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On February the 19th, Wellington will be awash with some of the greatest and brightest minds in computing as the Multicore 2013 Conference kicks off at Wellington Town Hall. I caught up with one of the keynote speakers, Paul McKenney, who is IBM's Chief Technology Officer of Linux and got to pick his brains on the rise of Linux and machine intelligence.

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Ubuntu 12.10) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Ubuntu 12.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

It’s now been a full year since ownCloud, the open source data syncing platform, launched as a commercial entity. I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical back then that the company would be able to succeed in a market already inundated with competing products. But ownCloud managed to hold its own and more in 2012, and has its sights set on continued expansion in 2013, according to recent statements from the company.

Alan Pope had the pleasure of announcing on Google+ that Stuart Langridge released the first game for the Ubuntu operating system for smartphones, also known as Ubuntu Phone OS.

ArchPup 12.12.2 is available! ArchPup is minimalistic Puppy Linux variant built using Arch Linux packages, with Pacman installed and configured as the default package manager. Combining speed and low-resource requirements from Puppy Linux with this powerful and efficient package manager, ArchPup provides a light-weight, portable operating system and gives full control to the end user.

Well, you have probably read a million guides on how to backup your personal data using rsync, a highly useful and versatile data copying tool. Here's another one. I would like to show you some basic tips and tricks for smart and safe rsync usage, how to make a flexible and useful setup, and how to automate your backup procedure, as a part of a comprehensive backup strategy, which you must have.

A newly proposed Fedora 19 feature is to do away with MySQL and drop in MariaDB instead, per this official proposal from Red Hat's Jaroslav Reznik. In Fedora 19, MariaDB would become the default SQL database package. MySQL would still be available in the Fedora repository for at least one release as the more conservative users make the migration from MySQL to MariaDB. "We would like to replace MySQL with MariaDB in early development cycle for Fedora 19. MySQL will continue to be available for at least one release, but MariaDB will become the default."

Work continues on the GNOME 3.8 development branch under the guise of the 3.7.x development tree. GNOME 3.7.4 was officially released on Sunday January 20th providing Linux desktop users will a solid view into the future of GNOME.

OpenSSL is a powerful cryptography toolkit. Many of us have already used OpenSSL for creating RSA Private Keys or CSR (Certificate Signing Request). However, did you know that you can use OpenSSL to benchmark your computer speed or that you can also encrypt files or messages? This article will provide you with some simple to follow tips on how to encrypt messages and files using OpenSSL.

Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government. I have discussed recently the NY State Senate progressive stance on open government and its embrace of open source. Capitol Camp 2012 was another display of the powerful benefits the adoption of open practices in government can bring to the public. The event involved an unconference-day and a hackathon-day, both of them fully open to the public.

Steam is now being used by thousands of gamers running a Linux OS, and Valve has got to the point where they are happy to start urging Windows users to make the switch. Proof of that comes from the screenshot you see above. It’s the Steam website, and placed prominently near the top of the page is a “Join the Beta” promotion suggesting you try Steam for Linux. There’s even a download link to get Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which removes yet another barrier to entry.

Release early, often, and with rap music.Evan Roth is a maker of things with a specific i nterest in tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture. We covered him and some of his work recently in an article about how open source is disrupting visual art. And here, we give you some insight into the guy behind open source rap, graffiti, and Brooklyn’s first and only R&D lab for the public domain: F.A.T. Lab.

A couple of days ago, the developers behind the Unity Tweak Tool software released the second development version of the one stop configuration utility for the Ubuntu operating system.

Kyle Rankin gets the nod from the SCALE staff to give the second keynote at SCALE 11X in February. Rankin joins Matthew Garrett in keynoting the 11th annual first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America next month.

Statistics are a matter of your viewpoint.

ownCloud Inc, announced a couple of days ago, January 19, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta release for the upcoming ownCloud Client 1.2.0.

After the launch of Steam Linux beta, you may have seen a big Tux logo on Steam client download page.

In addition to the Intel driver now always enabling floating-point textures, a patented feature but something that's required for GL3 compliance, the Intel DRI driver is set to play better with S3TC, the also patent-troubled but widely-used S3 Texture Compression...

Intel's Mesa DRI driver now is unconditionally enabling floating-point textures. Up to this point, the floating-point textures feature of GL3 hasn't been enabled by default due to patent worries...

Earlier this month I ran some new benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D MSAA support that was merged into the R300g driver. Unfortunately, the performance was very disappointing, but last week there were luckily some anti-aliasing performance optimizations that were merged into Mesa. I have now done new benchmarks of the new Mesa R300g driver with these multi-sample anti-aliasing performance optimizations, which show quite a noticeable difference from the open-source driver compared to earlier this month.