Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application. The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It's been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that's not exactly Mozilla's fault.

Big data is one of the most pervasive buzzwords in today's technology world. But it's impossible to deny how deeply data touches all aspects of not just our lives but also business and industry. The amount of data collected about everything is staggering—a typical transatlantic flight generates 30 terabytes of data about the engines alone!

Cisco has picked up a lipstick-gloss in one hand and a pig in the other, by re-launching its developer program to have another shot at attracting third party coders to its platforms. For not the first time, The Borg has hit upon the idea that getting others writing functions and applications for it is a big chunk of its future. It's not even the first time it's called the program the Cisco Developer Network (or DevNet in the parlance of today's announcement).

ProtonMail, as the name suggests, is an email service. The outfit is based in Switzerland and the service offers bumper-to-bumper encryption, is browser-based, does not log IP addresses, and will accept bitcoin and cash payments for paid accounts.

When Microsoft swallowed half of Europe's biggest tech company, it was only a matter of time before it spat something out. And so it has, ending Nokia's thirty-year roller-coaster ride. However, the decision will make tens of million of its customers take a look at Android – surely the last thing Microsoft wanted to happen.

No matter how much I love Plex, there's still nothing that comes close to XBMC for usability when it comes to watching your network media on a television. I've probably written a dozen articles on Plex during the last few years, so you know that's tough for me to admit. Still, no matter how many Plex-enabled devices I might buy (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, phones, tablets, Web browsers), I run XBMC on all my televisions. The interface, when coupled with a back-end MySQL database, is just unbeatable.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Read our Python masterclass for beginners and follow it up with ten projects in Understanding & Implementing Python volume one. Python is one of our favourite programming languages and we’ve covered it a lot over the years in Linux User & Developer. We’ve compiled ten of the best Python projects in the first edition of our digital Developer Manual, available now from our Newsstand app.

The pitfalls of working on closed source projects for contract developers...

A detailed analysis of iOS by a security expert digging into claims of NSA spying on Apple products has revealed some unexplained surveillance tools hidden in the operating system.

In today's open source roundup: A new distro will run Debian and Android. Plus: Android vampire apps, and take the Linux.com open source cloud project survey.

For the last two weeks, Opensource.com has published a series of 18 interviews with speakers at OSCON 2014. Here's the full list.

MPL’s CEC10 industrial PC is a fanless, Linux-ready Atom E3800 model featuring 40°C to 85°C support, five gigabit ports, and numerous expansion modules. Switzerland-based MPL has been in business for 21 years, and has been making Linux-compatible, Intel-based industrial computers for at least eight. The CEC10, which MPL also refers to as the “New Generation […]

Debate is currently raging in the open-source PHP community over what the number will be for the version of PHP that will succeed the current PHP 5.x series.

DigitalOcean is one of the hottest new kids in the block in the cloud VPS hosting market. While not offering as comprehensive service portfolio as Amazon Web Services and the likes, DigitalOcean is already a strong contender for the best Linux-based cloud VPS service targeted at small businesses and developers, thanks to their competitive pricing

Today, Opensource.com unlocks an important achievement: the publication of "What is Open Gaming?", a new resource page. read more

NPD reveals that Chromebook sales are exploding and Microsoft is starting to get worried.

Part two of our list of essential upgrades for the Raspberry Pi

Scott Wilson agrees that open source matters because of open code, but just as important is the process in which the code is made. Open development of code is in the social nature of many programmers, hackers, documentors, and project managers. So, what is it about open development? read more

Lumpy but free - the future is here Programming the Web, Pt. I If you travelled back to 1999 and told web developers that one day hundreds of them would pony up cold hard cash to get a feature in a web browser, none of them would have believed you.…

If you run Debian Wheezy 7 Linux as your main operating system and you wish to try open source real-time strategy and real-time tactics hybrid computer game WarZone 2100 then here is a short guide on how to install this game on your debian system.

Russia’s parliament is preparing new regulations to reduce its reliance on foreign technology suppliers after the U.S. imposed sanctions against some of its largest companies, a move that could hurt sales at vendors such as Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)

How To Install Nginx With PHP And MySQL (LEMP Stack) On CentOS 7 Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 6.5 server with PHP support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL (Mariadb) support.

Google has shown off a candidate for a new Chrome OS user interface. Dubbed “Athena”, the new UI appeared fully grown from the head, and Google+ page, of Googler François Beaufort. Athena “is a brand new project the Chromium OS team is experimenting with in order to bring a new kind of user experience,” Beaufort writes, adding “As you can see below, the first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management.”

A new Linux distribution is looking to overcome the limitations of Debian on ARM, by running both Linux apps and Android apps in native mode. Produced by the group that created the MicroXwin kernel-based X Windows implementation, the VolksPC distribution is designed to give users an ARM-Debian environment that supports Debian's range of desktop applications, while improving support for things like YouTube playback and HD video.

I'm pleased to announce the release of UberStudent 4.0 (LTS) 'Socrates' Xfce edition. UberStudent is a Linux distribution for learning, doing and teaching academic success at the higher education and advanced secondary levels. Much more than just an operating system, UberStudent aims to be a complete, ready-to-go out-of-the-box learning platform for education that facilitates not only immediate user-friendly productivity but cross-platform computer fluency among its users. System: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base; Linux 3.13 kernel; Xfce 4.10; 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images for trying and installing; 32-bit and 64-bit OVA images for trying and running in VirtualBox.

Inotify-tools is based on the linux kernel inotify feature which check and alerts on filesystem changes, In this example you can trigger a script on a change event in your directory

Fans of the typewriter remain a vehement group. They view the typewriter as something really special, a tool which makes the connection between languages. One of the attractions of a typewriter is that it offers a distraction-free alternative of modern day methods for producing a document. They challenge the writer to concentrate on what really matters - the content. They force the writer to think.

An educational robot to teach kids how to build and code – is this the future of classrooms or the start of Skynet?

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2014

We have a lot of good FOSS stuff for you this week including the new Raspberry Pi Model B+, an inordinate amount of Android apps wanting to read your text messages, saving endangered languages, an inside look at Linus Torvalds office, Carla Schroder shows us 6 lightweight distros and Ken Starks explains when "free" can suck. Enjoy!