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For the past several months there has been work on vhost-blk, an in-kernel virito-blk device accelerator. This kernel-based accelerator can provide measurable speed-ups for disk/block device access by virtualized guest machines...

Everyone by now should know about Humble Bundle, they used to be a provider of great DRM FREE and cross platform (Linux, Mac and Windows) indie games including games like Osmos, Aquaria, Psychonauts, World of Goo etc.

H. Peter Anvin has been involved with Linux for more than 20 years, and is currently one of the x86 architecture maintainers. During his work on Linux, one of his areas of interest has been the generation and use of random numbers, and his talk at LinuxCon Europe 2012 was designed to address a lot of misunderstandings that he has encountered regarding random numbers. The topic is complex, and so, for the benefit of experts in the area, he noted that "I will be making some simplifications". (In addition, your editor has attempted to fill out some details that Peter mentioned only briefly, and so may have added some "simplifications" of his own.)

The only problem was that it comes with Windows 8 preloaded, but I figured I'm going to have to bite the bullet and have a go at Windows 8 sooner or later, so why not. The good news was that I checked the specifications very carefully, and there was no mention of "UEFI" or "Secure Boot" or "Made for Windows 8", so at least I shouldn't have to fight with that yet.

The cheapest Android tablet I've ever seen costs $20, with a $2 per month unlimited data plan, and I'm holding it right now. It might not just change the tablet market. It might change the world. The Ubislate 7ci, also known as the Aakash2, is the latest gadget from Datawind, a Canadian company that's spent seven years trying to find the ideal market for some really neat data-optimization technology. On devices like the PocketSurfer and PocketSurfer 2, Datawind showed that it can display desktop Web pages quickly with low-cost devices on super-low-bandwidth networks like 2G GPRS. But it never gained major market traction in the Western world, especially as 3G and 4G networks have spread.

Robert Bennett sent me an email today, December 1, regarding a new Linux distribution of his, called Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix.

Ho, ho, ho! In celebration of the upcoming Christmas holidays, we’re announcing that the Crayon Physics Deluxe game is now available for download, for free, but only for 24 hours.

We are sorry to announce today, December 1, that the Mageia 1 operating system has reach end-of-life (EOL) and it is no longer supported.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

On December 1, Pierre Schmitz proudly informed Arch Linux users that the usual monthly release install medium, Arch Linux 2012.12.01, is now available for download.

Aside from the KDE, GNOME 3, LXDE and Xfce desktop environments, users also have the option of running the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments. The only problem, and a very minor one, is that there are no separate installation images for MATE and Cinnamon.

An interview with musician and admin Jeremy Jongepier about his setup. Jeremy gives a great overview of current Linux audio software and shows that Linux is a strong and viable music production platform.

What was known is that Gnome 3.8 will support a Gnome2-ish environment through some extensions. What wasn’t clear is if that option would be included in Gnome Control Center (similar to Fallback) or in Gnome Tweak Tool.

Neither will happen. Gnome “Classic” will start up a separate session, and that means we can choose if from Gnome Display Manager before we login in Gnome. In other words, Gnomers will pay lot of attention to it.

Gnome Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t even bump to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) which he is also senior maintainer at udisks.

There are already many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, but it also very buggy at the moment.

The latest ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks on Phoronix is an extension of the earlier compiler testing from this modern ARM CPU found on the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual within the Samsung Chromebook. In this round of performance testing, the LLVM/Clang compiler performance is compared to recent releases of the GNU Compiler Collection on this latest-generation ARM hardware.

A handful of memory-related issues were plugged up yesterday in Mesa thanks to the Coverity static code analysis tools...

While this week saw the release of the Doom 3 BFG source-code and word that a Sauerbraten update and a major Alien Arena advancement advancement are forthcoming, what's the state of the impressive XReaL open-source game engine and the similar OpenWolf engine?..

Well, well, well... what do you know, after all the fuss about the GNOME Fallback mode being removed from the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, it looks like the GNOME developers decided to implement a similar mode for all you GNOME 2 nostalgics out there.

Here's some interesting comments from Ryan "Icculus" Gordon about the latest state of Linux gaming and what's ahead...

Matthew Garrett, ex-power management and mobile Linux developer at Red Hat, proudly announced last evening, November 30, that a usable release of the Secure Boot bootloader is now available for download.