Mozilla's Firefox OS delivers an easy way to develop and market apps for Android and the upcoming Mozilla-specific phone. Mike Riley takes a first look at developing apps for the platform.

A full review of CrunchBang Linux 11 Waldorf.

What if VMware (NYSE:VMW) and its Zimbra email business countered Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT) and Office 365 -- plus Google Apps? At first that sounds far fetched. Zimbra is widely available from multiple cloud services providers (CSPs) and third-party hosting companies. But what if Zimbra was available in VMware's new public cloud -- called the vCloud Hybrid Service? Now that could be a game changer.

On March 15, 2013, ComputerWeekly.com, the “leading provider of news, analysis, opinion, information and services for the UK IT community” published an article by Bryan Glick entitled: Government mandates 'preference' for open source. The article focuses on the release of the UK’s new Government Service Design Manual, which, from April 2013, will provide governing standards for the online services developed by the UK’s government for public consumption.

While the main focus of Reglue.org is insuring that financially-disadvantaged kids have a computer, we often answer the call for a more community-oriented effort. This was one of those times.

Ubuntu 13.04 debuted in April. And Ubuntu 13.10 (code-named Saucy Salamander) is expected in October 2013. Canonical's long-term vision (starting with Ubuntu 14.04) is a single code base for smart phones, tablets and PCs. The big question mark: When will Ubuntu PC makers like System76 and ZaReason jump into the Linux tablet market? The question has multiple answers.

Devon IT unveiled an HDMI stick that can turn any HDMI-compatible monitor or display into an interactive virtual desktop. “Ceptor” is somewhat larger than a typical USB memory stick, runs Devon IT’s Linux-based ZeTOS “zero client” operating system on a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SOC (system-on-chip), and sells for $99. “Unlike PC Sticks, Ceptor is [...]

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) opened last month. (The official launch had been planned to occur at the Boston Public Library but the temporary closing of the library due to the Boston Marathon tragedy prompted that event to be postponed until the fall.) The aim of DPLA is to provide a large-scale, national public digital library of America's archives, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions in one portal. Leaders from 42 of America's institutions have contributed to the project, from ARTstor to the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Virginia Library. The idea of a national digital library harks to the early 1990s and the desire to provide a portal to make cultural and scientific information available to all. It was conceived as a non-commercial alternative to Google's proposed digital library or an American equivalent to the European Union's Europeana digital library. 

Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters.

From the release number, you can probably guess that it is based on Ubuntu Desktop 13.04. But what you cannot guess from the name or release number is that it ships with its own desktop environment called HY-D-V1. It also makes it super easy to test-drive other desktop environments from the same installation, without ever rebooting the computer or logging out of the current desktop.

Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz covers the FTC's special investigation of Patent Assertion Entities with legal analysis provided by PJ on Groklaw.net.

It is time to test the third sibling in the Ubuntu family, the one named Kubuntu. So far, we've had Ubuntu, which was somewhat bland. Then we also had Xubuntu, which worked like a charm, except for a kernel oops thingie affecting the entire range, a silly thing to coincide with the official release. The KDE version is next.

However, unlike all other tests this spring, I will do something rather unusual. I am going to attempt to upgrade Kubuntu, in-vivo, from Quetzal to Ringtail, using the package manager's internal functionality. True, this kind of review will skip a lot of what I usually demonstrate in the live session and during the installation, but it will expose many other interesting little bits. In general, I always advocated against doing these upgrades, because they were buggy and often ended in a fiasco. What now, you wonder.

Some forks do better than others. In the case of the Madriva fork known as Mageia, it's doing quite well, this week releasing its third major update in less than three years.

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that. Or, what if, like Jake Epping in Stephen King's 11/22/63, you could make changes and script the past without fear, play around with some new Drupal modules, and quickly reset everything just by leaving and then walking back down the stairs of the pantry again?

Jolla Ltd. opened pre-order voucher sales for the first smartphone to run its Sailfish OS, an open source distribution based on the Linux MeeGo project. The dual-core, 4.5-inch Jolla phone features a gesture UI, Android app compatibility, and interchangeable “Other Half” back covers that switch user profiles.

