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The H's Hardware Hacks section collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. It's where you can find out about interesting projects, the re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition: turn a Raspberry Pi into a Tor anonymising proxy, RS Components introduces a site for open source hardware projects, two new boards to control Arduino projects from mobile devices, and an augmented reality backend for Drupal.

Canonical said the first members of the group are Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, SK Telecom, and "the leading Spanish international carrier." We've asked Canonical to identify the Spanish carrier, although based on the description it may be Telefónica (also known as O2). With the exception of Deutsche Telekom, the owner of T-Mobile, the list doesn't include any major US carriers. Canonical said that "any national or multinational carrier" may join.

For those looking for the latest drama in the Ubuntu Linux land, the fighting over whether KDE and GNOME should support the Mir Display Server to complement the in-development Wayland support continues to be hotly discussed.

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), a confederation of German open source providers and users, and its French counterpart, the Conseil National du Logiciel Libre (CNLL) have agreed on a wide-ranging collaboration. The two organisations want to better coordinate their campaigning at the European level and to collaborate with other European open source organisations.

Researchers at EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory (Biorob) announced a cat-like robot that is claimed to be the fastest quadruped robot under 30 kilograms. The Cheetah-cub Robot, which runs real-time Xenomai Linux on an x86-based RoBoard control board, mimics the biomechanics of a cat to increase the speed and stability of it quadroped legs, helping it achieve speeds of 1.42m/s.

Logic Supply has signed a deal with RapidRollout to offer the latter’s custom Linux appliance platforms on embedded computers aimed at non-desktop applications such as interactive kiosks and digital signage. RapidRollout is a lightweight, customized version of Ubuntu enhanced with features like remote management tools and easy-to-use configuration and set-up utilities, says the company.

Red Hat has made a name for itself as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and it has proven that its Linux-focused strategy is very profitable. In fact, the company is the first open source-focused company to hit the $1 billion revenue mark. That said, though, Wall Street has been questioning where else the company might be able to generate revenues in the future.

Let's talk about a touchy subject: the Linux desktop. It's touchy because, by any reasonable measure, Linux on the desktop has yet to capture a significant market share of the desktop and portable PC platform. This has to be said, right up front. It does not make me particularly happy to point this out, given all the great work being done on the desktop by openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and all of the environment and application projects out there.

It is easy to take a screenshot in Ubuntu. You can use the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (if it comes with one), the default screenshot tool or any other third-party software like Shutter. What if you want the system to take a screenshot automatically at a regular interval, say every 5 seconds? The above tools won’t be able to do the job. Here is a quick way you can take screenshots in Ubuntu at regular interval.

Sad that Game of Thrones has wrapped up its third season? Looking for some drama to fill the time? We've got just the thing for you. One of the Internet's longest-running and most-hated lawsuits is back: SCO v. IBM has been reopened by Utah district court judge David Nuffer.

The story sounded plausible. Red Hat was said to have announced that the next version of its flagship operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 would ship with the MariaDB database management system (DBMS) installed by default, instead of Oracle's MySQL. Too bad the story was wrong.

Eric Wirttman, CEO of POTI (Pioneers of the Inevitable), which produces the open source media player Songbird, has announced on the Songbird blog that, for financial reasons, Songbird development will cease and POTI will shut down its business activities as of 28 June.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsAre you attending Akademy 2013 in Bilbao? Do you want to get something special out of your Akademy experience? Be a volunteer. The Akademy Team needs motivated people who are passionate about Free and Open Software, especially KDE, one of the foremost communities of any kind in the world. There is a variety of tasks to fit with diverse interests and skills.

The US District of Utah has re-opened the SCO v IBM court case, as Groklaw reports. The never-ending legal story originally started in 2003 when SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM, alleging the company had violated some of its intellectual property in its Linux products. It temporarily came to an end when SCO filed for reorganisation under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code in 2007.

Already published on Phoronix have been Intel HD Graphics 4600 benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux from the Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor and compared against previous generations of Intel HD Graphics. Being benchmarked today is the Intel HD Graphics 4600 on Linux compared against various AMD Radeon graphics cards using both the open and closed-source graphics drivers.

As a matter of course here at OStatic, we're committed to compiling documentation and guidance resources for popular open source platforms and applications. After all, one of the most common critcisms of open source creations is the lack of official project documentation. One of the best ongoing projects for producing free open source-related documentation is FLOSS Manuals. It's an ongoing and ambitious effort to build online guides for open source software. Recently, the site has added useful documentation for some projects that may interest you, including Firefox and the interesting collaborative editor Etherpad.

awk is a splendid Unix scripting language for processing text files. The version included in most Linux distros is GNU awk, or gawk for short. I like it for pulling data from ordered data sets, such as text lists and CSV exports from spreadsheets. awk sees each line in a file as a separate record, and each item in a line as a separate field, which makes it possible to slice and dice your files in all kinds of flexible ways. The classic way to illustrate this is with /etc/passwd; this example prints the whole contents:

Embedded Linux developers looking to tap into Intel’s 4th Generation “Haswell” Core processors can soon turn to seven new COM Express Type 6 computer-on-modules. The new COMs include models from Aaeon, Adlink, Advantech, Congatec, Kontron, Nexcom, and Portwell.

IBM officials are looking to accelerate the adoption of Linux in the data center and are taking a number of new steps to push along the effort.

Question: How do you get more developers to contribute to a free and open source software project? Contribution is the lifeblood of a FOSS community  Without contributions the community can’t grow beyond the initial project founders. People don’t just show up ready to work. They very likely start as users, even of the fledgling software before it really starts to take shape as the robust solution it could become. Let’s approach the question of getting more developers involved as "software engineers" instead of as "community organizers" by asking a different question: Why do we use software versioning a.k.a. software configuration management tools?