As we prepare to enter a new year, the big names that have dominated the Linux world for the past decade–Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Canonical/Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE–are unchanged. But they may be joined in 2013 by a newcomer to the open source channel, Mageia Linux, which has been enjoying staggering popularity since its creation barely two years ago. Where might it head next?

Read the full thing at http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/12/27/young-mageia-linux-distribution-surges-in-popularity/

Every so often there will be something that slows a system down. There are a few tools that can help to identify which process is the cause of this slow down. One such tool is htop. Htop is an interactive and real time process monitoring application for Linux which will show you your usage per cpu/core, as well as a meaningful text graph of your memory and swap usage.

Read the full thing at http://www.deonsworld.co.za/2012/12/20/understanding-and-using-htop-monitor-system-resources/

E17 has been in development for a long time, and there have been a lot of people involved over the years. At this time, the first and final official release of E17, I think it's important to name names and thank everyone who has been involved over the years.

Read the full thing at http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=77

We're, back with another shiny PulseAudio release! While the 3.0 release was a little delayed, it brings a number of important improvements, and bug fixes.

Read the full release at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/3.0

A few weeks back, we talked about KDE and Gnome in daily life, and how they fared from the applications perspective, when you pit programs developed for one environment against those created for the other. We learned a valuable lesson that technology and practicality do not necessarily go hand in hand, nor that you can easily draw a clear line between the two. Finally, we discovered the joy of freedom, in that you can mix software, regardless of whichever desktop you choose, and get the best of all worlds. Now, the big question is, does the same set of conclusions apply when you try to administer your box? Well, to answer that, we will check how easy and intuitive it is to manage Linux when you choose KDE or Gnome as your platform.

Read the full thing at http://netrunner-mag.com/?p=2254

The OpenMandriva community is moving on. The statutes of the “OpenMandriva Association” have been sent to the French authorities and the incorporation process has thus started. At the same time, preparations are ongoing to migrate both the actual development environment of the distribution and the entire community infrastructure. On top of this, the development environment is not just migrated to another server, it is being upgraded to ABF and Git.

Read the full thing at http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/12/10/openmandriva-takes-off/

One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do?

Proprietary software is associated with malicious treatment of the user: surveillance code, digital handcuffs (DRM or Digital Restrictions Management) to restrict users, and back doors that can do nasty things under remote control. Programs that do any of these things are malware and should be treated as such.

Read the full thing at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

Quite recently, the GNU project has announced Guix, a new package manager for the GNU system. Guix is described on their website as:

GNU Guix is a purely functional package manager, and associated free software distribution, for the GNU system. In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection.

Read the full thing at http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-guix.html

The Munich city council has realised cost savings of over €10 million ($A12.36 million) as the result of a recent program to migrate its desktop PCs from Windows to Linux.

H-Online reports the city council conducted a study on the IT savings made by switching in comparison to two scenarios in which the city council continued using Windows.

Read the full thing at http://www.smartcompany.com.au/information-technology/053174-munich-city-council-saves-over-12-million-through-switch-to-desktop-linux.html

A new phone OS based on the work Nokia abandoned on its Linux-based mobile OS has been unveiled in Helsinki. Jolla is a start-up run by former Nokia staffers devised to build on the old MeeGo project, which is now called Mer. The Sailfish OS is Mer with proprietary elements: a new user interface.

Read the full thing at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/21/sailfish_os_sets_sail/