devices. (softwarefreedom.org)
- Microsoft is now being paid royalties on 70% of all US Android smartphone sales. (arstechnica.com)
The Main Topic: Linux Mint 12 Review
- Linux Mint 12 Cinnamon. (cinnamon.linuxmint.com)
- DebEx-Mint 12 KDE. (forums.linuxmint.com)
Featured Websites:
- Dead Cyborg. (deadcyborg.com)
- Livrelux mintCast Review. (livrelux.com)
- Cinnamon… again. (cinnamon.linuxmint.com)
- KDE UserBase. (userbase.kde.org)
Tip:
- On your KDE desktop, you can use krunner for more than just searching or launching applications. It can be used as a calculator, you can run bash commands directly in the krunner window, you can launch web pages and web shortcuts, you can control power management, use it as a unit converter, and other functions. Press alt + F2 to get started.
(userbase.kde.org)
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Hosts:: James, Rob, Scott, Harrison
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Contact Us:
Forum: forums.linuxmint.com
Email: [email protected]
Phone:1-832-514-2278
Twitter: @mintCast @Linux_Mint @3dbeef @jamescoyner @txhawkins
IRC: irc.spotchat.org – #mintcast
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More Linux Mint info: website, blog, forums, community
Credits: Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast’s bumpers were provided by Oscar.
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I used Octave for a while, until I discovered NumPy, a Python library which does virtually the same. So, I would recommend for anyone interested: FORGET about Octave, it is too slow compared to NumPy. Also, with NumPy you get all the power of Python as a “side effect”. And I am not a programmer! (I work into R&D for a medical software company)
I’ve heard others say the same thing about NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib as a numerical analysis framework (http://ur1.ca/7l1rm). As an old Python-hacker-wannabe I tend to agree. The power of a generic programming environment is a nice thing to have at your disposal. The Octave/Scilab advantage, if there is one, comes from the domain-specific toolboxes that people have developed (e.g., control systems analysis in my case). I know there are things like python-control (http://ur1.ca/7l1st), but they’re not quite as well developed.
A very useful piece of open mathematical software is SAGE, http://www.sagemath.org It’s python based, and bounds around 90 different open source mathematical software.
It’s like Mathematica, Maple, Matlab…
Give it a try!
B.t.w., great show!
I also have duplicate downloads of the podcast. I use Bashpodder, and each week since I started getting your podcast about episode 93 I get two mp3s come down. Taking a quick look at the problem I see that you have multiple lines in the feed with .mp3. Since Bashpodder looks for .mp3 and then does a wget using that URL it finds – it will download each one.
I don’t know why you have two URLS.
Look for the “enclosure” statement in http://www.mintcast.org/feed/podcast/ it at line 145 & 146.
Regards
James
Good observation! I’ve never looked into the source of the RSS feed to see what was actually there. I have an idea about why we might be getting two MP3 entries. I’ll try something different next week and see if that corrects the problem.
Forgot to say that for one show also Bashpodder downloaded two copies of the .mp3 and two copies of the .ogg
A little bit of overkill that week!
James
Going to give the new MintKDE a try and see what it’s like – I haven’t used KDE since the glory days of Mandrake.
I’ll also see what Cinnamon is like, as it’s not available on LMDE yet.
I expect that I’ll go back to Xfce in fairly short order, cursing all things new like some crazy hermit out in the woods, but hey, you have to try…
The Crazy Hermit in the Woods says KDE and Unity are exactly alike…
Rob,
Is the flavor of scilab you are trying to run under wine native to debian? “http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/scilab.html”
I fiddled with scilab a few year ago and thought it was matlab like but not matlab compatible like octave. In the end I went with scipy/numpy/matplotlib/sympy and ipythons rather than matlab for my research’s numerical needs.
V/R
Brokenpike
Anyone had time to play around with Cinnamon 2.0 yet? Still waiting for it be built with muffin over here…
KDE 4.8 released
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/kde-48-released-install-it-in-kubuntu.html
will be trying KDE out when i fly back home. ive had nothing but over heating & battery life issues with mint 11 & 12. my laptop actually shut down and failed to transfer pictures taken while on holidays (41GB) worth. fired up win7 and transferred all pictures with ease and laptop stayed on a cool 38 degrees. not sure whether its a gnome or kernel issue with over heating but the battery life is horrendous with the newer kernels, even on suspend in mint 11 & 12, the battery indicated 15% battery life over night !(were did the power all go?). on win7 i left it on suspend for FULL 3 days straight and battery level still remained in the high 80% ??
i starting to believe that (my opinion only) Linux is not designed or suitable for laptops.
im hoping that the new KDE will prove me wrong. Your thoughts.
To Ibm450 : it is known since phoronix tests that the kernel from 3.6.39 and upward are drastically draining the battery life.
You could try the aspm argument mentionned in the phoronix site as a deterrent, but i’ll advised to wait for the 3.3 kernel with would contain the fix. link : http://www.google.co.za/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=phoronix%20aspm&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoronix.com%2Fvr.php%3Fview%3DMTAyMjk&ei=YeAoT9OPOIGIhQfy3aC0BQ&usg=AFQjCNFazoh7-wphBMp9PtjhcLLUtGFrnw
correction of my first sentence: it is known since phoronix tests that the kernel from 2.6.39″
Just catching up with the podcast and am a few weeks behind.
You recommended gPodder as an excellent podcatcher. I concur. I have used it for about 6 months now and love it.
What you didn’t say, however, is that the version that ships with Mint 12 doesn’t work. It crashes after you tell it to grab feeds from a list.
I hear you can grab the latest version from their site, but I have as yet failed to get it working.