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When Valve announced the public release of the beta for SteamOS 1.0 "Alchemist" on Friday they listed NVIDIA graphics as a hardware requirement, but I showed that AMD Radeon graphics with Catalyst would work and it's possible to get Intel graphics working (or the open-source graphics drivers in general) through a minor change to the Linux-based SteamOS kernel parameters. After that I ran some benchmarks and here are a few performance results comparing SteamOS 1.0 Beta to Ubuntu 13.10 with Intel HD Graphics.

The first workshop on "Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience," was held at the Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO on November 17, 2013. This meeting was organized by the Software Sustainability Institute at the University of Edinburgh and the National Science Foundation to examine how we can create sustainable software platforms that can best serve the needs of scientific research.

Linux and OpenOffice now humming away on 15,000 Bavarian desktops The German city of Munich has declared that its famous move to open source software is over and a success.…

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is getting coal for Christmas. That's according to this 2-minute video just released by the ACLU portraying Santa as an NSA snoop. "They're watching almost every electronic device. The NSA is coming to town." Ho. Ho. Ho. Happy Holidays!

Coincidentally, Debian GNU/Linux 7.3 was released this weekend -- the same weekend as it being known that SteamOS is Debian-based...

Lantronix announced an IPv6 certified version of its tiny, RJ45-sized embedded Linux networking server called the XPort Pro Lx6 aimed at IoT applications. Lantronix’s Xport Pro has long been a favorite of embedded engineers looking for a low-cost networking server that doesn’t consume much space or power. The new XPort Pro Lx6 is almost physically […]

A comprehensive performance comparison is underway at Phoronix that pits SteamOS against other desktop Linux distributions, but for those anxious to see some performance numbers, here are benchmarks done so far this weekend from seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on the public SteamOS 1.0 Beta operating system. In this article are early benchmarks from seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards running Valve's Debian Linux based SteamOS on an Intel Haswell system.

Google recently released and took back one of the biggest privacy features for Android since its launch. And we’re a little bummed. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote about a new and extremely important privacy tool in Android. Today, it realized the tool had actually been removed in an update to the mobile operating system earlier this week. After chatting with Google, the privacy advocacy group isn’t satisfied with why it was pulled.

Red Hat this week released the first beta to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. RHEL 7 is based upon improvements and other work that happened over the past few release cycles in Fedora and is riding on its new enterprise Linux 3.10 kernel. In this article is a first look at RHEL 7 Beta 1 along with our first benchmarks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 comparing the results to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5.

Open source news for your reading pleasure. December 9-13, 2013 We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found:

ECMA International has formed a technical committee to work on a standard specification for the Dart web programming language that's developed by Google as an alternative to JavaScript...

I never realized how much I rely on open source and public libraries until I started homeschooling last year. When I started to write for Opensource.com, my son was in school. He's nearly eight years old, but he's already been in both public and private schools and in both special needs and gifted programs. I've thus been on both sides of the educational spectrum. As a librarian, former teacher, and homeschooling mother, I am familiar with what formal schools can offer and what homeschooling and open source resourcces (programs, tools, etc.) can offer. Homeschooling is increasingly popular due to the differences between what schools can provide and what open source can offer homeschoolers. Even in China, bright children like my son are increasingly being educated at home or having their public or private education supplemented at home. Parental dissatisfaction with a school's environment is now the prime reason given in a recent survey by the US Department of Education for homeschooling, but dissatisfaction with the curricula and academic instruction still ranks high. 

So you have a great business idea for a wonderful IT product or service, and you want to build your high tech startup around it. Having the idea is a great start, but you will have to build an IT solution/service to get your business off the ground; be it a website, software solution, social network, or mobile app. Which programming language to choose to write these IT products is always the question to get the startup going on a reasonable budget. The truth is, you can write a great product in any language, if you know what you are doing. And when users are looking at a great product they really don’t know which language was used to create it, or how much code it took, nor do they care. But when it comes to time and budgets, there are unique situations, like getting a startup off the ground, where the choice of a programming language can make a difference between success or failure.

The Acer C720 was recently released as the latest Google Chromebook selling for just $199 USD. I have been running the Acer C720 Chromebook recently but not with Chrome OS and instead Ubuntu 13.10 Linux. This Chromebook with a Haswell-based dual-core Celeron CPU runs Ubuntu Linux rather nicely. Here are the first thorough benchmarks from this low-cost laptop.

The Fedora project held a go/no-go meeting today and the decision was reached to go ahead with the release of F20 based on release candidate RC1.x. The mirrors are scheduled to open next Tuesday Dec 17.

To date, there has been no way to run apps on Android with real and reliable privacy controls. Android version 4.3 and higher take a huge step in the right direction, letting users install apps while denying some of the apps' attempts to collect the user's data.

We’re proud to announce that Qt 5.2 is now available. With the release of Qt 5.1 in July, we showcased the Qt for Android and iOS ports and laid down the beginning of some heavy improvements we have now done on Qt’s graphics capabilities. In the last 6 months, we’ve worked very hard to finalize this release and especially these ports.

It's been a while since last looking on the anti-aliasing performance of the R600 Gallium3D driver so for this article we have some fresh MSAA benchmarks of the driver from Mesa 10.1-devel and using a Cayman-based high-end AMD Radeon graphics card.

While the release of Qt 5.2 is imminent and it features full support for Apple iOS and Google Android along side Qt's other mobile platform support, but missing from the party is Tizen support. Qt for Tizen is still in an alpha state but today they've put out their fifth development release...

We like to use the analogy that open source is like a recipe. It's a great way to explain what open source is to non-technical folks. Last year, this pumpkin spice latte recipe was popular with our community. So, we thought it would be fun to share more recipes with you this year. We collected some great ones from a few of our open source friends: Chris Aniszczyk, Erica Brescia, Simon Phipps, and Jim Whitehurst. Share yours with us in the comments!