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Mention the year of the Linux desktop, and you are guaranteed to get a laugh. The six words have become a catchphrase, with the implication that it will never happen. But, even more importantly, the laughter indicates a change in attitude.

Recently, I drove to the Netherlands for a day to hang out with about half the people who work at Greenpeace International. The meetup actually lasted an entire week, but I only attended Thursday, a day on which newly formed teams gathered to do some bonding and better understand each other's work. We talked about purpose and vision, as it was the first in-person meeting after a rather large re-organization that has been taking place over the last year or so. read more

The first major point release for LibreOffice, the 5.1 branch, is being worked on this weekend during the 1st Bug Hunting Session. This promises to be an important upgrade that should really make a difference.

The new Director of Community at GitHub, Jono Bacon, delivered a keynote at All Things Open this year titled: The new era of community. His talk was largely a call action to do better job of leading, guiding, and engaging in open source communities. Here's how. read more

SFC GPL enforcement hearing scheduled for 2016 Software Freedom Conservancy has spat out a “high level” update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year.…

Python is everywhere. These days, it seems it powers everything from major websites to desktop utilities to enterprise software. Python has been used to write all, or parts of, popular software projects like dnf/yum, OpenStack, OpenShot, Blender, Calibre, and even the original BitTorrent client. read more

Lately I've been pondering email clients. Yeah, something as simple and yet profoundly necessary as email. The whole of email has become a bit of a conundrum, as so many people are now getting their fix via mobile devices...or they're working within webmail.

Most people store and organise their personal emails as individual files (messages) in folders. Those folders might be on a webmail company's servers, or in a mail client program on the user's personal computer. In both cases the emails are probably in a special email format.

I'm horribly old-fashioned. I store my emails in plain text files, one long file for each correspondent, in chronological order. To make this easier I use the two shell scripts described in this article.

LISA is an annual technical conference for IT operations professionals, organized by The USENIX Association. The first LISA was held back in 1986, and the event still has a reputation for delivering top-notch technical content and an exceptional hallway track. This year, Amy Rich (Mozilla Corporation) and Cory Lueninghoener (Los Alamos National Laboratory) co-chaired the conference. In this interview, Amy offers a preview of what's in store at LISA15 and tips for conference-planning teams. read more

Renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has revealed earlier the fact that the upcoming Linux 4.4 kernel branch will be an LTS (Long-Term Support) one, maintained for a couple of years.

Aaeon’s first SMARC module features quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, soldered RAM, eMMC, dual display outputs, PCIe expansion, and -40 to 80°C operation. The “?COM-BT” marks Aaeon’s first venture into SMARC territory. Interestingly, Aaeon chose to use SMARC’s “short” (80 x 52mm) option, rather than SMARC’s larger 82 x 80mm size that’s closer to […]

Neofytos Kolokotronis was more than happy to announce that his Arch Linux-based Chakra GNU/Linux distribution will finally make the switch from the old-school KDE4 desktop environment to KDE Plasma 5.

Learn how to set up your computer hardware for Linux and how to find information about your hardware via Linux commands and tools. You can use the material in this tutorial to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or to learn for fun.

The development of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) has started, and we even know the launch date for it. We can now begin to track the Linux kernels that will be implemented in the daily builds.

Red Hat is opening up Ceph's open-source, object and block cloud program leadership to other leading companies such as Canonical and SUSE.

After the short-term support release Ubuntu 15.10, the next long-term support release Ubuntu 16.04 has been opened for development. The release that is named "Xenial Xerus" has received initials packages. The final release of Ubuntu 16.04 is expected to come out in 30, April, 2016.

Canonical's new Juju-based cloud app store for Ubuntu Linux offers tight OpenStack integration. Mark Shuttleworth announced the system at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo.

Avogadro is a molecule editor and visualizer, and one of the most advanced open source scientific software tools. It features many capabilities that can be useful in teaching as education can be much more effective when theory is combined with the actual depiction of realistic models. Here is a basic tutorial on how to use Avogadro in education.

In my last article, I introduced the Libreboot project: a free software distribution of coreboot, which is itself an open-source BIOS replacement. I also talked about some of the reasons you may want to run a free software BIOS and discussed some of the associated risks.

In 1992 I started working for the Tandem Computers subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was part of the team that started Tandem's operations in Brazil, and at the time I was the one and only techie in the group. Tandem was later acquired by Compaq, and now it's the NonStop division inside HP. At the time, Tandem manufactured and sold a high availability Unix System, the NonStop Integrity. It ran a customized version of AT&T's Unix System V Release 4.0, and used a Veritas file system, which is quite similar to what we have today with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). read more