If, like me, you've jumped onto the Plex bandwagon with both feet, you've probably discovered how difficult it is to make a standalone Plex player. Sure, you can install an entire OS, then auto-start the Plex program in full screen, but it's not as simple as installing the XBMC distro, or even OpenELEC. If you own a Raspberry Pi, that has all changed.

A car with do-it-yourself (DIY) interior parts that can be made using 3D printers will be a bestseller for the obvious reasons. And it could be coming to a car dealership near you in the not-so distant future.

Want to carry around a multi-booting hard drive you can connect to any computer? Then this quick tutorial may just be for you

Cross-platform development has several cons; poor platform integration, inflexible design, etc. On the other hand, we can reach a wider market with more consumers, and can offer uniform look and feel for our app across various platforms. Today, almost all modern mobile platforms provide object-oriented APIs. Thus there is no reason not to build multi-platform apps. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the basics of cross-platform development.

On Monday the companies, led by Google and Microsoft, presented a plan to regulate online spying and urged the United States to lead a worldwide effort to restrict it. They accompanied it with an open letter, in the form of full-page ads in national newspapers, including The New York Times, and a website detailing their concerns.

To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something... That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

I work for a private ISV and consultancy company focused on delivering software products for financial institutions. Three years ago my company decided to share our achievements and knowledge by publishing our application, FinTP, for processing financial transactions under an open source license. Here, I will explore the changes a company has to undertake when embarking on the transition from a traditional business model to a business model that supports open source. This is based on nine years of experience with a once commercially-available solution. The motivation for a transition like this comes from our company's ambition to be in a position of leadership in this changing and challenging industry.

Project Neon, the daily builds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 2 for Kubuntu, has started releasing ISO images for testing. These are very early previews of the next generation of KDE Software. It is strongly recommended not be installed on a production machine but can be tested as live images or installed into a VirtualBox or other VM. Crashes and bugs are virtually guaranteed. The only supported upgrade path is to install a later ISO image. More information on Rohan's blog. Project Neon introduction on the Dot. Experimental. Not for use in production environments. Dot Categories: Infrastructure

The life cycle of processes in Linux is quite similar to that of humans. Processes are born, carry out tasks, go to sleep and finally die (or get killed)

Sam Beck is the guy behind Blueshift, an open source sustainable eletronics business that is all about building cool stuff. Helium speakers are the company's first product to market and will be the world's the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers. Not to mention the design files are open source. In this interview, Sam shares with me his unique business mindset and why he's not afraid anyone will steal his thunder, even while they might have access to his design. If we build stuff that's cool enough, we'll find a way to make money. Sam grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and went to college at Columbia University in New York City where he studied physics and art. He got his start with open source eletronics when he moved to Portland in 2008 and began building a bike stereo system that ran off of a dynamo hub (a bicycle part that generates electricity) and used capacitors as backup power. It was a few years later that Sam realized he could use supercapacitors as a primary power source. out the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers in this interview.

his is my vim configuration to work with Git + Puppet manifests, mostly it’s based on some good articles about this that I found online:

Using vim and Debian to do puppet development Puppet editing like a pro Using Vim to edit Puppet code Using this repository you’ll enable the following plugins:

pathogen Makes it super easy to install plugins and runtime files in their own private directories. snipmate.vim snipMate.vim aims to be an unobtrusive, concise vim script that implements some of TextMate’s snippets features in Vim. syntastic Syntastic is a syntax checking plugin that runs files through external syntax checkers and displays any resulting errors to the user. This can be done on demand, or automatically as files are saved. If syntax errors are detected, the user is notified and is happy because they didn’t have to compile their code or execute their script to find them. tabular Sometimes, it’s useful to line up text. Naturally, it’s nicer to have the computer do this for you, since aligning things by hand quickly becomes unpleasant. vim-puppet Make vim more Puppet friendly! vim-fugitive Provides an amazingly deep Git integration for vim.

Which gadget from our holiday gift guide is your favorite? Raspberry Pi LulzBot TAZ 2 3D Printer Ouya Game Console SparkFun's Learn to Solder "Simon Says" Kit FLORA Wearable Tech Arduino BeagleBone Black Board littleBits Electronic Kits HexBright Flashlight In November, we gave you the ultimate open source gift guide for the holidays just in time to start preparing and brainstorming for a great gift for the tech and open source enthusiasts in your life.

If you have an older PC lying around with Windows XP (or even Windows 98) on it then replace it with antiX and you will make your computer more secure and perform better.

The PCLinuxOS team is happy to announce the availability of PCLinuxOS 2013.12, quarterly maintenance release ISO images. All PCLinuxOS ISOs for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems have been updated with the latest software updates and bug fixes from the software repository. The Linux kernel was updated to the stable release 3.4.70. The KDE on Full Monty, Standard and MiniMe editions was updated to version 4.11.3. The Mate ISO image got an updated theme from Linuzoid and reworked default desktop layout.

There's several things for Phoronix readers to keep in mind this holiday season.

An early patch-set has been sent out by Rob Clark as he prepares the "MSM" DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel. This open-source DRM graphics driver will support at least two new boards in the next kernel development cycle.

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks showing that with the very latest open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code, the AMD APU Gallium3D performance can be ~80%+ the speed of Catalyst, the notorious Linux binary graphics driver.

While it isn't in the form of any complete documentation, a NVIDIA engineer has begun answering questions by the open-source Nouveau driver developers about video decoding with their H.264 engine.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 8, that the fourth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

Clement Lefebvre has announced earlier today, December 8, that the Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux Mint 16 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

At the recent GStreamer Conference 2013 there was a presentation on "Taking Gstreamer to the Next Level" and in there some interesting features were brought up.

The KDE Calligra fork of KOffice is eyeing its 2.8 release and with it will come several new features. Calligra 2.8 final is expected in January but out today is the first beta...

Although Fedora 19 and Korora 19 are genetically identical, we admit it's a little unfair to pit these distros against each other. Fedora is more than an OS: it's an ecosystem and caters to a wide spectrum of users. On the other hand, Korora is just one branch of that ecosystem that has been pruned and cultivated to serve one section of Fedora users: the everyday desktop user.

ROSA is announcing a new major release pack for the 'R' series of its distributions - the ROSA Desktop Fresh R2. The 'R' lineup is targeted to the experienced users who care for fresh updated versions of the software and for those with new modern hardware. The R2 release includes all the updates, bug fixes and features added since the R1 release. The ROSA Desktop Fresh R2 is based on the KDE graphical desktop environment. The GNOME and LXDE editions are expected shortly as well.

Protecting email from unauthorized access and inspection is important particularly because the protocols that govern email do not include encryption. Email was not designed with any privacy or security in mind. The consequence of the lack of security is that email can be compromised on the sender's device, on a network, on a server, and on the recipient's device.

Unvanquished is a fast-paced, futuristic FPS with RTS elements, pitting technologically advanced humans against hordes of highly adaptable aliens. The player can choose from either team, providing a fresh gameplay experience on both sides of the conflict.

How to set the default applications on Google's Nexus 7 tablet

Mentor Graphics has updated its Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench and Analyzer embedded development tools with faster performance and improved debugging.

After landing hardware support improvements last week for Coreboot, the open-source BIOS firmware replacement now has another new feature: ACPI power limiting and it's been implemented for Intel Haswell CPUs.

My take on the just out Linux Journal readers choice awards. Ubuntu is dropping in position, Unity is getting chastised, and there is some confusion over hardware and software and other issues.