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We share with you and interview with scientist, professor and author Hans Petter Langtangen about his well known book "A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python". We delve into the story behind the book, future plans and, as always, the importance of free/libre software in science.

Word on the street is that Google is planning to compete with Apple by coming out with its own Siri competitor. Called ‘Assistant’, the upcoming feature will bring a personalized, voice-centered ‘Do-engine’ to Android. Expected to release in fourth quarter of 2012, not much is known about it except from the fact that it will be more adept at finishing certain tasks rather than just searching for them. As we impatiently twiddle our thumbs for any official announcement to pop up from the search giant, we’ve come up with our own wish list for the exciting project. So, without much ado, here are six things we want from Android’s rumored Siri-competitor.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 12.1 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

With today's updates, Canonical updated the Ubuntu One user interface in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

Here's a case to study for everybody who cares about Free Software teaching, open learning and open publishing: the Free Technology Academy (FTA) publishes online with open licenses all its Linux/FOss related courseware. Everybody can download them for free, no questions asked. TradePub gave the links to such downloads ONLY to people who provided personal information, then reused for advertising, profiling and other purposes. What to do? Please support the FTA formal request to stop such practices

Microsoft Windows to Go for Windows 8 is great idea, but instead of saving a desktop image to a USB stick, why not make the connection to the cloud instead? It's such an easy link, it's hard to believe Microsoft missed it.

I am proud to be a member of the Free Software community. I have found it to be a very open, and very tolerant, community that believes deeply in the South African concept of Ubuntu: the allegiance of people to one another. I find the tenets of the Free Software to be in sharp contrast to the uncivil discourse that dominates so much of modern society. Free Software has a lot to teach the world in terms of how we can all live together, and share our world in peace. In late March 2012, a large Free Software conference will take place in Abuja, Nigeria. Windows 8 has been generating a lot of buzz lately. Will Windows 8 drive disgruntled computer users to GNU/Linux? Extreme Tech writer Matthew Murray thinks so. Designer Marco Alici has used Blender to create a case design for the Raspberry Pi. The case can be created with a 3-D printer.

The VAR Guy thinks Linux Netbooks may have fallen into a pool filled with chilly water. The apparent result: Continued market shrinkage. Alas, The VAR Guy doesn’t have official market data to share. But three pieces of circumstantial evidence suggest the Linux Netbook market continues to decline in North America while the Apple iPad and tablets continue to rise. Here’s why.

Akademy—the annual world summit of the KDE Community—will take place from 30 June to 6 July in Tallinn, Estonia. 10 years of Akademy; 15 years of KDE! read more

After six release candidates and over 20 months of hard work, the Wine development team proudly announced a few hours ago, March 7th, the immediate availability for download of the final and stable Wine 1.4 app.

We've got versions 8, 9 and 10 to prove it QCon 2012 With Java 8 still on its way in mid-2013, Oracle is already prepping for Java 9 and 10, and protesting that reports of a Cobolesque slide into irrelevance are much exaggerated.…

The popular Knoppix Live DVD Linux distribution was presented last evening, March 6th, at the CeBIT 2012 event by its German developer, Klaus Knopper.

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The December updates contain many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications using the Nepomuk semantic framework. read more

Here's a video by James Simmons, the community developer that's near single-handedly been working on providing VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) support and in-kernel memory management (via a GEM-ified TTM implementation), talking about the Linux KMS and GEM/TTM infrastructures for those wishing to learn more about Linux graphics driver programming...

Online submission for ‘amazing innovations’ now open at element14

Matthew Dillon, the lead developer behind the DragonFly BSD fork of the open source FreeBSD Unix variant, had some issues with crashes on Opteron-based systems running his operating system for more than a year - and now Advanced Micro Devices says it's a bug in earlier generations of Opteron processors.

The stable release Wine 1.4 is now available.

Within the halls of Microsoft, a cordial but strategic debate is emerging. Some leaders within the company want Microsoft to describe itself as the world’s biggest cloud software provider. Here's why.

The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.4 is now available. This release represents 20 months of development effort and over 16,000 individual changes.

This entry is somewhat mis-titled. What I did with xmodmap wasn't exactly fun. Maybe mildly rewarding, finally. But also a bit perturbing.