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After a few hours of work alongside an electrical engineering buddy this week, my home garden drip system became powered by a Raspberry Pi. I can control the entire thing locally from my iPhone and, to be frank, it’s pretty flippin’ cool.

For some background, I’m a very lazy gardener. When my wife and I bought our house in 2012, our horticultural mission was Hippocratic (do no harm). In other words, we wanted—at the very least—to not kill the plants we inherited from the previous owners.

In part 2 of this series, we look at some new browser sandboxing developments in Firejail security sandbox. Since the first article was published, many new features have been added. Unlike other sandboxes, the main focus of Firejail project is GUI application sandboxing, with web browsers being, at least for the immediate future, the main target.

That, of course, was followed by a series of sessions that were, for the most part, once again standing-room-only, like Alison Chaiken’s systemd talk, where I understand no gunfire was exchanged. One track, SCALE: The Next Generation, is one where teens organize their own FOSS track and that did not disappoint, from wunderkind Justin King and his 65-year-old computer to Keila Banks’ talk on starting a FOSS-based business to Levente Kurusa talking about the Linux desktop and when it will be “our year.”

Ubuntu is the perfect Linux for a Newbie to start off with. They have a very good online community to help with any questions. Why, just ask anything about Ubuntu in Google and you will get a response that will help you correct your problem. I have long been a fan of Ubuntu, and used it extensively in my early years of Linux.

LinkSprite launched a gig-Ethernet version of its PCDuino3 SBC, featuring the same dual-core Allwinner A20 SoC, plus SATA, WiFi, and Arduino compatible I/O.

Ben Hutchings, the maintainer of the Linux 3.2 kernel branch, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and upgrade of a new maintenance release for Linux kernel 3.2, version 3.2.67, urging users to update to it as soon as possible. Linux 3.2.67 kernel is a long-term supported version mostly used on very stable environments or embedded systems.

Robolinux is proud and excited to announce our newly released 'X-Treme Plasma Speed' Robolinux KDE version 7.8.1. A mind-numbing amount of time and effort went into optimizing the KDE core and boot-up speed in order to make it run faster and use less RAM so that Linux beginners and advanced users would be very pleased. We believe that Robolinux KDE 7.8.1 is the fastest and most customizable KDE operating system available today.

Lenovo is all over the media recently, and not for a good reason. The revelation that it corrupted its computers with the vile Superfish adware has shocked many people in the computing world. It’s almost impossible to believe that a company could be so incredibly stupid and so unbelievably uncaring about the security of its customers.

Thanks to the ever more awesome SteamDB, we have a possible list of games Valve will demo on Steam Machines at GDC, and the list is interesting.

Linux has a good range of extremely strong chess engines such as Stockfish, Critter, Togo II, Crafty, GNU Chess, and Komodo. The chess engines featured in this article offer no match to a good chess engine, but they show how much can be achieved with a minuscule codebase.

Internet Relay Chat has a history of over 25 years and it is still a widely used text-based protocol for chatting. In the Linux world, each distribution and major project has a chatting room, usually on Freenode, and here you can get online help, participate in collaborative projects, or just have a look at the latest discussions regarding the development of some project or application.

Hello, open gaming fans! In this week's edition, we take a look at a Kickstarter bringing phyiscality to video games, how the Kano is teaching young girls to make games, the new World Video Game Hall of Fame, and more!

TEA is a Qt-based text editor with support for tabs, syntax highlighting, spell-checking, editing support for Wikipedia or LaTex, as well as many configuration options. The latest release, 40.0.0, has been put out earlier today and it represents a major milestone.

Kickstarter is hosting a wireless-savvy “OpenPi” mini-PC based on the RPi Compute Module. If you wait a bit, you can get one with the quad-core Pi 2 module. For almost a year, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has served the needs of professional embedded vendors looking to ship commercial devices based on the Raspberry Pi SBC. However, this computer-on-module (COM) version of the RPi Model B can be tricky for less experienced hardware developers. On Kickstarter, U.K.-based Wireless Things has successfully funded an “OpenPi” mini-PC based on the module designed primarily for software developers.

ClearOS is a server, gateway, and network platform tailored specifically for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as distributed enterprise environments. According to the release notes, ClearOS Community 6.6.0 brings support for YouTube School IDs, support for ISO-to-USB keys, support for WPAD (Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol), support for QoS (Quality of Service), as well as an updated Intrusion Detection engine.

The corruptible press continues to describe blatant attacks (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) against GNU/Linux and Free software as Microsoft 'embracing' Open Source

Victor Vran is a promising RPG in Early Access from the developers of the Tropico games. We have it confirmed from a developer that the game will be on Linux too.

The Apple TV set top box has been around for quite a while now, but it has never been as much of a priority for Apple as the iPhone, iPad or even Macs. Apple long regarded it as a hobby, and that attitude might have finally caught up with Apple TV. A prominent Apple blog has come out in favor of Amazon’s Fire TV as a better option than the Apple TV. Yes, a writer at a well known Apple blog has actually opted for the Fire TV instead of the Apple TV.

"That adds up to 1,963 first-time developers over the course of about fifteen months," the report states. "Remember that 4,171 developers overall contributed to the kernel during this time; one can thus conclude that nearly half of them were contributing for the first time. Many of those developers will get their particular fix merged and never be seen again, but others will become permanent members of the kernel development community."

According to this blog entry by Sean Davis, Xfce contributor and Xubuntu Technical Lead, Xfce 4.12 is to be released in about one week, this being quite an important announcement, since it comes after almost three years in which no new releases have occurred.