It all started at the Linux.conf.au Conference, when Nebula developer (and former colleague) Matthew Garrett kicked off a post-keynote Q&A session with Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds by asking about his often-abrasive, super-aggressive tone on official mailing lists.

Until now, we thought the days of the Top Ten on FOSS Force were long gone. However, the systemd brouhaha has awakened the inner Top Ten List that has been sleeping within us for all these years. Today, for one day only, the Top Ten List returns for one last encore — or the last one until the next time something tickles us funny.

Ladies and gentlemen, from the home office in Omaha, Nebraska, here is this week’s Top Ten List — the top ten things Linux users say about systemd.

A Linux-based desk with WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 5-inch touchscreen automatically adjusts between sitting and standing, and tells you when it’s time to move. Talk about good timing: Stir announced its second-generation “Stir Kinetic Desk M1″ smart desk the same week the Annals of Internal Medicine published a report on the health dangers of sitting. […]

Two more games entered Early Access on Steam during the past couple of days: Armello, a combination of card and board games with role-playing elements, and Perfect Golf, a realistic golf simulator.

Coming improvements in Chrome OS will enable easily running Linux directly from a USB stick: "Have you ever installed a full desktop Linux system on your Chromebook? It isn’t all the hard, but it is a bit more complex than it should be. New features in the latest version of Chrome OS will make dipping into an alternative operating system easier. For example, you’ll be able to easily boot a full Linux system from a USB drive and use it without any additional hassle!

...the version of Pac Man that was released for the Atari 2600 was horrible. I mean truly, incredibly, mind-blowingly awful. The graphics sucked, the sound was abominable and the entire experience was a let-down of absolutely epic proportions. But a programmer has created a new version of Pac Man for the Atari 2600, and it’s what Pac Man should have been when it was first released all those years ago.

Over 5,000 devices used by gas stations in the U.S. to monitor their fuel tank levels can be manipulated from the Internet by malicious attackers.

In today's open source roundup: Microsoft has some decisions to make about Internet Explorer. Plus: Stream content from your Linux computer to Chromecast, and are Linux graphics apps ready for professional use?

Linus Torvalds is not known to interfere with other projects than the Linux kernel and it must be something really special to get him involved. Well, it looks like the Linux port of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings proved to be interesting enough.

For starters, I thought the proposal — not Red Hat or the Fedora Project — was the product of “first-world thinkers.” Neither Red Hat nor the Fedora Project needs me to explain the length and breadth of their worldwide community and how they fit within the structure of positively promoting FOSS worldwide. Also, to be clear: My commentary appeared after Stephen’s “let-me-explain” blog post, by a matter of minutes incidentally, so there was no cause-and-effect involved on my part.

Every week I bring you the best of what we've published this week. It's always five articles, about five most interesting open source stories from around the globe.

Two open source titans put their rings together and joined forces to announce that Red Hat Enterprise Linux v7.1 beta is now available on the IBM Power Development platform. Last month Red Hat announced that v7.i beta supported IBM Power Systems based on little endian mode.

Paradox Interactive has announced a new DLC for Europa Universalis IV, which will be released in February.

Open-Xchange, which provides on-premise and SaaS, open source software for office productivity, data privacy and communication, has added ExtendASP to its channel partner network.

Atmel and Newark Element 14 have launched a Linux based, Arduino shield-expandable “Xplained” development board for Atmel’s Cortex-A5 based SAMA5D4 SoC.

Surely you've heard of Docker by now. No? This open source containers project has grown enormously in popularity over the past year, leading many of our readers to wonder not just "what is it?" but "is this a good tool for me?" read more

I want to make a rather bold statement here (though that isn't unusual). This morning, I was reading some of my usual tech news sites, which included reports of malware, Windows woes, and the usual litany of issues plaguing various platforms.

The Ubuntu MATE developers have just released the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Alpha 2 Linux distribution, which is now available for download and testing. It's the first one in the new development cycle and it comes with quite a few improvements.

There was a time not long ago when publishing was difficult and expensive. Thanks to services like Lulu.com and Lulujr.com, that's changing. Open source and Creative Commons licensing has also opened the door for teachers and students to inexpensively and easily find a new and authentic audience for their work. read more

With many of the videos from linux.conf.au now available, and a three-day weekend about to hit Australia, there's no excuse not to watch the best talks from last week.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at open data not being so open, Facebook releasing more of its tools as open source, and more! Open source news for your reading pleasure. January 17 to January 23, 2015 read more

Provided that you use KDE, you can push photos from digiKam directly to a mobile device that supports the MTP protocol (e.g., most Android devices) using the KioImportExport Kipi plugin.

Jamroom is powerful. fast and flexible community CMS based on PHP and MySQL. In this article we will show you how to install Jamroom on a CentOS 7 VPS with Apache, MariaDB and PHP.

Kubuntu 15.04 Alpha 2 (Vivid Vervet), a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and the KDE desktop environment, is now available for download and testing. The developers have made quite a few substantial improvements, including to the Plasma desktop.

Docker is all about making it easier to create, deploy, and run applications by using containers. Containers allow a developer to package up an application with all of the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one package.

Redmond says ARM-based OS to get just 'some of the functionality' With all the hoopla coming out of Microsoft's Windows 10 event in Redmond on Wednesday, there was surprisingly little talk of Windows RT, the feature-limited version of Windows 8.x for ARM-based tablets – and perhaps with good reason.…

Mirantis, maker of a major OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, has introduced new OpenStack training courses and a program for showcasing the credentials of those who complete its training.

In this article I explain one way to group data items with AWK arrays. The code is a little mysterious but the results are impressive, especially in my second example!

Robolinux is quite proud and excited to announce its brand new 'Supersonic 3D Speed' GNOME version 7.8.1. A massive amount of time and effort was spent to significantly speed up this new Robolinux GNOME version by creating a more streamlined menu system, removing the Nautilus file manager load time lag to zero seconds, and optimizing many other GNOME core applications. The 32-bit and 64-bit variants are based on the newest rock-solid Debian stable 7.8 kernel and source code. Please note that the Robolinux GNOME FAQ section is being edited as fast as we can to reflect the completely new user interface. We also upgraded Robolinux Xfce and LXDE with the newest Debian upstream 7.8 kernels and security updates.

With the use of Docker containers, Canonical wants Ubuntu Linux to become the operating system for smart devices.