From the fourth to the sixth of July, the Calligra team got together in sunny Deventer (Netherlands) for the yearly developer sprint at the same location as the last Krita sprint. Apart from seeing the sights and having our group photo in front of one of the main attractions of this quaint old Dutch town in the province of Overijssel, namely the cheese shop (and much cheese was taken home by the Calligra hackers, as well as stroopwafels from the Saturday market) we spent our time planning the future of Calligra and doing some healthy hacking and bug fixing!

LXer Feature: 27-Jul-2014

In the Roundup this week we have part 2 of 10 Raspberry Pi upgrades, a review of the best Linux browsers of which Pale Moon is my favorite, an "average guy's" review of living witrh Debian for two years and a whole lot more. Enjoy!

The concept of cryptocurrencies has come about in recent years as a sort of reaction to the way standard currencies are controlled. Cryptocurrenices such as Bitcoin are decentralised and not controlled by any one entity. In the past couple of years, Bitcoin has taken off to become a very valuable commodity, with whole Bitcoins becoming worth hundreds of pounds. While you can trade your standard currency for a Bitcoin, you can also mine them with a working computer.

GOG.com, formerly known as Good Old Games, is a popular digital gaming platform for distribution successful, mainly older, classic PC games. In 2012, the Linux community asked for the Linux games on the GOGs wishlist. Today, 2 years later, the waiting has finally come to an end - 50 games has been released for Linux.

We are fanatic supporters of privacy. Not so much because we have super secrets to hide, but because we consider privacy as a basic human right. So we believe that anytime anyone chooses to exercise that right on the net, then they should have unencumbered access to all the necessary tools and services.

Our render farm is all open source and is quite substantial. We have roughly 1000 Linux nodes between the two facilities and the majority of our artists run on Linux as well, though we have a few Mac boxes for Photoshop and other packages that can’t run on Linux.

Fine-tuning the software settings of smartphones and desktop computers to unlock the hidden potential of the devices will deliver faster performance.

While one can never have certainty in alternate-reality scenarios, it's safe to say that Apple benefited greatly from Microsoft in a time when the company needed help. Decades later, by refining the mobile experience Apple has done a great deal to provide headwinds to Microsoft.

Deepin, which interestingly enough comes from China, describes itself as “distribution that aims to provide an elegant, user-friendly, and stable operating system.” It includes not just the “best the open source world has to offer”, but also ships its own desktop environment, called DDE or Deepin Desktop Environment, based on HTML5 technologies.

GUADEC 2014 is taking place in Strasbourg. Because GNOME has been the default desktop environment in Fedora from the very beginning, and is going to be the environment for Fedora […]

Darkwood is an interesting take on the horror and survival genre with a top down perspective and a really dark setting.

Unlike Windows or Mac OS X, Linux offers a wide variety of desktop environments. Here are my picks of the most important of these PC interfaces.

Back in March, the digital games distribution site GOG.com (which, believe it or not, is owned by Poland's CD Projekt RED) announced it would be adding support for Linux. This week, ahead of schedule, 50 games were released on the site with support for Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Most of the games on the list were already released with Linux support, but a few notables are out on Linux for the first time.

Since Google Reader was discontinued a few months ago, uers have been looking for a replacement. While some people have turned to commercial services such as Digg Reader and Feedly, the best solution is to create your own, customisable feed reader hosted entirely on your own computer or home server.

The aptly titled the Car Hacker's Handbook 2014 opens with, “Congratulations! You just purchased your first real Owners manual.” It continues, “This manual doesn't focus on what all those dashboard lights are, but on how to control them.” If you read all the way through, and understand its content, “it will detail how to perform a full security evaluation of your vehicle.” In other words, hack it.

Toulouse, France's fourth largest city, has saved 1 million euro by migrating all its desktops to LibreOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools. "Free software and open source in general is now an established part of the city’s comprehensive digital policy,....."

Since at least the Maya 13 release we’ve had fits with the Nvidia driver and fonts in KDE. Sure the recommended driver installs fine, but upon the mandatory reboot, all is not well in Linuxland. While the actual desktop and the bottom panel display properly, anything that has anything to do with fonts is wonky. They are huge.

Recently I had the opportunity to watch a soccer game (football to the majority of the world). This game was one of the most amazing displays of team effort I’ve ever had the privilege of watching. (Here’s an obligatory link if you don’t know to which game I refer). Almost every score was predicated with a series of passes and touches by various players. There was a level of unselfish play and team spirit I don’t often see when observing professional sports. read more

Cornell University’s “Gemini” AUV will compete in next week’s 2014 RoboSub competition. The sub runs Debian Linux on an Intel Core-based computer-on-module. The Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (CUAUV) team’s Gemini AUV will enter next week’s 17th Annual International RoboSub competition with the help of Adlink, whose “Express-HL” COM Express style computer-on-module will power the […]

Denon debuted a line of Sonos-like wireless multi-room HiFi speakers that stream audio from both Internet and local sources, and run on embedded Linux. Like the similarly Linux-powered devices available from Sonos, Denon’s “Heos” wireless streaming speakers offer multi-room (multi-speaker) synchronized audio, and can deliver multiple audio streams from disparate sources to individual speakers or stereo-configured speaker pairs distributed around the home.

I sometimes use a QR code to give to people so they can scan quickly to enter a long wireless key into their phone without having to type out the […]

KDE has released the third beta of the 4.14 versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Your assistance is requested!

Zettaset will soon offer individual components of its Orchestrator security and management software for Hadoop and NoSQL Big Data platforms as standalone applications, starting with the data-encryption module.

Feral Interactive are little devils as they sent out a link earlier to a teaser page of new ports for Mac & Linux, but what ones will be on Linux?

Today is July 25 and that can mean only one thing — it’s SysAdmin Day 2014! SysAdmin Day is one day every year when we express gratitude and thanks to […]

A good tool for repairing partition tables and recovering files is TestDisk. TestDisk operates on both the legacy MBR and the newfangled GPT (see Using the New GUID Partition Table in Linux (Goodbye Ancient MBR)) . TestDisk is in most Linux repos, and on SystemRescueCD.

The recently released open source ownCloud 7 Community Edition introduces an innovative way to share files securely between private clouds, as well as interface enhancements and better ways to work with Microsoft Word documents.

When celebrated computer hacker Barnaby Jack died suddenly a year ago at the age of 35, headlines around the world touted the Steve Jobs-style pizazz he brought to cyber-security conferences and his show-stopping stunts such as breaking into ATMs and pacemakers. In hacker circles, he was known as the life of the party.

In today's open source roundup: Canonical releases an update to Ubuntu 14.04. Plus: The NY Times bashes open source for not making enough money, and a review of Deepin 2014.

It was 1 PM last Saturday and Edward Snowden was about to be televised. His audience was the crowd at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference, a group of people no one would ever mistake for attendees at a political convention. Amid the sea of black clothing were many unconventional fashion statements: purple bandanas and balloon pants, and tartan kilts, and white robes, and green hair.