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For many of us, our introduction to computing is being placed in front of a machine where the only challenge is figuring out the Windows user experience paradigm. Getting started with Linux, on the other hand, requires a bit more effort, a fair amount of trial and error, and perhaps some colorful language along the way.

Money out of the marketing budget? And so IBM Watson's massive marketing push continues: this time with the launch of a $5m (£3.4m) prize in an artificial intelligence competition that will run until 2020. Contenders – or perhaps their 'bots – will have to battle it out at a mainstage event at IBM's annual conference before the winner pockets their prize at the annual TED talk-fest.…

Most modern GNU/Linux distributions use some kind of a software service that tracks the user activities and events. These events can be anything, from the opening of a document file, to the chat conversation. This isn't happening for the purpose to monitor the user and sell this usage data information to 3rd parties, but to help users enjoy a more user-friendly and unified experience across their applications. For example, if you want to quickly locate that document that you opened last weekend, chances are that you will easily and promptly find it after opening your file manager and going to the “Recent” folder.

Open source development and collaboration takes place online, in places made of information. From individual commit messages to project websites and even larger digital structures, each piece of information we create is part of a mess. This is not a slight against open source; all human endeavors are messy, because that is just the way we are as human beings. We all bring our own strengths and failings, wisdom and ignorance, to everything we do. read more

'Webmentions' spec promises future linkspam outbreak Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).…

Life is full of bugs. No matter how carefully planned, no matter how much time went into design, any project is going to have unforseen issues when the rubber hits the road in the implementation stage. And that's okay. Perhaps the best measure of resiliency for any organization is not how well they handle things when everything is functioning as planned, but rather, how they handle the speed bumps when they come along. read more

The Linux Foundation has launched the Zephyr Project, to foster an open source, small footprint, modular, scalable, connected, real-time OS for IoT devices. Normally we think of the Linux Foundation as being all about Linux. But as the organization has matured, it has expanding its scope to embrace an ever-wider range of open source standards […]

LilyPond is a free, mature music-typesetting program, similar in flavor to LaTeX. The software is part of the GNU Project and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The authors originally developed LilyPond because they felt that computer-generated scores were, to their eyes, "soulless." They designed LilyPond to follow the traditions laid down in older engraved scores. read more

Places bet on software for future transactions IBM has open sourced a significant chunk of the blockchain code it has been working on, putting its weight behind the Linux Foundation and its Hyperledger project.…

We recently interviewed Neville Cross on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine where we profile Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done.

New 'pragmatic' open source language developed by JetBrains hits version 1.0. JetBrains has released version 1.0 of Kotlin, an open source programming language for the JVM and Android.

The Samsung Open Source Group released a Tizen 3.0 beta for the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, underscoring the broad OS support for the world’s favorite hacker SBC. Last week’s news that Tizen 3.0 has been ported to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B is the latest example of how the year-old ARMv7 version of the Pi is attracting ports from more powerful Linux distributions, most notably Fedora, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Snappy Core.

Quota support is an often requested feature in lxc. Linux filesystem quota is required when you want to give multiple users access to a container and want to control that one user is not using all the disk space. Quota is also required for web hosting servers, e.g. with ISPConfig 3, for the same reason: one website shall not be able to fill up the whole disk. This howto shows you, how you can use lxc with hard disk quota using qemu nbd with a qcow image file on Debian 8.

Recently, I wrote about how Docker is investing in Unikernels to reduce the size of its containers, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. Unikernels are a hot new technology, but many developers prefer stability and maturity over "new and shiny". And, that's where Alpine Linux comes in.

Meizu PRO 5 is the most powerful Ubuntu smartphone to-date

Doing good for the world is often the nature of an open source software or hardware project. Offering code and schematics to others free of charge and with a license that allows for reuse and modification is often done to help others. Knowing this, I was still surprised to learn about an incredible project that combines robotics and prosthetics. This Instagram video of a robotic hand stopped me in my tracks. Further investigation revealed that the hand is the creation of OpenBionics. read more

Gumstix has added a Raspberry Pi Compute Module baseboard design to its online DIY board dev tool, and is selling working units based on the design for $49. Back in November, Gumstix opened up its Geppetto online DIY design tool and quick-turn prototype manufacturing service to the development of carrier boards for third-party SBCs and […]

One thing that confuses some new Linux users is just how modular Linux can be, and on nearly every level. It turns out to be liberating in the end, but it can be overwhelming at first. That's why it's nice, sometimes, to come across a project that brings a bunch of modular technology and binds them together nice and neatly for users. In the world of digital audio workstations, the project that does this most profoundly is the Linux Multimedia Studio, better known as LMMS. read more

Intrinsyc announced a reference design for wearable law enforcement and security cameras, featuring a Snapdragon 410 SoC running Android and a 13-MP camera. The wave of reports of police shooting unarmed minorities over the past few years appears to be partly due to the greater number of smartphone cameras in circulation. Many observers agree that […]

Buffer overflow found in glibc. A huge amount of software can be hijacked by hackers on the other side of the internet, thanks to a serious security vulnerability in the GNU C Library (glibc). The library is used by the vast majority of Linux distributions, meaning the vulnerability is widespread.