Valve has joined the Linux Foundation, making Steam Machine prototypes looking more and more like serious competition for Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 4, that the third maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

Nowadays we see beautiful design everywhere in our daily life. The digital world is no exception. Many of the websites we visit and the desktop and mobile apps that we use started to be so beautifully designed, that user perceptions on design started to change. As a result, everybody is becoming more design savvy. Users who didn’t care about contrast, button color or responsiveness in the past now critique companies whenever they make a user interface or experience update. Do you remember the user reaction after several Digg re-designs? Why don’t you use GIMP over Photoshop even though as an average user you won’t need most the extras Photoshop has? There are hundreds of other examples where you will see design and user experience having a great impact on product adoption rates and continuity. Open source software always has the advantage of offering a free alternative to mainstream solutions, but it doesn’t guarantee user adoption.

A month or so ago, a PR person sent me a ridiculously misleading (to potentially dishonest) Forbes piece by Ev Ehrlich, former undersecretary of commerce for President Bill Clinton, arguing against net neutrality. The piece was so ridiculous that I asked the PR person whether or not Ehrlich, in his current job as a consultant/think tank person, was working with any broadband providers. The PR person said he didn't know, and I figured I'd just ignore the piece. However, having now listened to a radio debate on KCRW about net neutrality that included Ehrlich making the same basic argument in a discussion with Tim Lee from the Washington Post, Harold Feld from Public Knowledge and Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, it seems worth highlighting just how confused and, well, wrong, Ehrlich is.

While Valve has been tinkering away at SteamOS, and the Steam distribution platform for Linux, Gabe Newell and company have been busy cementing an important relationship. Valve has officially joined The Linux Foundation.

But that's not the most interesting way to use kexec. If you can load arbitrary code into the kernel, you can load anything. Including, say, the Windows kernel. ReactOS provides a bootloader that's able to boot the Windows 2003 kernel, and it shouldn't be too difficult for a sufficiently enterprising individual to work out how to get Windows 8 booting. Things are a little trickier on UEFI - you need to tell the firmware which virtual?physical map to use, and you can only do it once. If Linux has already done that, it's going to be difficult to set up a different map for Windows. Thankfully, there's an easy workaround. Just boot with the "noefi" kernel argument and the kernel will skip UEFI setup, letting you set up your own map.

Why would you want to do this? The most obvious reason is avoiding Secure Boot restrictions

Deepin Terminal is the latest attempt to give the Linux terminal a new face and better features. The other attempt is Final Term. See Final Term: A terminal emulator to rule them all and Finalterm now has tabs, horizontal and vertical split screens.

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance. But, how can big data do more? We see companies and inventors coming out with ideas for improving healthcare, for one, by tracking human biometrics. I think we can take it to the next level and make more wide-scale improvements to our health and our lives.

Oracle Linux 6 Update 5 ships with three sets of kernel packages: Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39 for x86); Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 3 (3.8.13 for x86_64); Red Hat Compatible Kernel (2.6.32 for x86 and x86_64). UEK R3 includes the following major improvements over UEK R2: integrated DTrace support in the UEK R3 kernel and user-space tracing of DTrace-enabled applications; Device mapper support for an external, read-only device.

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.27.0! This release brings the first official release of OpenCS, the OpenMW team's efforts to bring an open source solution for editing content for OpenMorrowind.

While I was looking some video related to Linux I’ve found this video of gotbletu an user that I follow on Youtube, related to a small player to listen music directly from the terminal: pms AKA Poor Man’s Spotify.

I like lightweight clients, and so I’ve gave it a try, these are the results.

Vuzix has begun shipping an Android-based eyewear computer to developers, and is now taking pre-orders from the general public. The $1,000 Vuzix M100 device is equipped with a 1GHz, dual-core processor and a 16:9, WQVGA display, and offers WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, sensors, a five-megapixel camera, and voice and gesture recognition. Vuzix announced the M100 in […]

Best known for its Linux distribution, Red Hat's introduction of OpenShift Enterprise 2 shows that the open-source giant has its eyes on the cloud.

For many years we've been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory -- based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research -- was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What's actually happened are two very bad things.

So the first Steam Machine has been shown off and it looks awesome with some decent specifications to boot.

Since the advent of Project Neon it's been made very easy to try out KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2 for Kubuntu Linux users, however, it's now even easier.

The GNOME developers unveiled the second development release of the upcoming Mutter Wayland 3.12 application, the Wayland port of the original Mutter package, a heavy duty replacement for the Metacity window manager on the GNOME desktop environment.

The Israeli and Saudi Arabian governments are working to create a new, even more destructive variant of the notorious Stuxnet malware, according to local Iranian news outlet Farsnews.

The final beta build ahead of the long-awaited and delayed FreeBSD 10.0 has now been made available.

A new type of malware that is using sound to transmit itself has been developed by scientists and it seems that the Linux systems are the only ones that can be protected against this kind of attacks.

DNF 0.4.9 has been released as the latest version of the open-source Fedora-focused package management solution poised to eventually replace yum for Red Hat package management needs.

Today in Open Source: What to expect from Ubuntu 14.04. Plus: LXLE beta updated, and SuperTuxKart 0.8.1 released

A Rust language front-end is under development for the GNU Compiler Collection. Rust is Mozilla's programming language under development that's similar to C/++ and aims to be a safe, concurrent practical language.

This release upgrades the desktop to Xfce 4.10.2+ and includes the 4.11 versions of xfwm4 and xfce4-session. The Centrych desktop profile gets a customized notification theme, and both desktop profiles now use whiskermenu. The GNOME and KDE services are no longer started by default, which provides additional RAM savings and shortens login time. Also present is the most recent version of LibreOffice, 4.1.3. The current stable release of open-vm-tools is included and has been modified to build properly under all LTS supported kernels - 3.2, 3.5, 3.8, and the soon to be released 3.11.

Red Hat updates the OpenShift Online service every month and releases OpenShift Enterprise three to four times per year, Badani said. One area that differs between the Enterprise and Online editions is the installation of the PaaS. The online service by definition does not require installation, while the on-premises version does require organizations to install the PaaS onto server hardware. As part of the OpenShift Enterprise 2.0 release, there is now a new wizard-driven installer that is available for enterprise users as well as the community OpenShift Origin release.

Through programs like Bullrun and Edgehill, both spy agencies have likely been breaking SSL at will for a long time. But how exactly are they doing it?

Here is the latest instalment of Steam's Hardware Survey, as usual we do our monthly thing and compare it and talk about it and make sure you know not to use it as a hard figure.

The GNOME Project has announced recently that the first development version towards GNOME Terminal 3.12 is available for download and testing. The final release will be part of the upcoming GNOME 3.12 desktop environment.

A man from Wisconsin was sentenced for participating in a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack by hacker group Anonymous on a Kansas company. Rosol, who pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of accessing a protected computer, was sentenced to two years of federal probation and ordered to pay US$183,000 in restitution, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

Among the words that the movie studios cannot use in describing Hotfile's activity: "piracy," "theft" and "stealing." We've been pointing out for many years how the industry has been using these kinds of misleading terms to influence pretty much everyone to their side, even though the terms are not even remotely accurate. Hotfile had reasonably argued that such terms could negatively influence the jury: