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After months of me promising Steam would be coming to Linux, the public beta is finally here. The early verdict: it's pretty great! The installer is a simple pre-packaged .deb file for Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case), and the user portion of the install looks very much like Windows or Macintosh. In my limited testing, I've found the Steam beta to be at least as stable as Desura. I also was impressed with the large number of my Steam games that have Linux versions ready to download and play.

Hewlett-Packard seems more determined than ever to flee the Windows reservation, unveiling a $170 Android tablet, the HP Slate 7. The tablet is slated to go on sale in April.

At the time of this article, Canonical's efforts with Ubuntu have done wonders for gaining new adopters for Linux. Sadly however, Canonical's efforts have yet to make the company profitable. Despite their financial shortcomings thus far, Canonical is bullish about their efforts with the Ubuntu phone and the Ubuntu tablet. Recently I was given the opportunity to try both firsthand. After spending some time getting to know the interface and understanding the core back-end, I was shocked to find that in many regards the Ubuntu developer preview had a ton going for it. In this article, I will share why I think this could be a winning alternative to Android on the tablet.

Red Hat's Secure Boot support is a case of the company wanting to "deep-throat Microsoft", according to a forthright posting from Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel developer mailing list. Torvald's comments were made in response to plans by a Red Hat developer to extend Linux support for Secure Boot. The comments have given rise to an ongoing discussion, during which several prominent kernel developers have shared their thoughts on Secure Boot support in Linux.

The fight against online piracy just gained a new weapon in the form of the Copyright Alert System (CAS) aka the "six strikes" policy. Starting today, participating ISPs like Verizon, Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Comcast will begin issuing warnings to customers suspected of using illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing services that violate copyright laws. Initial notifications will be used to educate and direct customers to legal alternative content sources. If the first set of notifications go avoided, the ISP may take further action, which includes: throttling internet connection speeds and redirecting users to websites requiring acknowledgment of CAS alerts.

HP has had a difficult relationship with WebOS, the mobile OS it obtained after acquiring Palm. After the failure of the TouchPad, HP decided to open up WebOS, and the sourcecode for the newly open source project was released last year. While Open WebOS has not graced any products since, LG has decided they want to buy the project and IP from HP.

Discussion on Secure Boot is often a heated topic and it's one that has recently exploded on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). It all started when developer David Howells asked Linus Torvalds for a GIT pull on signed PE binaries. Howells explained that the patchset provides a facility by which keys can be added dynamically to a kernel that is running in secure-boot mode.

HP is selling its webOS-related assets to South Korean electronics manufacturer LG. The two companies have issued a press release. LG is not, though, planning to use webOS in smartphones or tablets; its interest in the operating system is apparently for use in internet-enabled smart TVs. LG has now purchased the source code, associated documentation, developers and engineers working on webOS and all webOS web sites. LG is not purchasing the patents related to webOS but it will receive licences for all of HP's webOS-related patents, including those patents acquired by HP when it acquired Palm.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds makes no bones about it. He thinks inserting signed binaries into the Linux kernel is "moronic."

Kristian Høgsberg has proposed patches to Wayland and the Weston compositor for implementing pointer locks. Pointer locks allow for applications to lock the pointer so they receive relative inputs, which can improve the handling of some games running on Wayland...

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on Scientific Linux 6.3. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

By now, active observers of the open source world will have heard of the trademark dispute between the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and Veber, a small hosting company in the UK. As reported by the PSF, Veber recently decided it wished to use "Python" in certain branding of its products and services. Veber filed an EU community trademark application, claiming the exclusive right to use the "Python" mark for software, servers, and web services throughout the EU. The PSF (which obtained a registered trademark for "Python" in the US in 2004) is opposing Veber's trademark application.

As machines are getting more and more powerful today, people want more from the powerful hardware. From a cloud user’s perspective, it is better to run more virtual machines on a single host. Xen currently supports running hundreds of guests on a single physical machine, but we plan to take it to the next magnitude – to run thousands of guests on a single host. To achieve this goal, we need to tackle several bottlenecks, ranging from the hypervisor to the guest kernel to the user space tool stacks. One of the most notable / tricky bit of all the improvements is certainly the event channel scalability, which should enable Dom0 / driver domains to handle more events than before, thus supporting more guests.

Now that LG has acquired it from HP, we’ll just have to wait and see what LG’s game plan will be. We do know, from the announcement, that LG intends to use webOS to power its smart TV’s.

Are there any performance improvements in store for GCC 4.8 as it affects the ARMv7 Cortex-A15 processor on SoCs like the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual? Here's some benchmark results to find out...

I received an interesting message from Angela Kahealani with a challenge: "Here's what I'd like to see in Work the Shell: a full-blown shell script template. It should comply with all standards applicable to CLI programs.

Announced at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, the Slate 7 Android tablet is HP’s first consumer-level tablet device since the failed webOS-powered Touchpad.

DistroRank is now publishing daily rankings from the user-submitted survey data only, in addition to the weekly compiled official rankings.

In the past I’ve tested ownCloud a good solution for hosting a personal solution of cloud storage for your files, or perhaps your team, but there is also an interesting alternative: Seafile another open source file synchronization tool, it comes with Dropbox-like file syncing, but is designed to be better suited to teamwork with some of the features that are oriented to this such as..

Sure, Red Hat strives to compete with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. But the Linux company realizes it must also show VMware and Hyper-V a little love. A prime example: The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 release offers an “improved virtual guest experience on VMware and Hyper-V,” Red Hat claims. So why should customers care? Here are a few answers.