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Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for five years straight. It is meant for people who could not get into Google Summer of Code for various reasons, or people who simply prefer a differently structured, somewhat less constrained program. Season of KDE is managed by the same team of admins and mentors that take care of Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in matters for KDE, with the same level of quality and care.

The Linux kernel community is busy integrating and testing 3.11 content, working on 3.12 development, and finalizing the topic agenda for the upcoming Linux Conference Europe and Kernel Summit that are scheduled to be held in Edinburgh, UK from October 21-23 2013. Let's start with the release news.

On the latest Linux 3.10 stable kernel we have taken ten common Linux file-systems and generated an interesting performance comparisons. The Linux file-systems being tested in this article include XFS, Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, F2FS, and ZFS.

Selena Deckelmann, a data architect and contributor to PostgreSQL, gave a keynote speech at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference this year called, What open source communities can do for teachers. At the end she encouraged the audience to connect with free and open source developers from their communities to schedule a 15-20 minute talk about their work with a student classroom.

The "blink"* element, a feature of early web browsers that made text blink on and off, has been banished in the latest version of Firefox. The element had already been removed from Internet Explorer, was never implemented in Chrome and was ignored by most browser-makers because it never made it into a W3C HTML spec. The W3C even went so far as to add a Blink-killing requirement to its web accessibility guidelines.

RFEL has unveiled board-level versions of its HALO video processing technology, which runs Linux on a Xylinx Zynq ARM+FPGA system-on-chip. Previously introduced as a ruggedized subsystem aimed at military intelligence applications, such as UAVs, the new HALO boards provide embeddable versions of RFEL’s image stabilization and fusion engines, which can form composite images by combining visible and IR data.

Avnet has unveiled a smaller, lower cost follow-on to its community backed ARM+FPGA based ZedBoard. The $199 Linux-ready MicroZed board is built with a Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC, and can be used as either a single-board computer (SBC) or as a computer-on-module (COM) feeding 100 programmable GPIO signals into a carrier board.

Pwnie Express has opened pre-orders on a Linux-based penetration testing device that supports 4G out-of-band SSH access. The Pwn Plug R2 runs the Kali Linux-based Pwnix distribution on a 1.2GHz Marvell Armada 370 SoC, and offers dual gigabit Ethernet ports, high-gain WiFi and Bluetooth, and a variety of one-click pen-testing tricks, like running the device as an Evil AP.

For decades anyone buying a new computer did so in the knowledge that within a few years it would be overtaken by a much faster machine. Driving this rapid evolution has been Moore's Law – which has allowed the building block of information processing, the transistor – to be packed in greater numbers onto ever smaller computer chips.

Congratulations to the Gluster Community! In addition to shipping GlusterFS 3.4, the latest release of the open source, scale-out storage system, the Gluster Community has significantly increased its number of projects and contributing developers in just three short months. Since May 2013, the Gluster Community has grown from seven projects for the GlusterFS distribution to more than 30 incubating open software-defined storage projects for big data, demonstrating nearly 300 percent growth in the number of developers.

Astute readers will have noticed that we’ve begun publishing our "Open Voices" eBooks in the ePub format. Now, some of our best essays and interviews are available as lightweight and portable files, and can be read on any electronic reading device that supports this open standard. And who better to undertake the task of converting our library than your friendly opensource.com intern? This summer, I’ve refined what I consider a simple, reliable method for creating eBooks the open source way. Today, I’d like to share it.

Dot Categories: DeveloperIn this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

Are citizen CIOs a threat to local governments or a blessing in disguise? With government IT departments producing more open data and participation from community interest groups and citizens on the rise, we’re beginning to see the start of a new movement within open government: telling our government which technologies to deploy. Citizens are identifying—and some are creating themselves—the next wave of applications and resources for their municipalities, such as a crowdsourced answering platform for city services, an open data catalog, and a civic infrastructure adoption website for fire hydrants and storm drains. With this, the role of the citizen CIO is beginning to emerge.

Big week for Linux news with major kernel news and a reshaping of the Linux desktop space.

Zink Imaging announced the launch of two Android-powered, WiFi-enabled label and photo printers that don’t require ink cartridges, but instead use heat to create images on special adhesive-backed paper. The $199 Zinc hAppy and $299 hAppy+, which adds a 3.5-inch touchscreen, are designed to be controlled via Android and iOS apps.

Panasonic announced a DECT-compatible digital cordless landline phone that runs Android 4.0 with Google Play access. The KX-PRX120 is equipped with a 3.5-inch, HVGA screen on the handset, which offers a front-facing camera for Skype calls, as well as WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS for mobile Android use, but lacks cellular technology.

"The deal would be palatable if every Ubuntu Edge was delivered with shares of stock in Canonical, but as it stands now, why would I want to invest money to help Canonical make money?" said Robin Lim, a lawyer and blogger. "Eventually, we do have to realize, we are not partners in this venture. Just potential customers who Canonical wants to profit from."

Hardkernel and its community Odroid project opened $149 pre-orders on an updated version of the open platform Odroid single board computer, featuring Samsung’s eight-core Exynos 5410 Octa SoC. The Odroid-XU runs Android, Ubuntu, and other Linux OSes, and offers features including an eMMC socket, two USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, HDMI video, 100Mbit Ethernet, and more.

The word 'community' has many definitions, especially in the world of open source software and Linux. Urban planner, artist and TED fellow Candy Chang has her own understanding of community, cultivated through collective art projects in her hometown of New Orleans. Her "Before I Die" project, for example, transformed an abandoned house in her neighborhood into an interactive wall for people to share their hopes and dreams -- a project The Atlantic called “one of the most creative community projects ever.”

Much has been made about Google's $35 Chromecast dongle, which lets users stream their desktops and video to large screen TVs, but there is now a similar application for the Raspberry Pi that offers some of the same functionality: PiCast. Its developer has an informational page up here, where he notes: "I thought what do I have that I could use w/HDMI [licensing] and wouldn't be terribly hard to do? My Arduino? Nope BUT my Raspberry Pi can do it all, literally and [at the] same price as the Chromecast."