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The good news is that open source has become the leader on the desktop. The bad news is that a single desktop is not the leader, and that leadership on the desktop may no longer matter.

If there is one word that often percolates conversations hailing the benefits of open source, it is choice. We often celebrate many of the 800+ Linux distributions, the countless desktops, applications, frameworks, and more. Choice, it would seem, is a good thing. Interestingly, choice is also an emotive thing. read more

Don't bother lugging around a standard laptop to administer your Linux servers. Considering Chrome OS is faster, less likely to flake out on you, and less expensive, a Chromebook makes for a great mobile admin tool for remote Linux servers.

LiteSpeed web server is a popular choice for replacing an Apache web server. Its features include an optimization of the web content and content delivery which maximizes the download speed and combines better performance with a smaller memory footprint. Being compatible with Apache features is also an added benefit, which helps to reduce downtime during migration from Apache to LiteSpeed. This tutorial shows the installation on a CentOS 7 server.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.

As a programmer I sort and collect a lot of research, and my problem has always been finding a place to store it all. I had Jekyll in mind for a while, but it always seemed so daunting to get into. After a few days of configuration, I was able to create a Jekyll workflow that enables me to do a few things: read more

Opera Software revealed yesterday that a proposal to buy the company has been made by a Chinese consortium, and they are most likely going to accept it. The company is now trying to convince the community that it's a good thing.

In Soviet Russia, computer uninstalls you! The Russian government says it is looking to dump Microsoft and adopt Linux as the operating system for agency PCs.…

Linux: Load kernel modules at boot-up

At the same time, Canonical is finally delivering on its promise to deliver one codebase for all devices. The upshot is you'll be able to use the first Ubuntu tablet, the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet, as a PC as well as a tablet.

The Linux-based Tizen 3.0 operating system is being adopted for Raspberry Pi 2, in an effort to make the operating system much more popular.

Most people who use computers understand at least the basics of how they work. There's the hardware, that actually does the computing; an operating system, that sits on top and serves as an interface between the computer hardware and the programs run by users, and then the actual applications we use which sit on top of that. Sometimes, though, it's a little more complex than that simple abstraction. read more

Mentor Graphics has updated Mentor Embedded Linux (MEL) with Yocto Project 2.0 code, SMACK security, and support for CANopen, BACNet, and 6LoWPAN. Mentor Graphics has spun a more secure and industrial IoT-ready version of its commercial Mentor Embedded Linux (MEL) distribution and development platform that moves up to a modern Linux codebase built around Yocto […]

I’ve been going to FOSS (free and open source) conferences since 2006. My first open source conference was FreedomHEC in Seattle, a little 30-person conference for Linux users to protest Microsoft’s WinHEC. My next open source conference was OSCON, which had over a thousand attendees. They were both very different conferences, and as a college student, I really didn’t know what to expect. Going to your first open source conference can be intimidating, so I’ve complied ten tips for people who are new to the conference circuit.

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This is indeed a large payoff, one that indicates Warner/Chappell is not willing to test the merits of its case in front of a jury. The merits of the case, of course, are pretty much some random assertions with little documentation to back them up, but assertions that have, nonetheless, allowed Warner to obtain an estimated $50 million in licensing fees over the years. The $14 million Warner will pay is roughly in line with what it expected to make during the remaining years of the copyright term.

Elesar’s “Titanium” is a feature-rich board based on TI’s AM5728 SoC, featuring dual Cortex-A15, dual DSP, and dual Cortex-M4 cores, plus a dual-core GPU. It’s not too often that a workalike board ships before the original, but that appears to be the case for UK-based Elesar’s Titanium development board. The Titanium is not really a […]

An offer of $1.2 billion was made today for the acquisition of Opera Software ASA by a Chinese equity investment fund.

The case ruled upon on Tuesday goes back to the time when SCO famously tried to force enterprise Linux users to pay SCO a license fee, since according to SCO, Linux was nothing more than a stolen version of SCO Unix being dressed up under another name. IBM, already a little ticked off at SCO because they’d sued them for the billion dollars, told SCO “hell no,” or words to that effect, when they heard of the licensing scheme, terminated whatever dealings they had left with the company, and just before slamming the door in a huff on their way out, told SCO that they would encourage their partners to do likewise.

On Wednesday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) introduced a new bill in Congress that attempts to halt state-level efforts that would weaken encryption.

The federal bill comes just weeks after two nearly identical state bills in New York state and California proposed to ban the sale of modern smartphones equipped with strong crypto that cannot be unlocked by the manufacturer. If the state bills are signed into law, current iPhone and Android phones would need to be substantially redesigned for those two states.

The public will soon be free to sing the world's most famous song.

Music publisher Warner/Chappell will no longer be allowed to collect licensing royalties on those who sing "Happy Birthday" in public and will pay back $14 million to those who have paid for licensing in the past, according to court settlement papers filed late Monday night.