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A group styling itself as veteran UNIX administrators has announced that it has set up a fork of the Debian GNU/Linux project. Named Devuan, the fork comes as a reaction to the Debian decision to adopt systemd as the default init system for its next release, Jessie.

For those of you who don't yet know about Docker, it is a much-hyped Silicon Valley startup productising (what a horrible unword) Linux containers into something that's sort of easy to use.

The Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" MATE distribution has been made available and the ISO images can be downloaded from the officials servers. Just like the Cinnamon flavor, the MATE edition is quite heavy on the new features.

The Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015. For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development.

While we in the States were dealing with family and turkey, the EU was busy working on preparing Google’s head for the platter. The European Parliament yesterday passed by a wide margin a non-binding resolution urging anti-trust regulators to break up the company. For those keeping score, the final vote was 384 yeas and 174 nays.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at an open source iPad alternative, Creative Commons turning 12, and more!

Some of the world's best threat detection platforms have been bypassed by custom malware in a demonstration of the fallibility of single defence security. Five un-named top advanced threat detection products were tested against four custom malware samples written by researchers at Crysys Lab, Hungary.

Ha, from ongoing discussions surrounding Systemd/Init in Debian, anybody could have predicted this was going to happen sooner or later. Well, it has happened. A fork of Debian has been announced by the “Veteran Unix Admin collective.”

We put pro suites and no-frills tools to the test in search of the perfect place to write a script

At its heart, Creative Commons is a simple idea. It’s the idea that when people share their creativity and knowledge with each other, amazing things can happen. read more

The Ubuntu Touch operating system has reached a new milestone and Canonical has released a new update for the RTM branch, bringing the entire project a little closer to a shippable version that can run smoothly and without any bugs.

Devuan (pronounced "Dev One") aims to be a base distribution whose mission is protect the freedom of its community of users and developers. Its priority is to enable diversity, interoperability and backward compatibility for existing Debian users and downstream distributions willing to preserve Init freedom.

Coder is an experiment for Raspberry Pi, built by a small team of Googlers in New York. It converts a Raspberry Pi into a friendly environment for learning web programming. It is ideal for beginners and requires absolutely no experience with coding. read more

This document describes how to install and configure Nagios in Ubuntu 14.04 Server.  Nagios is a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes.

Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" Cinnamon has been released and is now available for download. The new version of the operating system features a major update for the desktop environment, along with a multitude of other upgrades.

In November 2014, the top six supercomputers all run Linux, but that's about the only thing they have in common.

Battle for Wesnoth is one of the flagship open-source games, with a huge, dedicated community and an almost unmatched feature-completeness among the open-source games.

You can interface a Raspberry Pi with Arduino components – now learn how to program them from the Pi and control robots like the Makeblock. Learning to code is one of the best things about owning a Raspberry Pi for a lot of people. Python and C are easy enough to start with on the Pi and you can get great results in a short time. When it comes to physical computing and making, though, not much beats using the Arduino IDE to control the open source controllers, servos and sensors associated with the system. Once set up, we can also use the Pi to program the Makeblock robot we reviewed in issue 142 of Linux User & Developer, using either the built-in commands or your own code.

The usage share of web browsers is dominated by a few mature applications. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera account for around 95% of all desktop web browsing activity. However, there are a myriad of other web browsers that are worth investigating.

In the latest Top500 supercomputer ranking, Linux once more totally dominates the fastest of all computers.