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KDE contributor Ken Vermette has written The Quintessential 2016 Review of Plasma 5.5 which was released last month, a 9 page cover of the good, the bad and the beautiful. Plasma 5.5 marks the beginning of the lifecycle where the vast majority of people will find it capable of serving as their workhorse environment. While at the beginning of the year Plasma 5.2 was exciting but a little wobbly, 5.5 has seen enough iteration to mature and close the significant issues found by the majority of early adopters. As of 2016 Plasma 5.5 has evolved well beyond where Plasma 4 ended while showing no signs of slowing down in the slightest, and I confidently recommend trying it out.

Most people have a limited view of Girl Scouts. They know about the cookies but do they know about the code? Carrie Raleigh is the STEM program manager for Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio in California where she says they are much more than a cookie program. Girls Scouts has been coordinating experiences to help teach girls life skills for over 100 years, and as our world changes, they will need to as well. To learn the right skills for our current world, Girl Scouts is focusing their efforts on teaching girls about robotics, cybersecurity, coding, gaming, and gaining STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) career exposure. Read more in my interview with Carrie who will be speaking at SCaLE 14x this year on Girl Scouts and computer science for middle schoolers.

Your Linux distribution of choice says a lot about you. Of course, one of the many great things about Linux is the diversity of options you have to choose between. Maybe you like a slimmed down minimalist option. Maybe having all of the bells and whistles is important to you. Or maybe you just prefer a distribution that you find easy to use.

At the 2016 Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 14x), long-time tech writer and editor Bob Reselman will give a talk called The 7 Rules for Creating World Class Technical Documentation, v.2016, which is based on an article he wrote more than six years ago. In this interview, he offers an update to the rules, and talks about how attitudes toward project documentation are changing.

In today's online retail market dominated by cut throat competitions, one player stands in the forefront, leaving the pack far behind, and that is Amazon. Amazon has been judiciously expanding its business model to satisfy consumer appetites, and I think Amazon Prime membership lies in the center of its expanding business model. Starting out as unlimited free-shipping membership, Amazon Prime has grown over time to include a variety of other perks, including unlimited streaming music, movies and TV dramas, unlimited photo gallery, free e-book library, and now same-day/one-day delivery.

Welcome, one and all, to 2016. I wish every one of you a happy and prosperous new year. I have been meaning to write this column for a while. It is one part observation, one part lecture, and mostly utter rambling, so please do stay with me. I hope that, if nothing else, this column shares an important insight that came to me a while back that you may find interesting.

When I was pitching The Open Organization, publishers always asked me the same question: "Is this a book about management or leadership?" And my answer was always the same: "The Open Organization is a book about management." After all, it's about the ways Red Hat, the open organization I lead, uses a networked organizational model (one we adopt from the open source world) to make decisions and coordinate, and those are management issues.

In 2015 there were a variety of legal issues of importance to the FOSS (free and open source) community. Continuing the tradition of looking back over the top ten legal developments in FOSS, my selection of the top ten issues for 2015 is as follows..

If you thought MD5 was banished from HTTPS encryption, you'd be wrong. It turns out the fatally weak cryptographic hash function, along with its only slightly stronger SHA1 cousin, are still widely used in the transport layer security protocol that underpins HTTPS. Now, researchers have devised a series of attacks that exploit the weaknesses to break or degrade key protections provided not only by HTTPS but also other encryption protocols, including Internet Protocol Security and secure shell.

This article can help administrators who need to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an IBM® POWER8™ processor-based system in bare metal mode by comparing the process of installation on an x86 system.

If you've been following Opensource.com and the Open Organization Ambassadors there, then you'll know that I've been working to help Greenpeace internalize the principles of an open ethos. But to do this, we've had to distill this ethos into a few concrete principles, actionable items the organization can more easily grasp. On its journey to becoming an open organization, Greenpeace has set seven cultural "waypoints," some guideposts for its transition to an open organization. In this article, I'd like to explain them.

Parrot showed off a fixed-wing, hand-launchable “Disco” drone that can fly for up to 45 minutes at up to 50 mph, and offers a new autopilot mode. Just two months after launching its second generation, Linux-based BeBop 2 quadcopter, claimed to offer a groundbreaking 25 minutes of flight time, Parrot showed off a fixed-wing Disco UAV claimed to almost double that with 45 minute battery life. Although Parrot doesn’t mention it on its product page, several CES reports, including one from BGR, claims the Disco can fly at speeds of up to 50mph, far faster than prosumer quadcopter speeds.

The year was 2003. I was an underpaid accountant-turned-IT-professional, and father to two children under the age of four. The idea of using Linux was intriguing, but it wasn't until I had a chance to experience it while taking a class on Long Island for work that I was fired up enough to try it out.

There's a long way to go before it becomes an “anyone can do this” hack, but games console tinkerers fail0verflow have replicated their PlayStation 2 work, getting Linux to run on Sony's PlayStation 4. However, as they told the Chaos Computer Conference in Germany, their work is only useful on an older PS4, because the jailbreak vector, present on version 1.76 of the machine's firmware, is patched on later versions (a new machine would be running 3.11).

If you are investing in the stock market, you probably understand the importance of a sound portfolio management plan. The goal of portfolio management is to come up with the best investment plan tailored for you, considering your risk tolerance, time horizon and financial goals. Given its importance, no wonder there are no shortage of commercial portfolio management apps and stock market monitoring software, each touting various sophisticated portfolio performance tracking and reporting capabilities.

In this article, I am going to focus on the hardware, software, and configuration issues that we Linux laptop users must confront in order to really enjoy that wonderful digital music on our hard drives.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at reasons to use open source software, betting on open source, cryptocurrencies, a look back at 2015, and—since it's that time of the year—some predictions for 2016.

Not being able to carry your configurations across was an issue for several Steam gaming enthusiasts, but not any more. The latest update of Steam controller lets you take your custom configurations with you. You can also customize the on/off sounds and brightness of the Steam button. It also lets you share non-Steam-game configs.

This year, we’ve seen some incredible price/performance breakthroughs in sub-$100 single board computers that can run Linux or Android and do cool stuff. The world of community-backed SBCs continued to expand in 2015, marked by lower prices and more modular, kit-like Internet of Things boards. Here we take a look at the top 10 most important — and probably the best — under $100 Linux- or Android-based, open-spec hacker SBCs that began shipping in 2015.

Every year we look back at 10 of the hot open source projects from the past 12 months. (Last year's list made a splash!) And, we expect more great things from these projects in 2016.