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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.

IPv6 has been introduced as a replacement of IPv4, the traditional 32-bit address space used in the Internet, to solve the imminent exhaustion of available IPv4 address space. However, since IPv4 has been used by every host or device connected to the Internet, it is practically impossible to switch every one of them to IPv6 overnight. Numerous IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms (e.g., dual IP stack, tunneling, proxying) have been proposed to facilitate the adoption of IPv6.

Now that it's become easier to swap out SIM cards on smartphones, the ability to swap devices to nearly whatever network you want is a reality. In some cases, the simple act of swapping out the SIM will be enough. There are cases, however, where the Access Point Name (APN) on the device will not allow the phone to communicate with the new carrier cell towers.

Attendance for SCALE looks like it may break previous records. Steve Bibayoff, who works the Free Software Foundation booth, asked me Friday evening if his badge number was any indication of how many people have registered so far. His badge number is a number just south of 3100; by a factor of less than 10. The answer to his question is “yes.”

Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is a side-scrolling game based on the original game Oddworld: Abe’s Odysee, released back in 1997. The game has been rewritten from scratch, and comes with new, modern graphics, enhanced audio and revamped gameplay.

Facebook's open-source leader details how the social networking giant participates in the Linux and open-source communities. -

Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.

Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk.

The first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Maps 3.16 app of the GNOME desktop environment has been announced as part of the GNOME 3.16 Beta 1 release of the controversial desktop environment. In this Beta, GNOME Maps received several improvements and bug fixes that we’ve detailed below for your general information.

"In open source, we put our laundry out to air in the front yard," Zemlin said. The Code Has Eyes

Zemlin quoted the oft-repeated Linus' law, which states that given enough eyes all bugs are shallow. That "law" essentially promises that many eyes provide a measure of quality and control and security to open source code. So if Linus' law is true, Zemlin asked, why are damaging security issues being found now in open source code?

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lawyer Daniel Nazer's Sisyphean task is right in his job title: he's the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.

So when Nazer says he's seen one of the all-time dumbest patents, that's saying a lot. Yesterday, Nazer and his fellow EFF lawyer Vera Ranieri filed court papers seeking to invalidate a patent on photo competitions. US Patent No. 8,209,618, owned by a little-known video website called Garfum.com, was used to sue four small photo websites last September that dared to ask people about their favorite photos.