In today's open source roundup: Check out the tiny Meerkat Ubuntu desktop. Plus: The 2015 Linux Jobs Report, and Mozilla releases Unity 5 to game developers.

1999 was a crazy year for business on the Internet, and for Linux. It was when Red Hat went public, with a record valuation, and VA Linux followed with a bigger one. Both were cases in point of the dot-com boom, a speculative bubble inflated by huge expectations of what the Internet would mean for business.

The open-source VirtualBox virtualization project is out with its 4.3.24 update today providing a number of important updates and bug fixes.

You’re on a city block. It's windy, and a light rain is falling. People scamper to and fro, carrying armloads of chalk and tarps. Many are crouched in the street, suffering over their chalk art and cursing the rain. The street extends to the south. A dingy concrete stairwell leads down, beneath street-level. read more

Déjà Dup is a nice graphical wrapper around the command line backup tool duplicity. It hides the complexity of backing up the Right Way (encrypted, off-site, and regular) and uses duplicity as the back end. Déjà Dup does not use cron or similar schedulers. Rather, it starts a program deja-dup-monitor when you log into your session. This keeps track of when you last successfully backed up and will wait until the next scheduled backup.

Linus Torvalds announced that Linux kernel 4.0 RC2 has been released and is now ready for download and testing. It's a couple of days late to the party, but it's here.

The GNOME Music app, the default audio playback software of the controversial GNOME desktop environment, has been updated for GNOME 3.16, due for release in March 25. GNOME Music 3.16 Beta 2 is a bug fix release that addresses a number of issues discovered in the previous Beta version of the software.

Open source and crowdsourcing—uttering these words at a meeting of the United Nations before the year 2010 would have made you persona non grata. In fact, the fastest way to discredit yourself at any humanitarian meeting just five years ago was to suggest the use of open source software and crowdsourcing in disaster response. Then, a tragic earthquake occured in Haiti in 2010, and OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi were deployed in the aftermath.

This is what we have been waiting for, Valve sent out official word about a number of things! These include Source 2, Steam Link and more.

After nearly three years of development Xfce 4.12 was released on February 28, marking the first official major version update since the Xfce 4.10 release.

Ubuntu 15.04 flavors have a first beta version, it is now available to download and install for testing. In this release, There are only available images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu and ubuntu cloud.

It seemed like such a good idea in the early 90s. Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) encryption was brand new and the National Security Agency (NSA) wanted to make sure that they could read "secured" web traffic by foreign nationals.

Over the years I've found that a significant hurdle to getting family and friends to switch to Linux comes from its lack of familiarity. This is especially true when it comes to troubleshooting any issues. Obviously, when a malfunction occurs it's not always possible to be there in person.

Mozilla has issued a hot fix for Firefox that removes the Superfish root certificate from the browser's trusted root store. The patch only removes the certificate if the Superfish software has been removed from the machine already, however.

Welcome to the first installment of a monthly feature where I explore how open source software and the open source way are used in the digital humanities. Every month I will take a look at open source tools you can use in your digital humanities research and some humanities research projects that are using open source tools today.

An email-based attack spotted in Brazil recently employed an unusual but potent technique to spy on a victim’s Web traffic. The technique exploited security flaws in home routers to gain access to the administrator console.

Every time a new release of Fedora becomes available, Fedora user communities around the world gather to share the new release with each other, upgrade their systems, and eat celebratory cake.

Meizu is now showing the MX4 Ubuntu Edition at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it looks like Samsung employees are also looking at what Ubuntu has to offer, not just regular fans.

Big data for the non-Java generation Like Hadoop but it’s just a bit too Javary? There’s now an answer for that: MapReduce for C (MR4C).…

MediaTek unveiled an “MT8173? SoC for Android tablets that mixes 2.4GHz Cortex-A72 and -A53 cores with a PowerVR GPU, and also showed an octa-core -A53 SoC.

Ubuntu MATE has been providing PowerPC support for some time now, but the developers have made some serious improvements to this particular feature in the latest 15.04 Beta 1 update. We already covered the "panel selection" that allows users to change the look and feel of the system with just a single click. It might not seem like much, but not too many Linux devs have this kind of features.

Mozilla’s goal of high quality plugin-free gaming on the Web is taking a giant leap forward today with the release of Unity 5. This new version of the world’s most popular game development tool includes a preview of their amazing WebGL exporter.

The article will guide you through the installation process of the latest versions of Mozila Firefox, Chromium and Opera. Throughout the article you will see the download links and the commands needed to perform the installation of the the browser.

You like car games right? Well the crazy and amazing looking Mad Max has been confirmed for Linux/SteamOS.

Jolla released Sailfish OS 2.0, showed off the first tablet to run the OS, and announced plans with SSH to develop a security-hardened version of Sailfish. Finland-based Jolla had a huge success on Indiegogo last November with it Jolla tablet, the first tablet to run its Android-compatible, Meego Linux based Sailfish OS.

As Congress gears up again to seriously consider patent litigation abuse—starting with the introduction of H.R. 9 (the "Innovation Act") last month—opponents of reform are arguing that recent Supreme Court cases have addressed concerns. Give the decisions time to work their way through the system, they assert. read more

GDC 2015 is a major milestone in a long term collaboration between Mozilla and the world’s biggest game engine makers. We set out to bring high performance games to the Web without plugins, and that goal is now being realized. … Continue reading

In today's open source roundup: Vulkan is the next generation successor to openGL. Plus: Korora 21 reviews, and Worms Clan Wars available on Linux.

Last week, Mozilla released version 36 of the Firefox web browser, and the updated packages are now also available from the Fedora repositories. This new update provides a handful of […]

Here are some of the major announcements from MWC that show that Linux has become an unstoppable force.