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Eleven years ago, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote a blog post and a follow-up listing a number of reasons why “Free Software usability tends to suck”, as well as an update six years later. Have things improved since then? In the absence of actual research, I can only recount my own experiences. I hope I won’t regurgitate too much of MPT’s writing.

Linaro has posted an abundance of videos and slides from its recent conference in Asia. Linaro Connect Asia 2013 (LCA13) took place in Hong Kong during the week of March 4 and covered a wide range of topics of interest to developers using embedded Linux.

The GNOME Project is proud to announce the imminent release of GNOME 3.8 in less than two weeks. As with every release, there are many new features and technical improvements. We asked William Jon McCann, a GNOME designer, about the direction of the project and what he is anticipating for GNOME in the future.

The importation of copyrighted goods made abroad has been an increasingly contentious issue in recent years. Easy access to Internet resale markets like eBay and Amazon have made it possible for a new breed of entrepreneurs to buy low and sell high in a wide array of areas. The Supreme Court handed these resellers a major victory today, issuing a decision [PDF] that makes it clear that the "first sale" doctrine protects resellers, even when they move goods across national boundaries.

Our community is at the heart of how we build Ubuntu. Recently there were some concerns expressed about some aspects of our community and I have been working with various community members and internally at Canonical to resolve some of these issues to make things smoother.

Apart from the architectural differences between them, which I've covered previously, Mir and Wayland also have quite different project goals. Since a number of people seem to be confused as to what Wayland actually is - and that's not unreasonable, because it's a bit complicated - I'll give a run-down as to what all these various projects are and aim to do, throwing in X11 as a reference point.

At AsiaBSDCon, Eric Faurot (eric@) has announced the release of OpenSMTPD 5.3 which is the first stable and production-ready release of OpenSMTPD.

It will also be shipping with OpenBSD 5.3.

We would like to thank the OpenBSD/OpenSMTPD community for their help in testing the snapshots, reporting bugs, contributing code and packaging for other systems.

Every month, a Steam survey is conducted about the software and hardware being used among the Steam users. In this survey the users of this online gaming platform are being asked about the CPU, the graphics card, the operating system etc. they are using.

The 389 Directory Server is an open source enterprise-class server developed by Redhat Community. In this how-to i am gonna to explain about setup LDAP server on CentOS 6.4.

Embedded board-maker Seco has rounded out a series of three SODIMM-like COMs (computer-on-modules) built to µQseven form-factor specifications. They’re based on three different ARM-powered system-on-chip (SoC) processors, from Nvidia, Freescale, and TI.

Since ISPConfig 3.0.5, it is possible to use multiple PHP versions on one server and select the optimal PHP version for a website. This feature works with PHP-FPM (starting with PHP 5.3) and FastCGI (all PHP 5.x versions). This tutorial shows how to build PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4 as a PHP-FPM and a FastCGI version on a Debian Wheezy server. These PHP versions can be used together with the default PHP (installed through apt) in ISPConfig.

The focus of this article is to select the finest CoffeeScript books which help programmers become proficient coding in this language. The books that we have selected help developers to take full advantage of the power of CoffeeScript. All of the books are available to download for free.

Pawe? Pijanowski has proudly announced a few hours ago, March 19, that his SparkyLinux operating system based on the testing branch of Debian GNU/Linux has now reached version 2.1.

In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical's Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 ("Raring Ringtail") on 25 April.

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known for much different reasons.

SoX is a cross-platform command line audio utility tool. SoX is very handy if you need to do some simple tasks with music or audio files right from the terminal. To be more specific, SoX is usually used for converting and edit audio files; changing audio attributes; adding audio effects and other advanced sound manipulation features.

Big news this week: Apache CloudStack has passed major milestones towards graduation, major progress on bugs against 4.1.0, discussions about integrating the Palo Alto firewall with CloudStack, and getting Eclipse and Maven to play nice for developers. Some interesting posts from members of the Apache CloudStack community as well.

While Android rules mobile market share, when it comes to usage, iOS users tend to be much more active, and as this infographic from Go Go Inflight illustrates, that's true in skies too.

New vulnerabilities were found in the Linux 3.2 and 3.5 kernels, which power the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating systems, and Canonical just issued patches for them.

1:30 PM Microsoft (MSFT) may soon find itself in some significant legal trouble now that federal officials are investigating whether the company allegedly worked with firms that bribed foreign government officials into accepting Microsoft software contracts. Unnamed sources have told The Wall Street Journal that “lawyers from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining kickback allegations made by a former Microsoft representative in China, as well as the company’s relationship with certain resellers and consultants in Romania and Italy.”