Fedora 24 Funage, Smoooth Mageia 5, Tumblin' Tumbleweed

Today in Linux news, Red Hat formally announced their 2017 expansion plans into Boston. Elsewhere, Dedoimedo posted another guide, this time how to make Fedora 24 useful and fun. After a rough start, Michael Huff found Mageia 5 to be "smart, eager and full of potential" and Dimstar has this week's Tumbleweed update.

Mageia 5 was released well over year ago to some mixed but some positive reviews. Today Matt Hartley's side project featured a new review by Micheal Huff who said it's great once you get it going. He first tested on an antique Celeron machine and graphics failed on him. Then on a modern laptop GNOME wasn't cooperative. He detailed several issues from limited graphics support to crashes to dropped connectivity. But before giving up, Huff tried MATE and found a much smoother experience. "It proved to be an amazing desktop environment for Mageia," he said. Startup and shutdown are very quick, the included software is impressive, and its wiki is a great resource according to Huff. He was very disappointed at his initial experience but rather liked Mageia after the hurdles were cleared. Mageia 6 is in development and may be released before the end of the year.

Last night we covered Red Hat's expansion plans into Boston, Massachusetts and now Red Hat has formally announced it in a press release. The new 40,000 square foot space will be home to "a world-class Executive Briefing Center, the first U.S. east coast location for Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, and a new Red Hat Engineering Lab." The Engineering Lab will focus on research and development centered "around emerging open source technologies."

Tumbleweed saw lots of updates this week with four new snapshots. According to Dominique Leuenberger said the highlights include Glibc 2.24, Appstream translations data, and Linux 4.7.3. He said KDE Plasma 5.8, GNOME 3.22, and Linux 4.7.4 are being prepped. On Wednesday Douglas DeMaio said these latest snapshots brought improvements to audio, graphics, and telepathy. Last week Firefox was updated to 48.02, GCC to 6.2.1 (provoking a total distro rebuild), and GStreamer 1.8.3. Blog Penguins and Stuff recently reported on an upgrade from 13.2 to Leap 42.1 saying, "On the whole I'm happy with what I have here."

Slackware has received some security updates the last week or so. These include updates for Curl, MariaDB, GTK+2, GNUtiles, and PHP. So for those who have forgotten to slackpkg update lately, now is the time.

And finally, if you're in need of a weekend project, Dedoimedo has posted a guide to making Fedora 24 fun. He helps users with extra repositories, multimedia codecs, Skype, customizating, as well as some other little tips.