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Finally, the KDE project has released KDE Plasma 5, a major new version of the venerable K Desktop Environment.

Plasma 5 arrives in the middle of an ongoing debate about the future of the Linux desktop. On one hand there are the brand new desktop paradigms represented by GNOME and Unity. Both break from the traditional desktop model in significant ways, and both attempt to create interfaces that will work on the desktop and the much-anticipated, tablet-based future (which may or may not ever arrive).

Cisco has released a guide for deploying Hadoop as a Service on Ubuntu OpenStack, Canonical's open source server platform for the cloud and Big Data.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2014

In the Roundup this week we have how to remove file metadata on Linux, USB ports are no longer our friends, Linux use grew 50% year-over-year in India, open source education for kids, hackers unveil their evil plans for e-mail, a new distrosharing website and a big conversation starter on why or why isn't all government software open source? Enjoy!

There are untold riches awaiting those who can create smartphone apps – luckily getting started with Android is really easy

The latest version of m23 extends the spectrum of supported client distributions by adding support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Linux Mint 17 Qiana.

A few months ago, the Heartbleed bug was discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which plays an absolutely critical role in securing confidential online transactions. We then discovered that for years this critical piece of infrastructural software has been maintained by a handful of overworked volunteers. The industry was rightly shocked by Heartbleed, and some companies – notably Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Amazon – agreed to donate $300,000 each over the next three years to support the OpenSSL project. You can interpret this as "corporate social responsibility". I call it common sense.

The net neutrality saga continued today as well as the FCC made September 15th the final day for public opinions. It was just yesterday that the Federal Communications Commission asked for an explanation for their act of slowing down the internet for specific kind of data. According to the recent reports, the FCC has for the time being officially postponed the implementation of the new set of rules.

The speakers and sessions planned for this year’s events showcase how leaders in diverse industries are using the power of open source and collaboration to innovate and advance technology for all. The open source principles espoused by Linux and other projects have grown and expanded to now be used in many other areas including healthcare, manufacturing, data science and more.

In the world of consumer electronics, if you don't give the buyer what they want, they'll go elsewhere. We've recently witnessed this with the Firefox browser. The consumer wanted a faster, less-bloated piece of software, and the developers went in the other direction. In the end, the users migrated to Chrome or Chromium.

Customer reports of blue screens of death and reboot loops have led the company to withdraw several updates and recommend that users uninstall MS14-045. Since Patch Tuesday this past week, Microsoft has been receiving reports of severe system errors caused by one or more of the updates. In response, the company has pulled several updates from download channels and offered advice on how to remove them. In one case, it recommends that users uninstall the update.

Create a custom build of the Gentoo distro from the ground up, to suit your preferences and even speed up your system

If the owner can disable a phone with nothing but access to a computer or another mobile device, so can Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia or Apple. Google and Apple have already demonstrated their ability to remove software from all devices using their respective operating systems. If the designers of a phone’s operating system can brick a phone, guess who else can do the same? Everybody from the NSA to your friendly neighborhood police force, that’s who. At most, all they’ll need is a convincing argument that they’re acting in the interest of “public safety.”

It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of my bits and pieces of information has unfortunately been an issue for some years. In part, this is because of my passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as 'brain fog'. To combat this, I arm myself with open source software that helps me efficiently capture a lot of information.

The -- very old -- laptop of a friend of mine died the other day and I offered to give her my old laptop as a replacement. Problem was, an old version of Windows was installed on my old laptop which I had to get rid of. Since I did not have any spare Windows product keys at the time, I decided to install Linux on the device instead. While the main reason was that I could do so without paying a dime, it would improve the overall system security as well which is always a good thing. Since I'm not really a Linux guy, I had to do some research on how to get Linux on the device. Turns out, it is pretty simple and straightforward.

Here is what you need for that:

Open source games roundup Week of August 10 - August 16, 2014 A quiet week in open source gaming news. I spent most of my gaming time trying to figure out Divinity: Original Sin, which... isn't out on Linux yet, but will be soon. How soon? Good question. read more

Vringo's win over Google was one of the biggest and most public jury wins for a "patent troll" in recent years. It won $30 million from a jury verdict in 2012, far less than the half-billion-dollar verdict it was seeking.

But last year, the judge overseeing the case revived Vringo's hopes, ordering Google to pay a running royalty amounting to 1.36 percent of US AdWords sales. Those additional payments could have been more than $200 million annually, pushing Vringo investors toward the billion-dollar payday they were pining for.

Wind Power Monthly (I had no idea such a thing existed) has an article about how Intellectual Ventures is apparently targeting its patent trollery towards wind power, having filed a bunch of patents on very broad and basic concepts related to wind power. Of course, IV is trying to hide its involvement here by using one of its many shell companies.

Many of the Flock talks were logged in PiratePads. We’re hoping to gather a list of them all, so if you have a link to one not listed here, please […]

Six things that Windows users should know about Linux. Plus: Four Linux download managers, and why has the controversial systemd been adopted so quickly?

In the following article we will show you how you can secure and protect your Ubuntu or Debian based virtual server using a firewall application, called iptables.