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Amarok is installed by default with the KDE version of openSUSE but is it the best audio player or would you be better off installing Clementine instead?

Over the last few columns, we’ve looked at some fundamental concepts in Python, concerning objects, object- oriented programming and how objects are stored in memory. This issue, let’s take a look at the Raspberry Pi and one of the unique features not usually offered on single-board computers. Of course, I’m speaking of the GPIO pins. GPIO stands for general-purpose input/ output. The pins provide an interface between the Raspberry Pi and the outside world. They can act as either inputs into the computer, or outputs to the world. With the addition of these pins, the possibilities for the Raspberry Pi explode. It goes from being simply a single-board computer to a project platform.

The KDE Applications 4.13 announcement highlighted the delightful new capabilities of Palapeli, the KDE jigsaw puzzle application. What the announcement did not mention is that the Palapeli maintainer, Ian Wadham, is celebrating 50 years of software experience. He’s ready to hand off Palapeli and his other KDE software development responsibilities. Albert Astals Cid called attention to Ian’s achievements and suggested a Dot interview.

The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May 2012, by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and open source software movement developed its licenses.

In today's open source roundup: North Korea Linux 3.0 has been released. Plus: iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite users can search with DuckDuckGo, and Tim Cook smacks Android around.

Two releases from Samsung are making the headlines this week. And the headlines are centered around the Samsung Z Tizen OS smartphone and the Samsung Tizen OS TV SDK (Software Development Kit).

You have missed the openQRM Community Summit 2014? Now worries! We have recorded the talks for you so you can view them online now!

Samsung finally lifted the veil on the world’s first Tizen smartphone, the “Samsung Z,” and is showcasing it at this week’s Tizen Developer Conference. In its announcement of the Tizen Z, Samsung described it as being “built on top of unparalleled quality and the cutting-edge technology of Samsung’s latest premium smartphone.” Despite the rhetoric, the Z’s specs aren’t particularly spectacular — yet it still earns high marks for chutzpah, being the first mobile handset to venture down the untrodden Tizen smartphone path.

Obviously, there have been an awful lot of patent lawsuits in the past few years concerning smartphones and various software and hardware associated with smartphones. The folks over at law firm WilmerHale have now released a paper, which conservatively (and thoroughly) estimates that the patent royalties that need to be paid by smartphone manufacturers currently exceeds $120 per device -- which they note is right around the price of the components themselves (found via FOSS Patents, which notes that the estimates in the paper almost certainly lowball the patent royalties, so they may be much higher). Basically, more than half the cost of making a smartphone these days is in paying off patent holders.

The idea of OS convergence is starting to take a hold in the world and major companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Canonical are working hard to achieve it. There seems to be a race going on and all the players want to reach the finish as soon as possible.

It's no secret to anyone paying attention to the video game industry that the graphics processor war has long been primarily waged between rivals Nvidia and AMD. What you may not realize is just how involved those two companies are with the developers that use their cards and tools. It makes sense, of course, that the two primary players in PC GPUs would want to get involved with game developers to make sure their code is optimized for the systems on which they'll be played. That way, gamers end up with games that run well on the cards in their systems, buy more games, buy more GPUs, and everyone is happy. According to AMD, however, Nvidia is attempting to lock out AMD's ability to get involved with developers who use the Nvidia GameWorks toolset, and the results can already be seen on the hottest game of the season thus far.

The only way to truly beat Hack 'n' Slash, a new video game from Double Fine Productions, is to reprogram it. But playing the game—a sendup to traditional adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, which place players on quests that involve battling monsters, collecting artifacts, and solving puzzles—requires no programming knowledge whatsoever. Nor does it demand familiarity with coding tools. Instead, Hack 'n' Slash makes manipulating the game's source code part of the game itself. To play it is to hack it.

I’ve been watching HBO’s tech-startup spoof Silicon Valley. One of the reoccurring background jokes is that every software company, large and small, purports to be making the world a better place — usually as a sort of reflexive afterthought with no real meaning. In Fedora, we’re a little more modest with our claims, but we back them with both sincerity and action. We sometimes debate the relative positioning of our “Freedom, Friends, Features, First” foundations (of course we do — we’re a community-driven open source project, and so everything is always up for discussion), but our collective goal of leading the advancement of the free and open source world together is never in doubt.

The first smartphone running the Linux-based Tizen mobile OS launched today. The Samsung Z will first be made available to app developers.

The way Linux development has worked for the last several years has been relatively straight forward. Every six to 10 weeks there is a new Linux kernel, with each kernel requiring six to eight release candidates. At the end of the release cycle, Linus Torvalds opens up the 'merge' window during which new code is pulled in from the various sub-system maintainer developer trees.

One of the developers of Desktop Dungeons has written a blog post from a Windows user point of view about getting Unity games to play nice on Linux.

If you code a little, you know how handy an Integrated Development Environment (IE) can be. Java, C, Python, they all become a lot more accessible when the IDE software is checking the syntax for you, compiling in the background, or importing the libraries you need. On the other hand, if you are on Linux, […]Continue reading... The post How to turn Vim into a full-fledged IDE appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to open a large text file on Linux How to edit a remote file over ssh How to install Adobe Flash Player on Linux How to take a full-length screenshot of a web page in Linux How to set up C/C++ development environment in Eclipse

Red Hat today announced Matthew Miller as the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project. Miller takes over for Robyn Bergeron, who announced on May 19 that she was stepping down as Fedora Project Leader.

Suppose you are working in a data center or company and your boss puts a dumb debian server setup and you need to configure it in the running environment. Yes it is little painstaking, but not very tough task. In my case I have a dumb debian server which was installed by someone in his networking environment and I want to make it functional in my static IP environment. Suppose I have a vacant IP 192.168.0.100 and I will implement it in my environment. My IP details are as follows:

The US Supreme Court issued rulings this morning in two of the five patent cases it heard this term. In both cases, the high court unanimously struck down rules created by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation's top patent court.

The two rulings continue a pattern that has developed over the past several years, in which the Supreme Court has overturned key Federal Circuit rulings, finding them too favorable to patent-holders and too harsh on parties accused of infringement.