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Open source news this week: August 12 - 16, 2013 What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

Puppy Linux, the lightweight and speed-oriented Linux distribution based upon Slackware, has updated their "Slacko" release to version 5.6 and with Puppy Linux 5.6 comes full F2FS file-system support...

HMTL5 is such a low-cost and portable alternative to native app development that it makes sense to explore solutions that address its limitations.

Adapteva announced a Parallella University Program (PUP) to provide free Parallella single board computers to universities engaged in parallel programming research. Last month Adapteva began limited shipments of its $99 open source Parallella SBC, which combines a Xilinx Zynq-7020 ARM/FPGA SoC, running Ubuntu, with a homegrown 16-core Epiphany coprocessor. Last October, Adapteva launched a Kickstarter [...]

One of my favorite workshops to give is the one that introduces librarians and their staff to open source software. After defining open source to them and debunking all the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there, I focus my talk on a list of open source tools that can be useful to libraries.

My nearly 11 minute keynote at OSCON 2013 this year, felt long enough when I gave it, but in terms of what I have to say about the future of open source, it wasn't even close. Here I expand on the lessons I've learned from other people working in open source, new technologies emerging in open source that haven't come of age yet, my passion for open source not being a Zero Sum game, and bringing open source to other parts of society and industry.

I’ve been working in educational technology for more than 17 years and have spent much of my career advocating for open source in schools. For years, open source in education has gotten a bad rap. Superintendents, school boards and teachers frequently misunderstood open source software to be synonymous with dubious code birthed by mad, degenerate "hackers" who spend dark nights scheming to unleash complex and nefarious plots for social disruption.

The first release candidate for KDE's Plasma Media Center 1.1 release is now available. Plasma Media Center supports viewing photographs, watching movies, and listening to music from one central KDE component...

The Elementary OS crew, a group of young designers seeking to create a beautiful and simple Linux distribution, have released Elementary OS 0.2 "Luna" as their latest Ubuntu-based operating system...

OpenIndiana, the operating system seeking to let Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris project live on within the open-source community, is finally out with an update. This isn't a stable OpenIndiana release but rather is still a pre-release to 151a...

The Common Display Framework (CDF) proposal for the Linux kernel that started last year is still being worked on. The CDF code is now up to its third revision, but this isn't likely to be the final revision before pushing it for mainline inclusion...

A set of patches were published this weekend to improve the Nouveau NVIDIA Gallium3D graphics driver's handling of video playback acceleration for certain scenarios...

Here’s the lineup of IRC channels we created on irc.freenode.net for remote attendees to follow along. You may want to configure them in your IRC client now to make your remote attendance easier. I’ve linked each channel name up to the freenode web client just in case it’s helpful.

With Fedora more liberally pushing down package updates compared to Ubuntu Linux and other fixed-release distributions, how has the performance evolved since the release of "Schrödinger's Cat" in early July? Here's some benchmarks showing how the Fedora 19 performance has evolved with a newer kernel and other changes...

A set of six patches were published for Mesa on Friday that allow for profiling support with Gallium3D's "Clover" state tracker for OpenCL support...

Here’s a quick rundown of the day 1 talks that have transcripts and / or video recordings:

Scarcely a week after the Intel-backed Minnowboard.org project began shipping its $199 open-hardware single board computer, the AMD-backed GizmoSphere.org project released an unrestricted version of its $189 Gizmo SBC’s schematic and electronics distributor Digi-Key added Wandboard.org’s open, Freescale-based $83-144 boardset to its online catalog. The moves reflect the current infatuation of embedded developers, makers, and [...]

I occasionally get asked why I spend so much of my free time writing software and giving it away for free. There are a number of reasons for this—I like to build things and I use it as an excuse to practice and improve my skills—but one of the most driving motivators for me is that I see open source contributions as a civic duty, a moral obligation to the rest of the world.

In February of this year, I reported that the Raleigh Public Record—a local, online news publication in Raleigh, NC—was in the process of creating an open source solution to extract data from PDFs. The problem many news journalists have is easily and quickly (which is very important given the nature of their job) converting data and images into a usable format from documents they use for their reports (see an example here). The project, DocHive, is now phasing into the next cycle of development under the leadership of Edward Duncan. He tells us what he has planned for his team over the next six months. But first, I asked:

Collaboration is one of the key principles of the open source way and a major topic here on opensource.com. One of our goals to highlight great collaboration stories, and when we discuss collaboration, the need for the perfect collaboration tool frequently comes up. One article, Avoid the tool trap when building communities, provides some great insights (hint: people create community, not tools). Email is still undoubedly one of the most preferred tools out there for collaboration. In fact, collaboration on the the Linux kernel started with the famous email Linus Torvalds sent to a mailing list back in 1991.