The new Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon Edition long-term support release offers five years of upgrades, tweaks, improvements, and stability through 2019. Mint 17 has spiffed up its appearance and made changes so apps launch faster and use fewer resources.

The Cygwin environment lets you run Linux applications on a Windows system.

This month's DVD is the Ubuntu Monster Pack, with five lovable, Live Ubuntu distributions for both 32- and 64-bit installations. All distros are based on the "Trusty Tahr" 14.04 long-term support (LTS) release.

Opinions differ on the UEFI boot security system, but one thing is certain: Secure Boot is here to stay. We thought it was time to ask, "How hard is it to boot a popular Linux distribution in a UEFI Secure Boot environment?"