Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler says it's time for CIOs to have an "uncomfortable" conversation about open source software.

In today's open source roundup: Google may be preparing to release Drive for Linux. Plus: Q*bert rebooted for Android, and will Blizzard finally support Linux users?

Ubuntu cloud users see OpenStack rising, Docker getting more talk than traction, and companies moving to the hybrid cloud.

Surf the Internet securely with your very own portable WiFi VPN/TOR router. You can configure a Raspberry Pi with Linux and some extra software to connect to a VPN server of your choice. The VPN connection encrypts your internet traffic so that hackers and spies can't figure out what web sites you are visiting, and the web sites you are visiting can't tell which computer you are surfing from.

Having a slow Debian mirror can be frustrating and thus it is always best to choose closest mirror to your geographical location as possible. Even your best guess may not always bring good results. Fortunately netselect-apt command line tool is here to help you find the fastest mirror available.

While some in the security community are chasing GHOSTs this week, there is another update that needs attention. The widely deployed Apache HTTP Server (httpd) is being updated to version 2.4.12 fixing at least four publicly identified CVEs.

The slow adoption and lack of productivity associated with Hadoop and other big data technologies likely stems from poor planning and lack of big data training and expertise, among other factors.

Open Source Careers A collection of articles about jobs and careers in open source. I have been working in the computer business for over 40 years, but the best years have been the last 17 or so working with Linux and open source software. I got into the computer business unintentionally and kind of sideways, but that is a whole other story. I'll tell you about how I got into open source and Linux semi-intentionally and also kind of sideways. read more

Bill Gates is much more involved in philanthropy than Microsoft these days and he's done some great work regarding the eradications of certain diseases and to improve the quality of life in a number of third world countries. He's also inadvertently promoted Ubuntu, which is a Linux system.

The top open-source office suite offers a new, improved version with better Microsoft Office file format compatibility.

Ruth Suehle and a speaker to be named later (more than likely in the next 24 hours) will keynote at SCALE 13x. There are about 130 sessions in the four days, and just over 100 exhibitors.

During every login or bootup, the OS performs a number of tasks in the background to get the OS up and running and ready to be used. Customizations in Linux OS like Ubuntu can be done very easily, that allows a user to add any number of "custom" tasks or programs to the system to be performed or executed every time the user logs in or boots up the OS.

One of the most interesting trends in the computer world during the past few years has been the rapid growth of NoSQL databases. The term may be accurate, in that NoSQL databases don't use SQL in order to store and retrieve data, but that's about where the commonalities end. NoSQL databases range from key-value stores to columnar databases to document databases to graph databases.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from February 9th - February 11th, 2015.

Details about a GLIBC vulnerability were published a couple of days ago by a company called Qualys and the distributions using it have already received patches. Now, it seems that Google knew about this problem, patched it in ChromeOS a year ago, and forgot to say anything to anyone else.

Boot Chess needs just 512 bytes of memory, beating 1982's 1K ZX Chess Developer Olivier Poudade claims he's beaten a 33 year-old record for the smallest working Chess program.…

Cyanogen takes the Android source code and modifies it, adding more features and porting it to other devices. It has also started supplying Android builds directly to OEMs (like the OnePlus One), which ship the software on devices instead of stock Android. Last week during a talk in San Francisco, Cyanogen's CEO said the company's goal was to "take Android away from Google." It wants to replace the Google Play ecosystem with apps of its own, the same way that Amazon uses the Android Open Source Project for its Kindle Fire products but adds its own app and content stores.

The following is a partial transcript from a phone interview with Dan Silivestru, CEO and co-founder of bitHound.io—automated, open source, code quality analysis software. read more

The Document Foundation has just announced that a new major update has been released for LibreOffice and it brings important UI improvements, enough for them to call this the most beautiful version ever.

The Document foundation announced availability of the latest version of LibreOffice on Thursday, which it says is the most beautiful version of the open source productivity suite yet. LibreOffice 4.4 also fixes some compatibility issues with files that are saved in Microsoft's OOXML formats. "LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love," Jan "Kendy" Holesovsky, who leads the design team for Libreoffice, said in a statement.

Adlink unveiled a rugged, Linux-ready “cExpress-BL” COM Express Compact Type 6 module with Intel 5th Gen Core chips and optional -40 to 85?C support. Adlink is the second vendor to announce a product based on Intel’s 14nm-fabricated 5th Generation Core (“Broadwell U”) processors, following Congatec’s Conga-TC97. The cExpress-BL supports the same Core models as the […]

The molecular diagnostics company that had won patents of two human genes that were invalidated by a landmark Supreme Court ruling has decided to abandon separate patent litigation surrounding how scientists study those genes.

If you're reading this piece, you probably already know there's a ghost in the machine of Linux. Specifically, a critical hole in the GNU C Library (glibc). This haunting specter enables remote hackers to gain access to machines without the need for credentials of any kind.

Combine a Raspberry Pi, a Wi-Fi dongle and your speakers with an amplifier to create a wireless stereo system

In this article I will give you an overveiw on the Smartmon tools which is a set of applications that can test hard drives and read their hardware SMART statistics to detect harddisk failures early. I will cover installation, usage on the shell and the smartmon gui in this tutorial.

MEN Micro unveiled the “CC10S,” a Linux-ready i.MX6 based multi-display controller module for touchscreens deployed in harsh, -40 to 85? C environments. Imagine a humongous earth-moving rig prepping an oil shale site in North Dakota in the middle of January. You’re going to want a touchscreen with that, and it better be tough. The MEN […]

In today's open source roundup: The best is yet to come for Valve's Steam Machines. Plus: The Linux Foundation offers Essentials of System Administration course online, and Microsoft offers preview version of Outlook for Android.

This article describes an installation of the Valve Steam Linux client on Debian 8 Jessie 64bit. The article assumes that you have already installed your VGA drives required to run Steam client.

GParted Live is a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution that has a lot of features and that can be used in operations like creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions on a variety of filesystems. A new stable update has been made available and the operating system is now at version 0.21.0.

A column from back in 2010 that outlines some of why Flash sucks. I'm posting it here in honor of YouTube dumping Flash for HTML5. It took a long time, but it finally happened.