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After many rumours, Valve has now officially confirmed that it is porting its Steam game distribution platform to Linux. A port of the first-person shooter game Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) is also being worked on. The announcement coincides with the launch of a new Valve Linux Team blog, which will provide a first hand account of future Linux developments at the company.

What do Bill Reynolds, Fabio Erculiani, and Clement Lefebvre have in common? They spearheaded new distributions that have become staples in Linux desktop computing. Beginning new projects is particularly difficult and not all who try succeed. So, that's why Todd Robinson might sound a little nuts with his newest experiment. He's going to attempt to create and release a complete Linux operating system each and every day for a whole month.

Google's Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has released an overview of Android's security features. The document explains concepts such as the application sandbox, the permission management framework and inter-process communication.

Like Ubuntu's Unity interface? Great. If not, you can easily change it to look and act like Ubuntu used to. This tutorial shows how. I won't debate whether Unity is an improvement. This article is simply a "How To" for those who want to alter it. We'll start by customizing Unity. We'll add and delete icons from the applications Launcher on the left-hand side of the screen, then we'll add icons and folders to the desktop. I'll introduce some Unity tweaking tools.

Finally some non-Phoronix exclusive information about Steam/Source Engine on Linux ;) Valve Software has begun to write about their Steam Linux client initiatives on their public blog. Over at blogs.valvesoftware.com/Linux is the start of the Linux blog! This should be linked to from the main Valve Software blog in the near future, I'm told (I was just pinged by them this evening about the soon-to-go-live blog post). The first post is entitled "Steam’d Penguins"; the post's author isn't displayed but I would assume it was written by Mike Sartain.

Some Linux kernels require more release candidates than others, no matter what Linus Torvalds wants.

There may be no end in sight to the ongoing Secure Boot Saga in the Windows 8 world, but the same, alas, cannot be said for Mozilla's Thunderbird. No, as was apparently prematurely revealed by a leaked email earlier this month, the "end" for the desktop email client may be all too near now that it's no longer "a priority for Mozilla's product efforts."

LXer Feature: 16-Jul-2012

The latest installment of the LXWR of the weeks big stories for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

The DebConf 12 developer summit ended on Saturday in Managua. Here is a recap of the prominent Debian Linux and open-source discussions that took place in Nicaragua's capitol for the past week.

Earlier this week at DebConf there was a discussion about Debian derivatives so that Debian's offspring could share their experiences and also for the Debian developers to share various derivative-related initiatives. Some friction between Debian and distributions based upon it (namely Ubuntu) were exposed.

On Wednesday, the Italian region of Puglia passed a law requiring the public sector to utilise more open source software and to make more data freely available to the public. The law consists of 21 articles setting out a series of rules aimed at fundamentally changing the relationship between the citizens and the regional government. The law gives the region's citizens the right to access all information and services provided by the public sector in digital form. Digital diversity is also to be encouraged through the use and dissemination of open source software.

What do the Energizer Bunny and the ongoing Windows 8 Secure Boot Saga have in common? Yes, that's right: They both just keep going. Scarcely a week goes by these days, in fact, without some fresh proclamation to fan the flames of UEFI controversy here in the Linux blogosphere.

Windows may still be the default operating system on the vast majority of mainstream PCs thanks to Microsoft's many longstanding OEM partnerships, but that's not to say it hasn't been possible for some time to buy desktop machines with Linux preloaded.

Do you ever have that moment when someone asks you for a recommendation on a book, and when put on the spot you spin around in your office chair, scan your ever-growing library of books that you bought over the years of IT experience but either:A. Never read? B. Flipped through but never finished? C.Passed out halfway through the first chapter? 

While I've never been giddy with praise over a project-planning application, GanttProject has enough going for it for me to consider using as a regular go-to planning tool. Its user interface is structured clearly so it is easy to understand. GanttProject lets you break down a project into a tree of tasks and assign available human resources to work on each.

With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 "Squeeze" to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

While it isn't the first inexpensive gaming console and open gaming platform to test the market, the open source Ouya gaming platform is generating buzz. A Los Angeles-based project, Ouya is billed as "a new kind of video game console" on Kickstarter, the open crowd funding online site dedicated to giving innovative ideas a chance in the market. As CNet notes, it only took about eight hours of crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter for Ouya's $950,000 startup goal to be met. Can this open, hackable game platform do as well in the actual market?

The inventor of object-orientation, co-designer of Smalltalk, and UI luminary opines on programming, browsers, objects, the illusion of patterns, and how Socrates could still make it to heaven.

Ouya might have assembled the right ingredients to make its open source entry into the video game console competition a success. "It is a good time, and I'm glad to see it start," said M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon. "This is one area where third parties can easily build on top of Android and do so freely."

Andreessen Horowitz is investing $100 million in GitHub, the San Francisco startup that provides online resources for software programmers. It's the largest investment the venture capital firm has ever made. Github's acceptance of the cash is notable. Unlike many startups, the company has been profitable since its 2008 beginnings, and it's turned down investment offers in the past.