Vim is one of the popular text editors of Linux. Because of its capabilities, there is a large fan base of this command line based text editor. In this article, we will discuss some impressive features of vim editor that can help you save a lot of time while working on vim.

Slackel Live 3.1 Openbox has been released. Includes the live kernel 3.8.8 and lots of updates from Slackware's 'Current' tree. Slackel Live 3.1 Openbox includes the Midori 0.4.9 web browser, Claws-Mail 3.8.1, Transmission, SpaceFM, OpenJRE 7u9, Rhino, IcedTea-Web, Pidgin, gFTP, wicd. AbiWord, Gnumeric and ePDFviewer office applications are included. Whaaw! Media Player is the default movie player, Exaile 3.3.0 is the application to use for managing your music collection, Asunder CD ripper, Bracero for writing CD/DVDs and more. In the graphics section Viewnior 1.3, GIMP 2.8.4 and Scrot the snapshot utility. It is very easy to put Slackel Live 3.1 Openbox in a USB thumb drive.

QuickLogic has released Android 4.1.2 support for its custom Parallel Camera Interface (CAM I/F) chip for TI’s Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 SOC (system-on-chip). The new support, which comes in addition to earlier Linux support, adds Android compatibility to the BeagleBone’s 3.1-megapixel Camera Cape.

With Linux, it is easy to customize many settings and features including appearance. Unity (one of many desktop interfaces) is no exception. Unity is the desktop interface that is maintained and developed by Canonical. Canonical uses Unity as the default interface for their popular operating system - Ubuntu. Users can easily change the theme, cursor, icons, and fonts used in Unity.

We mean, what’s really advanced about an advanced distro? Firefox and Chrome are the same, whether you’re in Linux or Windows, as is Thunderbird–and even grandma can usually make the jump from from Word to LibreOffice with little to no difficulty. When you get right down to it, the “advanced” part of a “not user-friendly” Linux usually has to do with either installation or configuration, and when did grandma ever do either? If your grandma’s like ours, she calls you up to get you to come over even to do a simple little configuration trick with her Windows machine.

What I typically look for in desktop distributions are a good graphical installation, a sane and sensible default desktop configuration that just work, and all the graphical tools that will make managing the desktop easy for all users, especially those not familiar or not willing to use the command-line.

Does this first release of Antergos meet those criteria? Read on to find out.

It's been a while since last running any Ubuntu Linux disk encryption benchmarks, but thanks to recent encryption improvements within the upstream Linux ecosystem, it's time to deliver some new Linux disk encryption benchmarks. In this article are results comparing Ubuntu 13.04 without any form of disk encryption to using the home directory encryption feature (eCryptfs-based) and full-disk encryption (using LUKS with an encrypted LVM).

Mageia 3 has finally been released after a two week delay, fixing the installation bugs of the release candidate, and bringing with it updates and refinements over Mageia 2

Hotline Miami a game we have said is coming to Linux now has in Beta form! Hotline Miami is a high-octane action game overflowing with raw brutality, hard-boiled gunplay and skull crushing close combat.

Yahoo is buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. So let's get this straight: On one side of the table we have a big, aging Internet media company that needs to boost profits. On the other side of the table we have a blogging platform that has generate tiny revenues -- and no profits. So how exactly will Tumblr boost Yahoo's fortunes?

Joshua Kiepert, a PhD candidate from Boise University, has built an awesome 32-way cluster from Raspberry Pis. Although clusters from Pi's have been made before, and even much larger, this is still a seriously cool project.

The law of software patents took an interesting, and ultimately encouraging, turn a little more than a week ago. In the CLS Bank case, ten judges of the Federal Circuit issued five separate opinions, without any single legal theory gaining a majority. Their debate showed that the scope of the subject matter requirement for patenting software is far from settled. It also makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will speak to the issue, and get it right.

reposync is used to download an entire remote yum repository or a set of remote repositories. It will also synchronize changes in a repository with a local directory.

The Jolla smartphone was demonstrated today in an online announcement. Jolla runs on the linux-based Sailfish OS.

I'm not a fan of Tumblr, but I am a fan of freedom and WordPress, both of which are apparently now 'winning' as a side effect of this deal. While it's still unclear precisely how Yahoo's ownership may/may not affect Tumblr, users are already voting with their blogs.