Hold onto your swords RPG fans Eschalon: Book III is right around the corner, sort of, it will be in your hands February 2014!

US law on software patents is as chaotic as it's ever been. In May, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which takes all patent appeal cases, agreed to have an important case about software patents, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, heard "en banc" by the full court (10 judges at the time).

That produced one of the most splintered rulings ever to come out of the court. The ten judges hearing the case issued seven different opinions. None of those opinions gained a six-judge majority, so the ruling produced no binding precedent. It also showed how the Federal Circuit was all over the map when it came to software patents.

Wine 1.7.8 has been released as the latest bi-weekly development version of Wine to run your favorite Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems.

KVM, the long a popular x86 Linux virtualization technology, will appear in IBM's Power architecture in 2014.

I installed Arch but considered Manjaro also. The big benefit is a graphical installer:

We're proud and happy to announce the first re-spin of Peppermint Four in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. The downloads are live now via our standard download links and are also available for purchase in both CD and USB format. The re-spins offer a fully updated install as of November 5th, 2013, so you aren't left needing to download hundreds of megabytes of updates immediately after the install. In addition, we changed the desktop notifications back to the way they were in Peppermint Two after several users noted that the way they were implemented in Four seemed to be a bit of a step backward compared to the previous iterations.

Teslagrad is a puzzle platformer with action elements, where magnetism and other electromagnetic powers are the key to go throughout the game, and thereby discover the secrets kept in the long abandoned Tesla Tower.

Delays are very common within the Fedora camp and while the Fedora developers had preemptively moved up the final release after a number of one-week delays already got into the schedule, it was decided yesterday to push back the final release by one week.

You are a God! You are master and ruler of a loyal nation. You have unimaginable powers at your disposal. You have claimed this world as yours. But there are others who stand in your way. You must defeat and destroy these pretenders. Only then can you ascend to godhood and become the new Pantokrator.

The GStreamer Conference 2013 videos and slides are now available online for anyone curious about GStreamer and OpenGL, Linux multimedia enhancements coming, the Opus and Daala free codecs, PulseAudio, and other open-source media topics.

Linus Torvalds has done another Friday release of the latest Linux 3.13 kernel merge window.

How to force your Android phone to restart if it's frozen

While we don't generally review keyboards and other gaming peripherals at Phoronix, occasionally such a product will come along that is worth checking out in close detail. One of these products is the Func KB-460, a new high-end gaming keyboard. The Func KB-460 looks great, but will it work on Linux and be worth the nearly $120 USD price tag?

Linus Torvalds has just announced a few minutes ago, December 6, that the third Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.13 is now available for download and testing.

Neo900.org has begun production of its open source Neo900 phone, an update to the Nokia N900 that can run GTA04 (OpenMoko Debian), Maemo, and other distros. Germany-based Neo900.org was announced in October, as a spinoff from OpenPhoenux, which itself was a spinoff from the splintered OpenMoko open source smartphone project.

As the first X.Org graphics driver past the open-source Intel driver to have mainline support for Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 is GLAMOR.

Today in Open Source: Is Microsoft committed to open source? Linux users don't think so. Plus: Android flashlight app violates user privacy, and have you been pwned?

Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 has shipped, here come the derivatives, with both Oracle and CentOS releasing new versions of their respective Red Hat–alike Linux distros.

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News

3.13-rc2 has been released on November 29th. This release candidate includes several small bug fixes. Please read the 3.13-rc2 release announcement.

The latest iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (6.5) is now available, and it's a serious contender to usurp all other platforms as king of the enterprise space. This particular release was designed specifically to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications. The new release focuses on key enterprise-specific areas, including:

ZaReason's latest incarnation of their Android tablet, the ZaTab ZT2, is a sturdy little chunky monkey.

Version 1.14 of the eBook reader and management software Calibre has been announced on December 6.

That's the headline and question NPR blogger Gene Demby explores in this article. Demby looks at why open source developers tend to be white men, interviewing people who say there are a variety of contributing factors that keep African Americans and Latinos from participating in software development including education, Internet access, pay inequality, and more.

You don't have to be a professional photographer, nor need specialized equipment to create dramatic panoramic pictures. In fact, there are quite a few picture stitch apps (online or offline, desktop or mobile), which can easily create a panoramic view of a scene from two or more overlapping pictures. This tutorial explains how to stitch photos together on Linux, by using panoramic photo stitching software called Hugin.

This tutorial helps you learn the skills required to manage DB2 database servers, instances and databases. Furthermore, you will get introduced to DB2 autonomic computing capabilities and you will learn to use IBM data Studio to perform database administration tasks such as job scheduling and generating diagrams of access plans. This tutorial prepares you for Part 1 of the DB2 10.1 DBA for Linux, UNIX, and Windows certification exam 611.

SteamOS installed on the new Jetpack may be a possibility, allowing for a hidden, mounted Steam Machine behind your TV

Conky, or call it an "Active Wallpaper", is an application that can display dynamic information on what's going on with the computer on our desktop.

Conky is highly configurable in its looks, in what and how it displays, whether text, bar, graph or special iconic fonts and how often and where-about on the screen, in all three dimensions.

Brightest Flashlight Free, available in the Google Play store, has been downloaded over 50 million times, but a complaint from the FTC reveals that the seemingly innocent app transmits “precise location” data to third-party advertisers alongside a unique device identifier.

  These are my reflections on CityCamp Minnesota 2013, which occurred at St. Thomas in Minneapolis on November 9, 2013.  What was it, and what worked well? CityCamp MN 2013, hosted by Open Twin Cities and E-Democracy.org, was an event for civic hackers, open data nerds and advocates, and social justice-minded individuals in the region. Saturday was an open space technology-style unconference event. It was brilliantly planned. While I’ve never been to an unconference before, I was impressed by the way it generally fostered a sense of community, conversation, and connection. This stands in opposition to most conferences I attend (and that is a pretty decent number), which primarily serve to foster a few connections in the hallways between tedious and oftentimes irrelevant-to-me presentations.

Clement Lefebvre has announced a minutes ago, December 6, the immediate availability for download of the OEM installation images of the recently released Linux Mint 16 operating system.