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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week's edition we look back at all of the news and stories in 2014 that we covered for open source and Linux games! read more

I’ve written a few blog posts about Facebook, and my view of the company is most definitely a negative one because of its attitude toward the privacy of its users. But I got quite the shock the other day when I read a comment posted by a reader in the thread of an unrelated post that indicates that Facebook might be blacklisting my site.

Healthcare is one of the most urgent socioeconomic issues of our time. This year, Opensource.com saw a variety of news and feature stories about applying the open source way and open source software (including tools) to alleviating the many problems faced by the healthcare industry. Here are this year's best of the best from Opensource.com in open health. read more

Linux desktop comes with a display manager (e.g., GDM, KDM, LightDM), which lets the desktop machine automatically boot into a GUI-based login environment. However, what if you want to disable GUI and boot straight into a text-mode console because you are troubleshooting a malfunctioning desktop manager?

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the the security of commercial open source, Google's surprise launch of ODF support, Uganda adopting free and open source software, and more. Open source news for your reading pleasure December 22 - December 27, 2014 read more

Each company will have its own level of comfort when it comes to moving their content or workloads to the cloud, but it won't be a question of if, come 2015. It will be a discussion of what and how that will happen. And it's about time.

What is API [First]? Not long ago, I was speaking at the National Association of Government Web Professionals. At the same conference, Mark Headd was speaking. We were speaking on different open data topics. My discussion was about the difference between open government and open data and his talk was about API [First]. read more

Centmin Mod is a shell script which provides menu based installer that allows you to install and manage the latest versions of Nginx webserver, MariaDB/MySQL, PHP and a DNS server on a CentOS VPS, without using a control panel.

On a personal note, some of you know that I inherited an old PowerBook G4 — yep, PowerPC 32-bit — now with limited options regarding what distro to put on it. It wasn’t like that when I started back in ’06 with Debian on an iMac, but I digress. I tried what few options are left on the PowerPC side, from both Linux and BSD, and the winner — drumroll, please — is Xubuntu.

When I first started using Linux, back in the mid-late nineties, a typical Linux installation was roughly four to five CDs and wound up installing applications geared toward scientists, programmers, HAM radio operators, and more. The kernel was built for a small sub-section of hardware it actually had support for (which included a lot of hardware most people didn't have). The typical resources needed to run Linux were quite small. The first machine I ran Linux on was a Pentium II 75 Mhz processor with 56 MB of RAM and an unsupported WinModem (which was eventually swapped out for a US Robotics 36.6 external modem).

Folks who follow news about FOSS, OSS and Linux who also watch the “talking heads” shows the TV networks serve up on Sunday mornings might be excused for not noting that David Boies, the lawyer speaking for Sony on this week’s “Meet the Press,” has on several occasions been involved in news stories affecting Linux. Over the years, he’s played the role of both friend and foe, but it’s been a while since his and the FOSS world’s paths have crossed.

The media has been abuzz with stories recently about how the Marriott hotel has blocked Wi-Fi access in a desperate attempt to get its customers to pay the hotel for Internet access. Yes, the Marriott – a billion dollar corporation – has been attempting to gouge its customers by blocking private Wi-Fi connections, and now the company wants the FCC to give them its blessing.

Wikipedia is one of the most frequently visited websites in the world. The vast online encyclopedia, editable by anyone, has become the go-to source for general information on any subject. However, the "crowdsourcing" used by Wikipedia opens their doors to spin and whitewashing–edits that may be less than factual in nature. To help journalists, citizens, and activists track these edits, TWG (The Working Group) partnered with Metro News and the Center for Investigative Reporting to build WikiWash. read more

In January 2014, Github removed the rug in its office's waiting room in response to criticism of its slogan, "United Meritocracy of Github." Since then, the criticism of the idea of meritocracy has spread in free software circles. "Meritocracy is a joke," has become a slogan seen on T-shirts and constantly proclaimed, especially by feminists.

As of December 19, the European Space Agency (ESA) is now sharing all of its images and videos from the Mars Express mission under CC BY-SA. ESA is using the intergovernmental organization (IGO) port of CC BY-SA 3.0. ESA is one of several intergovernmental organizations to use the IGO port since we introduced it last year. read more

SinoVoip is prepping an Banana Pi “M2″ update built with a quad-core Allwinner A31 SoC, while LeMaker has begun shipping a competing A20-based “Banana Pro.” It appears that the Banana Pi project has forked into two rival groups that are now pushing their own Banana Pi updates: SinoVoip’s “Banana Pi M2,” which is announced but […]

A new release of this venerable Linux distribution is always good news - and if you want to avoid systemd, this PCLinuxOS release could be your new best friend!

Recently Filip Krikav made a fork on github and created a Juno branch using the latest commit + fixing the problem of loading an image from glance.

One more prediction: Upon sailing through the Post-PC era, there will be a post-Post-PC era, after the advent of the pre-post-Post-PC era, where people will start thinking, “You know, I had a laptop (or desktop…or both) once where I didn’t have to strain my eyes on such a small screen, and where I actually got stuff done rather than just wasting time.” Or something like that.

Two years on, switching from a MacBook Pro to a Chromebook was the right answer for this geek.