We are preparing Kubuntu Vivid Vervet (15.04) for distribution on April 23rd, 2015. With this Beta 1 pre-release, you can see what we are trying out in preparation for our next (stable) version. We have some interesting things happening, so read on for highlights and information.

Hello, open gaming fans! In this week's edition, we take a look at Steam's 125M active accounts and the Game Developers Conference, an open source augmented reality headset, Linux games, and more.

Canonical published its Ubuntu Porting Guide just a week ago and it will help developers bring the operating system to other devices than just Nexus 4 and BQ's Aquaris, but it looks like an Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus One porting project was started well before that.

I created Puppy Linux back in 2003, but there was never a toolchain for compiling Puppy completely from source. Instead, Puppy is built from binary packages of another distro, plus PET packages compiled natively. We did use the T2 system right back at Puppy v2. In early 2015, I tackled the formidable task of compiling everything in T2, and I had to introduce 105 new packages into T2. It took a couple of months, but I eventually was able to compile every package required for Quirky.

It seems a recent trademark request from 'The Khronos Group Inc.' includes a new API named ‘VULKAN’.

Learn how to configure a cluster of Raspberry Pis to handle parallel programming

After two years of hard work, the Xfce development team had the pleasure of announcing a few minutes ago, February 28, the immediate and general availability of the highly anticipated Xfce 4.12 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

Monohm unveiled a disk-shaped “Runcible” smartphone running Firefox OS. The camera-equipped device is notable for its chilled-out UI and modular construction. The Runcible will launch in the second half of the year through Japanese carrier KDDI, which has invested in Berkeley, Calif. startup Monohm, Inc. The company name combines the Japanese word “mono” or “object,” […]

We are happy to announce the release of final version 2.9 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of changes which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.

Tails, the secure live-boot Linux made famous by Edward Snowden, has had a major revision release to Version 1.3. The new version, released after testing since February 12, combines various security fixes with new apps and simplified install, the developers say.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Docker and the Oceanic Society, Linux kernel version 4.0, a mini-farm, and more!

Was that former Linux Outlaw Dan Lynch on FLOSS Weekly 326 earlier this week? It most certainly was. Dan joins regular host Randall Schwartz in talking about the Open Source Initiative with Simon Phipps and Patrick Masson in this particular episode, which is well worth a watch. It’s always great to see Randall on his show, and it’s great that he has such fantastic “guest help” from time to time.

The Ubuntu Kylin 15.04 Beta 1 (Vivid Vervet) operating system has also been released alongside the Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, and Ubuntu MATE distributions, bringing a wide range of improvements, numerous updated components, as well as the usual bug fixes. We took the distribution for a test drive and created a nice screenshot tour for all users of the Chinese Ubuntu community.

Welcome to the Opensource.com Weekly Top 5! Do you want to know how the magic happens? It's not rocket science of course, but I thought you might like to know how I make the Weekly Top 5 video and article for you every week. read more

In today's open source roundup: Get the latest version of VLC. Plus: Ubuntu MATE is now an official spin, and developers don't care if Linus is nice.

Google has open-sourced something called “gRPC” that it says represents “a brand new framework for handling remote procedure calls” using HTTP/2. The Chocolate Factory says it has dogfooded gRPC on its own microservices and that it “enables easy creation of highly performant, scalable APIs and microservices” and offers “bandwidth and CPU efficient, low latency way to create massively distributed systems that span data centers, as well as power mobile apps, real-time communications, IoT devices and APIs.”

This month, the GIMP lost its User eXperience (UX) maintainer.

GE unveiled a rugged COM Express Type 10 Mini module that runs Linux on a 2GHz Tegra K1 and offers soldered 2GB RAM and support for CUDA and VisionWorks. GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, a division of GE Energy Management headquartered in Charlottesville, Va., is primarily focused on the military/aerospace segment. The 84 x 55mm mCOM10K1 computer-on-module, which conforms to the COM Express Type 10 “Mini” form factor, is designed in part for SWaP-constrained mil/aero applications like image and video processing, sensor processing and electronic warfare. However, it also has broader applications in industrial Internet and Internet of Things applications, says GE. These are said to include industrial process automation, automotive and transportation, and medical imaging.

Writebox is a simple text editor that provides almost no features. Despite this, it's one of the simplest and most trustworthy WYSIWYG text editors around if you just want something simple for writing.

Vine Linux 6.3 (Malartic-Lagraviere). Vine Linux 6.3 has following features (highlights): update the software collection; update Linux kernel to 3.4.106 (latest LTS kernel 3.4.y); bundle newer software - Firefox 33.0, Thunderbird 24.0, Sylpheed 3.4.2, LibreOffice 4.3.5, OpenSSL 1.0.1; stability improvement; improvements of look and feel; newer hardware support; new user-friendly tools. Since this is not a commercial version (Vine Linux CR), non-free applications and fonts are not included on the CD/DVD. Instead of proprietary ATOX X/Wnn7/Wnn8/VJE Japanese inputs and Ricoh/Dynacomware fonts, this FTP edition contains Anthy and free TrueType fonts.

Red Hat's OpenShift Commons invites open-source programmers and users to work on its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service cloud.

Juniper and Canonical have partnered on Contrail Cloud Platform, an OpenStack-based SDN and NFV solution for carriers that is based on open standards, according to the companies.

The cheapest and simplest Raspberry Pi robot you're going to find on the market. Is it a perfect entry-level kit?

Can a Linux company and a networking power join forces to make an open-source cloud and software defined network that's good enough for telecommunications data-centers? Canonical and Juniper think so.

Midokura open-sourced MidoNet in November 2014, in a bid to make it more accessible and encourage broader developer participation. In the three months since then, Midokura's development process for MidoNet has evolved somewhat.

Magicka is a very popular action/adventure game that is set to have a sequel soon, and the likelihood of Magicka 2 coming to Linux just went up.

The release this week of Docker's Machine, Swarm and Compose orchestration tools will help protect against vendor lock-in on the open source containerization platform, Docker says.

GNOME 3.16 promises to be one of the best releases made so far and numerous changes have been already announced. The new notification system is one of them and it's definitely something to look forward to.

Vagrant is an highly efficient tool for managing virtual machines via CLI. This increases your and your team's productivity and flexibility. This tutorial will cover the installation of Vagrant on Ubuntu 14.10, explain the basics of this great virtualisation tool and will guide you trough the creation of your first Vagrant instance.

KaOS is very proud to announce the availability of the February release of a new stable ISO image. This release brings the end of KDE 4 as the default Desktop Environment for KaOS. Almost ten months ago work started to fully migrate to Frameworks 5, Plasma 5-based distribution and with the release of Plasma 5.2.1 this migration is now deemed ready to bring a better user experience then KDE 4. From the unset of this migration there was never a plan to mix the two environments. What you will see on this ISO is a pure Plasma 5-based environment. As many might have noted KDE Applications 14.12 did not contain more then a handful of Plasma 5 applications. Just about all applications that users have become used to seeing in a KDE 4 version are available as a Plasma 5 port. A few are not ready yet, and those will be missing from the KaOS repositories until their ports are ready for daily use.