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This short post is for those running a system on which Windows 7 or 8 (or 8.1) is installed in dual-boot fashion with one or more Linux distributions. If you have such a system and are wondering whether the integrity of the Linux side will survive an upgrade to Windows 10, well, it depends.

When you put your code out under an open source licence, how much control can you expect over what it's used for? Open source has often been described as 'free as in speech, rather than free as in beer'. Yes, it's software that's free to use, but the lack of a price tag isn't always the main point.

A $10 device capable of skimming access cards on the go is soon to be released into the open-source community.

A second Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 iteration has been released by Canonical, and the new version comes with a reworked boot logic for BeagleBone Black, among other features.

Avnet released a carrier board for its Linux-driven, FPGA-enabled MicroZed COMs featuring an Arduino shield interface and hooks to an optional MCU board. The MicroZed Carrier Card Kit for Arduino extends Avnet’s SBC-like MicroZed computer-on-module with Arduino and MCU expansion.

The ROSA company gladly presents ROSA Desktop Fresh R6, the number 6 in the "R" lineup of the free ROSA distros with the KDE desktop as a main graphical environment.

As always, the distro presents a vast collection of games and emulators and the Steam platform package along with standard suite of audio and video communications software including the newest version of Skype. All modern video formats are supported. The distribution includes the fresh LibreOffice version, the full TeX suite for true nerds as well, along with best Linux desktop publishing, text editing and polygraphy WYSISYG software. The LAMP/C++/… environment packages are waiting to be installed by true hackers.

In my last article, I started a series on some of the challenges related to spawning secure servers on Amazon EC2. In that column, I discussed some of the overall challenges EC2 presents for security compared to a traditional infrastructure and elaborated on how I configure security groups and manage secrets.

This tutorial describes how to connect an Ubuntu 14.04 Desktop with an ownCloud server by using the ownCloud desktop client.

Brent Picasso is CEO and co-founder of Autosport Labs (ASL), a company that develops open source motorsports technology. Their innovations allow enthusiasts to explore and enhance auto systems and to contribute back to the community. In this interview, I sat down with Brent and Ryan Doherty, principal at ASL, to talk about being open. read more

Dual-booting Windows and Linux really sucks. It’s not because I hate Windows, either. It’s because I feel it should be unnecessary. It’s a half-measure that allows a lot of Linux users to play games or get things done.

While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”

5281 free software passionate people met in Porto Alegre (South Brazil) for the 16th FISL edition, enjoying activities such as talks, panels, hackathons, workshops, and community meetings. All kinds of FLOSS-related topics were in place: development, translation, artwork, education, robotics, entrepreneurship, audio-visual, women and gender, politics, academia and research ...

Continuous integration is an integral part of an agile software development setup. Sprint after sprint, teams strive to "not break the build" while delivering incremental features. But when developers focus completely on adding features, code errors can sometimes creep in and render the software unusable. To stop such errors from being integrated into the SCM, a CI server is the gatekeeper that helps keep a tab on code quality. Even if the code is integrated to SCM, a CI server can very quickly tell you what went wrong. In this post, let's take a look at six open source CI server tools that you can use in your agile setup. read more

At OSCON this year, Kara Sowles and Francesca Krihely gave an amazing workshop on how to plan and run tech events. So many tech events I've attended have looked completely seamless, so I wanted to know what went in to planning events like that. read more

KDE Activities are multiple desktops. While easy to understand, they open up the possibility of new methods of workspace organization as well as new ways to layout the desktop. They deserve to be recognized as an innovation as important as tabbed browsing, and should be a part of every desktop environment, yet most users have only vaguely heard of them, and even fewer have tried them.

The Solus operating system is getting closer to a stable release and its developers are showing off some of the capabilities of the distro, including the boot time, which has got to be the most impressive result out there.

Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks began the second morning of OSCON 2015 with a talk about architecture. read more

In today's open source roundup: Some users think that the Chrome web store sucks. Plus: Wine 1.7.48 offers better support for Windows games and apps. And KDE unleashes Plasma Mobile Linux OS for phones.

Microsoft's 'working on a fix to this issue' – or you can go third party instead An issue with the Windows 10 Start menu means that those with more than 512 application shortcuts will have missing entries.…

There was a time when visiting a planetarium involved more than turning on your computer. I have long been fascinated with the night sky, but I live an hour's ride from the nearest planetarium. Luckily, I've discovered two open source applications that bring the stars to me: Stellarium and Celestia. read more