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On July 27, Arne Exton, the creator of several Linux kernel-based operating systems, had the pleasure of informing us about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his Exton|OS Light distribution.

Good luck getting it patched on non-Nexus kit any time soon – may as well just buy a new one. The vast majority of Android phones can be silently infected each by a single text message, allowing criminals to worm their way into as many as 950 million devices.

On July 19, 2010, Chris Kemp, at the time NASA's CTO for IT, went on stage at the OSCON open-source conference to announce OpenStack, a new open-source effort along with Rackspace. Five years later, OpenStack has emerged as one of the leading cloud platforms governments and big-name companies around the world use.

phpMyAdmin, the popular free and open source web based tool for administering MySQL databases, has left the SourceForge building. In a blog post on Saturday, the project’s infrastructure coordinator, Michal ?iha?, announced that a migration from Sourceforge is all but complete. The few remaining items left on the SourceForge server will be “hopefully handled in upcoming days as well.”

Akademy Awards. Each year the KDE Community presents Akademy Awards to people who have made special contributions. The jury this year was made up of recipients from last year.

Scilab is an OpenSource Linux software for numerical computation similar to Matlab. This tutorial shows how to handle files and load data into Scilab for later use or processing. Scilab will interpret the code in the file and it's structure and format, etc. To use a file within the Scilab environment, it is necessary to use a number of previous commands that allow both reading and interpretation of the file in question.

Almost all Android mobile devices available today are susceptible to hacks that can execute malicious code when they are sent a malformed text message or the user is lured to a malicious website, a security researcher reported Monday. The vulnerability affects about 950 million Android phones and tablets...

The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the latest phone to ship with the operating system built by Canonical, and it's also the most powerful available right now. We'll take a closer look at it, and we'll try to determine whether it's good enough to stand on its own.

At OSCON this year, Amye Scavarda and Leslie Hawthorn gave a talk entitled "Fear of Failing Fast: How to Avoid Sabotaging Your Success." I just had to attend. Here's a summary of the talk. read more

Yule bee … you'll bee … you'll be butter off … better off without it, says ad giant Google has decided the autocomplete API it informally offers will no longer be available for “unauthorised” users as of August 10th.…

I attended Una Kravets' OSCON talk, "Open Source Design: A Love Story," after interviewing her recently. read more

The developers of the lightweight desktop environment Enlightenment (used in various Linux distributions) anounced their 0.19.7 release.

According to the Enlightenment team Enlightenment is in the transition from X11 to Wayland.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' (UAV) applications and capabilities are advancing at a phenomenal rate, and the cost of these systems is decreasing at an equally impressive rate largely because of the open source. In many cases, open source projects are outpacing the development of their equivalent closed source systems. To further accelerate these developments, in late 2014 several companies came together to form the Dronecode Foundation, a nonprofit organization that brings together existing open source drone projects and assets under one umbrella organization governed by The Linux Foundation. read more

Utopic Unicorn gets another gallop to leap security rainbow Ubuntu has changed its mind on an end-of-life announcement, giving Version 14.10 one last kernel patch to cover off some big vulns.…

In today's open source roundup: How well does the Chromebook stack up after three months of use? Plus: Debian dumps SPARC hardware architecture. And Ubuntu MATE drops the Ubuntu Software Center.

Last month, after nearly two decades of using free and open source software, I attended my first conference: SELF. I even gave a little talk there, a kind of high-level overview of open source tools available to those of us who produce creative work (you can watch it on SELF's YouTube channel if you have an hour to kill). read more

Update: I was contacted by Gabe Aul, our Ring Master, directly and he has informed me that a fix is in the works for this and will be pushed out soon.

The day today started out with showers of water drops as the late comers to Akademy waded their way amidst raincoated cyclists and residents of A Coruna sheltering themselves underneath coloured umbrellas...

The Ubuntu MATE distro will no longer ship with the Ubuntu Software Center, starting with the next 15.10 Alpha 2 released, announced one of the project developers.

A new industry group called HEVC Advance is threatening to demand royalties for the new HEVC video codec that could halve the bandwidth required for streaming online video or offer higher resolutions with the same bandwidth usage. The organization is promising to demand a royalty of 0.5 percent of revenue from any broadcaster that uses the codec for streaming. This move could re-ignite the arguments surrounding video codecs on the Web and may well jeopardize services such as Netflix's year-old 4K streaming service.