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Matthew Garrett has written a new article summarizing the state of UEFI/SecureBoot on Linux. Overall, the situation isn't good if you're using hardware from one of three major vendors.

On Thursday morning, Linus Torvalds merged two changes into the main Linux development tree which mean that the samsung-laptop kernel driver will no longer be activated when Linux is booted via UEFI (1, 2). This should resolve the problem of some Samsung laptops being irreparably damaged when Linux is booted using UEFI. The does not, however, mean that the danger is past, as there appear to be other ways in which the sensitive firmware can be disrupted.

This week we look at cloud detractor's three levels of insanity, whether Chromebooks are ready for the enterprise and if the new open source smartphone operating systems on the way can be viable.

Whether or not desktop 3D printing is the forerunner of the "third industrial revolution," as Jeremy Rifkin and Chris Anderson have suggested, it's definitely one of the hottest tech trends around. Open source DIY hacker engineers, artists, and craft designers have led the surge on the low end while higher-end models are already being used in rapid prototyping and short-run, custom manufacturing.

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use EncFS on Fedora 18 to encrypt your data.

Linux has a problem: it's running out of platforms to conquer. It's already the top operating system for smartphones and supercomputers, and is widely used in embedded and industrial systems. It's true the Year of the GNU/Linux desktop continues to be five years in the future, but the rise of tablets makes up for that in part.

Boosting OpenStack, Rackspace has partnered with AMD, Dell, EMC, HP, Arista Networks, Brocade, Hortonworks, NetApp and CommVault to launch open reference architectures that were designed to make it easier for enterprises to deploy large-scale private clouds.

Any decent Linux distribution comes with an installation option to automatically encrypt user's home directory. In case you do not wish to encrypt the entire home directory or perhaps you wish to encrypt some random directories on your Linux system you can use EncFS the FUSE-based cryptographic filesystem. EncFS will allow you to encrypt and decrypt any directory in a matter of seconds. It will reside on top of your current filesytem and provide access to any EncFS encrypted directory only upon entering a correct predefined password. This short tutorial will show you how to encrypt and decrypt your directories with the EncFS cryptographic filesystem.

Penguins console tearful owners of shiny new bricks Samsung laptops will no longer be irreparably destroyed when their users try to boot Linux on them, kernel chieftain Linus Torvalds made certain today.…

Apple (NADAQ: AAPL) has blocked a Java 7 plugin to protect Mac OS X 10.6 and up users. Alas, Oracle’s (NASDAQ: ORCL) Java software has been plagued by bugs in recent weeks. I wonder: Would the late Steve Jobs have made this move — especially when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison ranked among Jobs’ closes friends? Hmmm…

We've talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public ("promoting the progress of science") it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players -- the RIAA and MPAA -- happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office.

Linux has not received much attention from the major gaming houses, even though it seems a natural fit as a robust gaming platform, so the announcement of the Steam for Linux beta last December generated a lot of interest. A Linux game port can be done in one of two ways. The first way is to use the operating system's own resources and to make allowance for a variety of versions and functinally equivalent applications. The second way is to recreate the norms of another operating system and require specific applications and versions. Despite the client being available as a .DEB package, Valve's Steam beta for Linux generally opts for the second approach, making it less promising than it might have been.

What do 16th century Incas, 18th century shipyards and 21st century professionals have in common? Phil Verghis describes an issue that has plagued civilizations and industries throughout history: inadequate access to lessons already learned. We all understand the importance of sharing knowledge, so why is it difficult for us to implement it into our daily business practice? Dancing E is a startup aimed at

Danish municipalities are increasingly using free and open source software for collaboration and innovation of ICT solutions. More than 10% of the country's municipalities last year joined the newly founded Open Website Community OS2. The group has already delivered a Drupal-based municipal content management system (OS2Web) as well as an application offering paperless meetings (OS2dagsorden).

I suppose it's not shocking or newsworthy (to most people) when an open source project changes its license. Some projects involve a small number of developers, making consensus around such changes easy; some projects have a contributor agreement whereby copyright is assigned to a single entity, averting the need for consensus. However, when an open source project has many contributors and no contributor agreement, then such a switch is indeed attention-grabbing. Why? Because to do so means obtaining the permission for the license change from each contributor—a task that is undoubtedly arduous and tedious, requiring an unswerving attention-to-detail and perseverance. But it can be done, as so proved by the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Kempf in switching VLC from GPLv2 to LGPLv2.1.

The Porteus community is pleased to announce Porteus 2.0 RC2, the latest development release of our Standard and Xfce editions. We've cleaned up several minor bugs that were present in RC1 and have added some new features. Please give this a thorough test so we can continue refining everything for 2.0 final. Here is our changelog from 2.0 RC1: Linux kernel upgraded to 3.7.5; fixed a bug with linuxrc not ejecting CDs in copy2ram mode; added a function to rc.M which disables discrete video card for PCs with dual graphics setup; rc.services - added a function for setting brightness when booting on battery.

MariaDB is due to replace MySQL in Fedora 19 and, in this version, udev will handle network device names. Additionally, the developers are still discussing the integration of Apache OpenOffice 4.0

One of the really neat features of coding for a portable platform like a phone is that you can use its motion sensors to control the UI. How useful this is in a particular app varies from "neat gimmick" to "UI perfection" -- admittedly the example here is more on the "gimmick" end of the spectrum, but it'll get you started with using the Android motion sensors. We'll carry on using the code from the previous three tutorials, but this time, we're going to add a detector which enables you to start the timer by shaking the phone.

I received this e-mail from the AP this morning -- Dear Users: Please be advised AP has been effected by the automated system patch released by Apple this morning, blocking java based applications on mac computers. This may slow down the publishing of some AP photos. AP Engineers are working on a solution.

Open Developer Break catches up with miscellaneous news from the open development world. This week: a new Node.js version, Red Hat's Developer Toolset, a new CyanogenMod bug tracker and a collection of Apache releases