Issue #166 / Sep 2014

Highlights:

You don’t have to settle for KDE or Gnome anymore. Linux offers a variety of powerful alternative desktops.

SERVICE: Welcome

Welcome

We don't cover a lot of Microsoft technology in this magazine (except in our "Interoperability" and "Living with Windows" issues), but sometimes the moving and shaking of Microsoft really does affect the rest of the high-tech industry. Redmond announced that they were laying off 18,000 people recently; big layoffs are always big news, and Microsoft's bold swipe dominated the high-tech headlines, but another important update from the empire received a lesser share of attention. New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's manifesto to his employees, dated July 10, 2014, set out a new direction for the company.

SERVICE: This Month's DVD

CentOS 7 and Fedora 20 Robotics Spin

This month we bring you CentOS 7 (64-bit), a community enterprise operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the Fedora 20 Robotics spin (32-bit).

NEWS: News

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools.

NEWS: Cinnamon and Mate

Exploring the Cinnamon and Mate desktops environments

The Cinnamon and Mate desktop systems have stirred up plenty attention around the Linux world. We'll show you around these innovative new desktop systems and help you decide which is right for you.

NEWS: Introducing LXQt

LXDE and Razor-qt come together

The popular LXDE lightweight desktop is undergoing big changes under the hood, and the future looks bright.

NEWS: DMDc

Debian meets Mate with the versatile DMDc Live Linux

Mate isn't just for Mint users. The DMDc project is Mate on top of Debian Testing.

NEWS: Xfce

The Xfce desktop — Small, fast, and easy on resources

The Xfce desktop travels light but still comes with all the essential features.

REVIEWS: GPS Tools

Read and process GPS data

Almost all manufacturers of GPS devices use proprietary formats to save routes, tracks, and waypoints. Vendors unfortunately rarely offer Linux software for uploading and downloading or processing the data. Four GPS editors keep Linux users on the right track.

FEATURES: RHEL 7

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 tested

On June 10, Red Hat launched a new major release of its enterprise distribution, RHEL 7. We take a look to find out where RHEL is headed.

FEATURES: Perl — Responsive Web Design

Responsive web page layout by display size

Make your blog look good on both desktop monitors and modern smartphones with high-resolution graphics by adding CSS and media queries to change the layout on the fly.

FEATURES: Charly's Column: Corkscrew

The sys admin's daily grind — Corkscrew

Sys admin columnist Charly never takes a vacation from the Internet. A beach bar with WiFi is quickly found, but it runs a forced proxy, which thinks that the SSH port (22) is in league with the devil and blocks the connection. Time to drill a tunnel.

FEATURES: systemd-networkd

systemd-networkd — Network configuration

The new networkd component of the systemd project supports basic network configuration. Despite its early stage of development, one thing is clear: This is a daemon with brains.

FEATURES: Meson Build System

Meson — a new build system

Developers fed up with cryptic Makefiles should take a look at the new Meson build system, which is simple to operate, offers scripting capabilities, integrates external test tools, and supports Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

FEATURES: Parallel Shells

Parallel shell with pdsh

The most fundamental tool needed to administer a cluster is a parallel shell, which allows you to run the same command on a series of nodes. In this article, we look at pdsh.

LINUXUSER: Paperwork Document Manager

Paperwork battles the increasing stacks of paper

Paperwork was developed to manage the paperless office – a dream as old as desktop PCs.

LINUXUSER: Command Line: autojump

Complementing cd with autojump

Autojump is a mature and widely available command-line tool for navigating your directory structure. We show you how it works.

LINUXUSER: Workspace: GitBook

Publishing with GitBook

Write and publish ebooks with the GitBook software and publishing platform.

LINUXUSER: Chapeau Linux

Chapeau Linux multimedia and gaming platform

If you are looking off the beaten Ubuntu and Debian paths for a fast, multimedia distro with a Gnome 3 desktop, take a closer look at Fedora-based Chapeau Linux.

COMMUNITY NOTEBOOK: Doghouse: Performance Improvements

Improving performance of Linux on ARM

"maddog" looks at some of Linaro's efforts to improve GNU/Linux performance on ARM architectures.

COMMUNITY NOTEBOOK: Kernel News

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

NEWS: Financing Crypto Projects

Who pays free crypto developers?

Although open source crypto software is used virtually all over the world, the projects behind it are often small and chronically underfunded. Heartbleed, however, brings a possibility of improvement.