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If you are an owner of Intel "Ironlake" generation hardware, there is still some good open-source Linux graphics driver news. Intel developers have addressed hardware context support for Ironlake Linux graphics and will be re-attempting to enable RC6 power-savings support.

Dot Categories: KDE Official NewsThe KDE Community announces the release of Plasma Active 4 (PA4). Plasma Active is a user experience technology stack for consumer electronics. While the default user interface is for tablets, it can be customized to work on smartphones, settop boxes, smart TVs, and touch computing devices such as home automation and in-vehicle infotainment. There are major new improvements to the Files application, an overhaul of the on-screen keyboard and a completely free and open source system based on the Mer Core.

Sharing is easy. Everyday we have faster, easier and many more ways to do it. Sharing is also important. They say happiness gets bigger when it’s shared, as sorrow gets smaller. We share everyday and we feel good about it. We share our knowledge about an issue, we share advice when needed, and we share our opinion on all sorts of things. But the best thing about sharing is when our friends also share their points of view, giving everyone a better vision of the topic and enriching each another through a new perspective. Sharing code is similar.

U.K.-based car manufacturer McLaren is adding an Android-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system to its 2013 MP4-12C sports car based on Parrot’s Asteroid system. The Formula One inspired racer’s updated IRIS IVI system introduces new features like Pandora radio, Bluetooth audio streaming, and voice controlled music selection.

For parents: Shopping for back-to-school supplies, textbooks, clothing, and other accouterments can be frustrating and expensive. To help take the sting out of this ritual, students and parents might consider turning to free, open source software and tools in preparation for a new year of study.  For students: Beyond cost savings, open source software empowers students to take ownership of their work and be free of software licensing treadmills. And, perhaps the ultimate educational opportunity is the ability to examine, analyze, and contribute to open source software and tools like these. For teachers: Turning theory to practice, students can learn by doing as they help with documentation, quality testing, bug review, or even code contributions. Teaching is not simply the delivery of content, via lecture-taxi, to passive minds. Participation and collaboration ignites powerful learning, and empowers students to engage in thoughtful, meaningful scholarship. And open source can be the catalyst. Here are five great open source applications for learning. Share this list to your favorite student or teacher!

For manuals and guides, Wikis are an excellent way of organizing content. Yet, they often don't work as well for larger articles or books because individual content is spread across many pages and the reader has to click around. Additionally, when you want to read online content while in a place where you cannot get an Internet connection (like, reading on the plane), another mode of content delivery is needed.

Dot Categories: KDE Official News With the upcoming Frameworks 5, the KDE Release Team will decouple the release cycles of Workspaces, Applications and Platform. While Applications will have more releases in the 4.x series, the Plasma Workspaces team has decided to focus on Workspaces 2. The recently released 4.11 version of Plasma Workspaces will have Long Term Support. Meanwhile, work on Frameworks 5 is progressing, making KDE technologies ready for the future. What does all this mean? Read on to find out!

In 2008, Facebook gave big data users a gift. The social network released Cassandra, its NoSQL, big data distributed data store to open source. Today, with the release of Cassandra 2.0, the gift is more valuable than ever.

Recently filed FCC test documents offer a sneak peek at a new device in Sony’s NSZ-series Google TV media player lineup. Although the NSZ-GU1 plugs directly into a TV’s HDMI connector, it’s considerably larger than HDMI stick-style adapters like Google’s Chromecast or Plair’s device, which eschew Google TV in favor of remote management by a computer or mobile device.

It’s a relatively quiet time for most governments around the world right now. Typically, during this time there are few new initiatives, policies, or announcements related to open source. So, it’s a good time to consider the trends of the first half of the year and ponder what the remainder of this calendar year holds. Here are a few that come to mind.

SolidRun refreshed its line of tiny 2 x 2 x 2-inch mini-PCs with four new community-backed models based on 1.2GHz multi-core Freescale i.MX6 SoCs. The CuBox-i devices run Android 4.2.2 and Linux, offer HDMI, S/PDIF, IR, eSATA, GbE, USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth interfaces (depending on model), and are currently available for pre-order starting at $45.

After written thousands of Linux articles, one of the complaints that I always heard about Linux is that you have to use the command line to install applications. Most people don’t like Windows, but they were afraid to move to Linux because of the command line. In Windows, they can install an application by double clicking the exe file, but in Linux, they have to use the command line. So is it true that the command line is the only way to install applications in Linux?

Now that The Linux Foundation is a member of the UEFI.org group, I’ve been working on the procedures for how to boot a self-signed Linux kernel on a platform so that you do not have to rely on any external signing authority. After digging through the documentation out there, it turns out to be relatively simple in the end, so here’s a recipe for how I did this, and how you can duplicate it yourself on your own machine.

Our favorite operating system is now 22 years old, and that means we're that much closer to a freedom-enabled future. "The sky is the limit!" blogger Mike Stone suggested. "Well, I guess Linux already is used on the International Space Station, so I guess the sky isn't the limit. With desktop computers fading in relevance, expect the last barriers to Linux to drop."

Dot Categories: KDE Advocacy, Discussions, and RumorsThe KDE community is deeply concerned by the wrong notion contained in a recent complaint to the European Commission. The Fairsearch initiative claims that "distribution of Android at below-cost" could constitute anti-competitive behaviour or predatory pricing. Mirko Böhm produced a response (PDF) for the KDE Community.

While Btrfs isn't always the fastest file-system, it makes up for in other areas not covered by benchmarks like transparent file-system compression, checksumming, online resizing, native RAID, online disk management, error recovering, and snapshot support. Since deploying Btrfs on a local storage server, the engineering manager of product strategy at Canonical proclaimed in today's blog post, "I love Btrfs."

It's been a while since last running any Ubuntu Linux disk encryption benchmarks either of the eCryptfs-based home directory encryption feature or the LUKS-based encrypted LVM, both of which are supported by Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer. With having around the System76 Gazelle Professional laptop and its nice Core i7 4900MQ "Haswell" CPU with Intel 520 SSD, and I'm always one to encourage encrypted disks especially for mobile systems, here are some new benchmarks of Ubuntu 13.10 with no disk encryption versus home directory encryption versus a fully encrypted LVM of the root EXT4 file-system.

Dot Categories: KDE Official NewsBack in the last months of 2010, the ALERT Project began. Part-funded under the European Union's 7th Framework Programme, the project followed in the footsteps of research efforts such as NEPOMUK. Its objectives were to help open source developers to work more effectively and to produce better software by improving bug tracking, resolution and software quality tools.

We've had the Gazelle Pro at Phoronix the past few days and have been running a plethora of Linux benchmarks on the high-end Haswell system with Core i7 4900MQ CPU, Intel SSD, and beautiful 1920 x 1080 display. As one of the final tests before having to return the review sample, I was curious how the Gazelle Pro compared to the Serval Pro -- the Ubuntu-friendly hardware vendor's laptop from two years ago when Intel "Sandy Bridge" CPUs were the latest and greatest.

One of the unique benefits of the Coreboot open-source BIOS/firmware project is that it can support loading the Linux kernel directly after initializing the motherboard -- instead of using GRUB2/SeaBIOS, the Linux kernel can be included on the ROM chip. This isn't a new feature to Coreboot, but with a Git commit made today it's now easier to configure.