Open source news for your reading pleasure. December 9-13, 2013 We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found:

It came from space, and ate our brains is a top down shooter with horde survival gameplay. The brain slurping aliens are only vulnerable to bullets.

WordPress has been released version 3.8 “Parker” named in honor of Charlie Parker, bebop innovator. The company claims it features a modern new design and most beautiful update yet. Here's what’s new in WordPress 3.8.

Version 1.15 of the eBook reader and management software Calibre has been announced on December 13, introducing a major feature called Book Editor.

ECMA International has formed a technical committee to work on a standard specification for the Dart web programming language that's developed by Google as an alternative to JavaScript...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the masses, the Community Enterprise Operating System has been upgraded with some of the newest features from RHEL

CompuLab unveiled two Linux-friendly, x86 based surveillance oriented mini-PCs: the Fit-CCTV supports 16 analog cameras, and the Fit-PoE supports four PoE-fueled IP cameras. In September, CompuLab announced the first four customized versions of its x86-based, 16 x 19 x 4cm Fit-PC and more powerful Intense PC mini-PCs. The fanless computers, which support 40 to 70°C […]

Canonical announced a couple of days ago, December 11, that the recently released Mozilla Thunderbird 24.2.0 email client landed in the Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

I never realized how much I rely on open source and public libraries until I started homeschooling last year. When I started to write for Opensource.com, my son was in school. He's nearly eight years old, but he's already been in both public and private schools and in both special needs and gifted programs. I've thus been on both sides of the educational spectrum. As a librarian, former teacher, and homeschooling mother, I am familiar with what formal schools can offer and what homeschooling and open source resourcces (programs, tools, etc.) can offer. Homeschooling is increasingly popular due to the differences between what schools can provide and what open source can offer homeschoolers. Even in China, bright children like my son are increasingly being educated at home or having their public or private education supplemented at home. Parental dissatisfaction with a school's environment is now the prime reason given in a recent survey by the US Department of Education for homeschooling, but dissatisfaction with the curricula and academic instruction still ranks high. 

YotaPhone is an Android smartphone, running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. But it’s different from other smartphones (Android and otherwise) in that it comes with a dual screen (it’s a double-display smartphone). On the front is a 4.3-inch, HD LCD display and on the back is an e-ink display that’s also 4.3 inches.

The GNOME developers have announced earlier today, December 11, the immediate availability for download and testing of the GNOME Photos 3.11.3 photo viewer application for the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 12, that the fifth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

Avalue’s 3.5-inch ECM-KA board expands upon the AMD G-Series SoC with Linux support, up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, plus CF, SATA, and Mini-PCIe expansion.

The only aim in Rust is to survive. To do this you will need to overcome struggles such as hunger, thirst and cold. Build a fire. Build a shelter. Kill animals for meat. Protect yourself from other players. Create alliances with other players and together form a town. Whatever it takes to survive.

An interview with journalist Mike Saunders, of the recently-funded Linux Voice magazine, about his love of Xfce, Amigas, and SNES simulators.

Analysis Microsoft is caught in a monkey-trap, created by cloud computing and Free Software, coupled with short-term thinking and a dose of not-invented-here syndrome.

You know how monkey-traps work? You make a small hole in a coconut shell, put some bait in it and tie it to something. The monkey comes along, reaches in for the bait and grabs a handful. But when it tries to retrieve its prize, it can't: its fist won't fit through the hole. The monkey is trapped by its own greed. Under pressure, the animal isn't able to choose between escape and letting go of the goodies; you just walk up and whack it over the head.

That's the situation Microsoft is in right now with its virtualisation strategy.

Ever since Apple kicked off the mobile platform wars, the courts have been clogged with disputes. And the regulators aren't happy about that.

OK, chances are you're not going to have a Steam Machine, but SteamOS will be here for anyone with the right hardware soon. Here's what it looks like you're going to need to run it. ?

For the record, when we first started out we did contact Microsoft and told them what we wanted to accomplish. On our third attempt to contact them, we did receive a response. They offered us Windows XP SP1 at 50 dollars a license.

Microsoft has to evolve beyond the Windows 95 Start button and develop a coherent OS strategy. While Windows 8 as currently designed might not be the best or only answer, the idea of presenting one view across three screens is definitely the vision they should be pursuing --and they have to drag their whining users kicking and screaming with them into the future.

Today in Open Source: SteamOS will be released for download December 13. Plus: Steam Machines ship to beta testers, and photos from the Steam Machine production line

Molecular dynamics computations make up a very large proportion of the computer cycles being used in science today. For those of you who remember chemistry and or thermodynamics, you should recall that all of the calculations you made were based on treating the material in question as a homogeneous mass where each part of the mass simply has the average value of the relevant properties. Under average conditions, this tends be adequate most times. But, more and more scientists were running into conditions that would be on the fringes of where they could apply those types of generalizations.

Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 0.22, is out. All users must upgrade as soon as possible - this release fixes numerous security issues. Notable user-visible changes include: Upgrade to Iceweasel 24.2.0esr that fixes a few serious security issues; stop migrating persistence configuration and access rights - instead, disable all persistence configuration files if the mountpoint has wrong access rights; upgrade to NSS 3.15.3 that fixes a few serious security issues affecting the browser; switch to Iceweasel 24.2.0esr and Torbutton 1.6.5; incremental upgrades are ready for beta-testing.

So you have a great business idea for a wonderful IT product or service, and you want to build your high tech startup around it. Having the idea is a great start, but you will have to build an IT solution/service to get your business off the ground; be it a website, software solution, social network, or mobile app. Which programming language to choose to write these IT products is always the question to get the startup going on a reasonable budget. The truth is, you can write a great product in any language, if you know what you are doing. And when users are looking at a great product they really don’t know which language was used to create it, or how much code it took, nor do they care. But when it comes to time and budgets, there are unique situations, like getting a startup off the ground, where the choice of a programming language can make a difference between success or failure.

Most Linux desktop environments have its own GUI that allows users to configure user-specific auto-start programs or services. This tutorial describes how to start a program automatically in various Linux desktop environments.

The Acer C720 was recently released as the latest Google Chromebook selling for just $199 USD. I have been running the Acer C720 Chromebook recently but not with Chrome OS and instead Ubuntu 13.10 Linux. This Chromebook with a Haswell-based dual-core Celeron CPU runs Ubuntu Linux rather nicely. Here are the first thorough benchmarks from this low-cost laptop.

After a protracted legal battle, the Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of the open source Koha integrated library system, has succeeded in preventing an American defence contractor from poaching its trademark.

The Fedora project held a go/no-go meeting today and the decision was reached to go ahead with the release of F20 based on release candidate RC1.x. The mirrors are scheduled to open next Tuesday Dec 17.

It was announced today by Robert Ancell at Canonical that right now they're running on a heavily-patched version of GNOME 3.6 and that they're not looking forward to upgrading the gnome-control-center version since it would involve a lot of work. Right now Canonical carries 61 patches atop the gnome-control-center and they are uninterested in upgrading the patches against the latest GNOME software code.

On Thursday, a Korean court ruled that Apple did not violate three Samsung patents related to messaging services.

The Seoul Central District Court rejected Samsung’s request that Apple should pay 100 million won ($95,000) in damages, as well as a ban on sales of older iPhones and iPads. According to the AFP, the court noted that two of three patents in dispute are invalid because they can be easily developed using technologies that already exist.