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The Unvanquished project laid out plans this weekend for 2013 so that their impressive cross-platform first person shooter can be done with the alphas by January of 2014...

We shared almost 600 open source stories this year—highlighting how open source is changing the world. And it's not just the technology, it's the community and their passion. The open source community is sharing their stories about how their work is making a positive impact and opensource.com is helping to amplify those messages. Let's take a look back at 2012 and see what your favorite stories were.

After pessimistic views regarding the health of the GTK+ tool-kit project were recently shared on IRC, Alberto Ruiz took it upon himself to create some statistics about the development of this critical component to GNOME to show in fact things aren't entirely bleak...

The developers of the toolkit for developing concurrent, distributed event-driven applications in Java or Scala, Akka, have announced the release of Akka 2.1 which adds experimental cluster support to the toolkit.

More than three years after its last major release, the developers of awesome have released version 3.5 of their dynamic tiling window manager. The new version, code-named "Last Christmas", includes a large amount of changes, many of which are internal and will not be noticed by users.

The Steam Linux client is now available to everyone and with the Linux world not beginning and ending with Ubuntu, Valve's Linux developers are working to improve support for handling other distributions. Up to this point there's been mixed results when running Steam and the Source Engine games on other distributions due to packaging problems, graphics/driver issues, and other bugs.

Kaspersky’s refreshed security solution, which serves Linux and FreeBSD mail servers, contains revamped security mechanisms that partners can use to gain ground in competitive open-source markets. One of the biggest improvements is a zero-day exploit and targeted attack shield, dubbed ZETA Shield technology, designed to detect and block unknown and increasingly sophisticated advanced persistent threats (APTs) delivered via e-mail attachments.

The latest, most expensive routers include so many facilities you'd be forgiven for thinking they're more like PCs than tools for networking. This thought should lead you to wonder if you can use a regular PC to do the same thing. The answer, thanks to Linux, is that you can - and it's very easy. There are many different Linux distributions designed specifically to turn your machine into a router or a gateway, complete with any number of enhancements. Our favourite is called ClearOS. It's a fantastic choice of router for your network because it's relatively painless to configure, but it's also extendible, taking it far beyond even the most ambitious devices from manufacturers like Netgear.

The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception. There's no doubt that there have been challenges for the free and open source operating system over the course of 2012—the Secure Boot challenge comes immediately to mind—but so, too, have there been numerous successes. All in all, I believe the good has outweighed the bad for Linux this past year. Here are five specific reasons.

Well, we're in the final countdown now as 2012 draws to a close, so you'd think all would be quiet here in the Linux blogosphere as bloggers hunker down to recover from what's been an exceptionally exhausting year. Linux Girl, for one, has been putting in extra hours on her favorite barstool down at the blogosphere's Broken Windows Lounge in an effort to recover a bit of the sanity that slipped away in 2012.

In the first of three parts, The H looks are what people were reading in 2012, month by month. From Anonymous weapons to fresh Linux kernels and from updated Ubuntu to open source hardware, it's all in The H Roundup of 2012.

Here we are again—the dawn of a new year is upon us. I really can't believe it. It is me or do the years seem to go by faster and faster? Before we close this chapter, let’s take a quick look at the ten most popular articles from opensource.com in education for 2012, starting with number ten and counting down.

It's been a great year for the open source movement in government. I feel like we've moved the needle on the transparency, collaboration, and participation fronts. More importantly, the open government movement saw a fair amount of code released under open source licenses and lots of activity in the open data space.

The latest release of the GNU C Library (glibc) supports the upcoming ARM 64-bit infrastructure (AArch64) and also includes improvements targeted at cross-compilation

The Raspberry Pi, the $35 credit card-sized computer, has lived an interesting life despite being less than a year old. It has been used to teach programming and host servers, but above all it has provided a near-perfect platform for some of the most fun and interesting hobbyist projects in the computing world. Arcade cabinets, computing clusters housed in LEGOs, musical instruments, robots, and wearable computers are just some of the uses Pi owners have found. It turns out you can do a lot with an ARM processor, GPU, a few ports and GPIO pins, and an operating system (typically Linux-based) loaded onto an SD card. Here are 10 of the coolest Raspberry Pi creations we've been able to find.

The year 2012 marked the true arrival of credible open source cloud computing platforms, and the open source cloud is poised to be one of the biggest stories of 2013. Of course, OpenStack emerged as a heavily backed open platform, but it's far from the only one. We've covered CloudStack, Eucalyptus Systems and other platforms and providers all year long. In this post, you'll find our complete and updated collection of stories, interviews, resource guides and more on the topic of open source cloud computing.

I recently received the Android-based Noble Nook Simple Touch ebook reader as a gift, which I enjoyed very much except for one insanely annoying issue with it: the Nook comes with two “books” on how to operate the reader which apparently cannot be removed by normal means. There is no option to delete them from the Nook itself, and going online to check my Barnes and Noble account, it isn’t listed as one of the titles I can remotely manage. Searching around online seemed to indicate that, incredibly, there was really no way to remove these annoying files on my device.

The year of the Linux tablet is, like the year of the Linux desktop, destined never to arrive. That doesn't mean we won't see Linux on a tablet, but you'll see Linux on a tablet the way you see it on the desktop - clinging to a tiny percentage of the market.

Looking back over the law channel posts of 2012, I was not surprised to see that software patents were a major concern. The high volume of significant patent lawsuits of competitors and rising levels of NPE (aka patent trolls or patent assertion entities) suits has been the subject of both open source community and mainstream media interest. There were new ideas on patent reform, and an increasing recognition by the public at large that software patents can hinder innovation. We also saw interesting developments in the areas of internet privacy and freedom and copyright law. I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction: there will be more to think about and write about in these areas in 2013.

I have a huge collection of NASA photos taken from the Astronomy Pic of the Day Web site (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) stored in a folder in my Dropbox. No matter what computer system I'm using, I rotate those images on my background, getting a virtual tour of the universe on every screen. Oddly enough, it can be challenging to get that image rotation to work well in Linux. I've mentioned some wallpaper-rotating applications before, but Slidewall is really pretty cool.