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Thinking about launching a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign to fund a custom Linux-powered SBC for powering your dream product? Gumstix says it has come up with a better way: find 50 collaborators, agree on a design, and have first articles of your custom SBC built and booting Linux in under three weeks. Sounds tempting, but [...]

Build systems are deeply siloed by development language and primarily rely on the '80s model of spelling out targets and instructions. But new tools, such as Gradle, that cater to polyglot apps and the needs of continuous delivery are finally emerging.

The City of Boston has teamed with edX to create BostonX. It will offer free online college courses throughout the city. And it will make MOOCs (massive open online courses) available at community colleges and libraries throughout the city. BostonX is still in its infancy but the city hopes to make MOOCs more available and accessible to residents and visitors. Boston's Mayor Thomas Menino envisions neighborhoods as "mini campuses" around the city. He believes that this will only increase the city's impact and standing on the nation and world as at the forefront of education.

With the Linux 3.11 kernel due to be released in the coming weeks, here's an overview of the most exciting changes for this next major Linux kernel update...

Intel kicked off a five month Yocto Project Innovation Challenge today, offering 254 prizes to developers who submit embedded Linux product or project ideas involving Yocto Project software running on Intel processors. Six types of prizes — ranging from $50 gift cards, to Yocto Project hoodies and blimps, to 480GB SSDs — will be awarded [...]

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too. What to do? I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad.

Open source software has come a long way since the moniker "open source" was first coined in 1998. The Cathedral and the Bazaar helped to explain this new paradigm of software production, and history has proven that the profound implications predicted by Raymond’s essay were not only credible, but now also obvious. And perhaps because of the open source software community’s awesome record of success, those who work outside the strict boundaries of software development have started to wonder: Are there new paradigms, based on open source principles, that could rock our world, too?

As I was diving back into Window Maker for this article, it occurred to me that the desktop manager I used for years with Debian is disturbingly similar to the Unity Desktop. It's been clear since its inception that I am not a fan of Ubuntu's new Unity interface, yet it's odd that for years I loved Window Maker, which seems fairly similar, at least visually.

Direct Insight has launched a $200 development kit built around its Linux- and Android-ready Triton-TX6Q computer-on-module based on Freescale’s quad-core i.MX6Quad ARM Cortex-A9 system-on-chip. The kit combines the COM with a baseboard that adds an SD slot and connectors for Ethernet, dual USB, audio, serial ports, and optional capacitive touchscreens. U.K.-based Direct Insight announced the [...]

Feng Office's tag line is: Unleash your team's potential. It's an open source collaboration platform for teams and businesses that began as an academic project at UdelaR University. Interested students worked on the initial research and development, and today it remains an open source project.

Fresh out of five days at OSCON and all the fun events around Portland that week, a group of devoted hackers came to our Tizen Devlab and Hack to check out Tizen‘s open source, HTML5-based mobile OS, which is being brought to the world by the Linux Foundation with support from Samsung and Intel.

So, you're finally considering giving Linux a try. It's about time! And it's really not as scary (or different) as you may think. The myth that you had to be some kind of computer guru to use Linux is utterly untrue. Today's top desktop Linux distributions, such as Mint, openSUSE, and Ubuntu are easier to use than Windows 8.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has ratified the SATA 3.2 storage spec, adding support for a SATA Express spec that can piggyback on faster PCI Express lanes, and defined a new embedded single-chip microSSD. SATA 3.2 also embraces the tiny, SATA Express based M.2 form factor, which debuted in recent Intel and Samsung SSDs. [...]

LyX is a graphical tool, with a familiar drop-down and content-driven menu system, for writing and editing LaTeX documents. TeX and its higher-level macro language, LaTeX, are powerful document markup languages that are the de facto standard for Linux users. New users can find them difficult to work with because you must know the available markup tags, the contexts they can be used in, and how to use a text editor and previewing tool. LyX simplifies the entire process of working with LaTeX documents not just on Linux. Learn how to install, use, and customize LyX on Linux, UNIX, Windows, and Mac OS X systems.

When Edward Snowden leaked intelligence files, a storm was triggered in the cloud, leaving a path of destruction. Snowden’s email provider Lavabit shut down. So has the email offering of Silent Circle. The Guardian ran a story declaring: Lavabit’s closure marks the death of secure cloud computing in the U.S. And the EU is not entirely unaffected either. Be it by the Tempora program in the UK or the U.S. National Security Agency facilities that reportedly reside in Germany.

Open source news this week: August 12 - 16, 2013 What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

Puppy Linux, the lightweight and speed-oriented Linux distribution based upon Slackware, has updated their "Slacko" release to version 5.6 and with Puppy Linux 5.6 comes full F2FS file-system support...

HMTL5 is such a low-cost and portable alternative to native app development that it makes sense to explore solutions that address its limitations.

Adapteva announced a Parallella University Program (PUP) to provide free Parallella single board computers to universities engaged in parallel programming research. Last month Adapteva began limited shipments of its $99 open source Parallella SBC, which combines a Xilinx Zynq-7020 ARM/FPGA SoC, running Ubuntu, with a homegrown 16-core Epiphany coprocessor. Last October, Adapteva launched a Kickstarter [...]

One of my favorite workshops to give is the one that introduces librarians and their staff to open source software. After defining open source to them and debunking all the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) out there, I focus my talk on a list of open source tools that can be useful to libraries.