Showing all newswire headlines

While not yet officially announced Mount & Blade: Warbound is out for Linux, downloadable and might even be playable for you.

If you saw last issue you might remember the DoodleBorg, a massive remote-controlled tank of a vehicle designed and built by PiBorg, makers of add-ons for the Raspberry Pi. This month we’re looking at their XLoBorg, a board designed to help you measure movement and determine direction, among other things. At under £10/$16, it’s a bargain too, because as well as featuring a three- axis accelerometer, it’s also kitted out with a three-axis magnetometer (digital compass). In this tutorial we’ll be using the accelerometer to turn our Pi into a tilt controller and mock up a simple demo to show how you could integrate it into your Pygame-powered games…

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Xfce. Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. The Update Manager was hugely improved. It shows more information, it looks better, it feels faster, and it gets less in your way. It no longer needs to reload itself in root mode when you click on it. It no longer checks for an Internet connection or waits for the network manager and it no longer locks the APT cache at session startup. Linux Mint 17 features Xfce 4.10, MDM 1.6, a Linux kernel 3.13 and an Ubuntu 14.04 package base.

In today's open source roundup: Chrome OS is getting Android apps. Plus: Get great Linux games on sale at Steam, and Makulu Linux KDE 6.0 released.

Can Google's Rebel Alliance of Android and Chrome OS finally dent Microsoft's Windows Evil Empire? I expect we'll see this desktop operating system war start in late 2014.

David Herrmann wanted to disable the virtual terminal subsystem in order to save space on a kernel that didn't need a VT. But, he still wanted to see kernel oops output for debugging purposes. The problem was that only the VT subsystem would display oops output—and he'd just disabled it.

If you're a big-time open source fanatic like me, you probably get questions about open source alternatives to proprietary tools rather frequently. From the 'Alternatives to Microsoft® Visio®' department, here are three tips that should help designers who use Visio in an open source environment. If you need an open source option for opening Visio files, a revived open source application for creating diagrams, or a lesser-known open source tool for converting Visio® stencils, these tips are for you. read more

The Asus 1015E isn't great hardware...at all. But Linux makes it workable for a great price. The larger question is, why didn't netbooks catch on?

Torchlight already exists on Linux but it cannot be found anywhere but the Ubuntu Software Centre! What about those of us who do not use Ubuntu? Why is this charming hack and slash action roleplaying game being withheld from our willing wallets?

Get to grips with yEd, one of the best flowcharting tools for communicating information about how processes work

The other day I heard the phrase every open source educator hates to hear: "Well, you get what you pay for..." So, this time in my talk to the group, instead of explaining that 'free' means 'free as in freedom' not 'free of cost', I changed it up. I replied, "You're right you do." read more

This guide explains how to install and configure Samba server in Debian 7 with anonymous and secured samba servers. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients. Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

ownCloud Community Edition 7, the latest version of the open source private cloud infrastructure, offers a new web interface and innovative server-to-server file sharing between private clouds.

This article explores where the KDE community currently stands and where it is going. Frameworks, Plasma, KDE e.V., Qt5, KDE Free Qt Foundation, QtAddons - you heard some of these terms and want to know what all the fuss is about? A set of articles on the Dot aims to bring some clarity in the changes and constants of the KDE community in 2014 and further. This is the first article, diving into the technical side of things: Plasma, applications and libraries.

VMware has posted an End of Availability Announcement for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Virtzilla used to hand full, and fully-supported, SLES licences to some vSphere buyers. As Vmware's page describing the offering states, the licences came “complete with patches and updates”. Those don't come free: SUSE's support pricing page lists prices starting at $US349 per physical server and $529 for a virtual server.

Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.

As you may have heard, this morning, the Supreme Court effectively killed off Aereo with an unfortunate and terribly problematic 6 to 3 ruling that can be summarized simply as the "looks like a duck" test. If you're not familiar with the history, decades back, when cable companies were first around, they started rebroadcasting network TV to cable subscribes, and the Supreme Court (rightly) ruled that this was perfectly legal. The broadcasters ran screaming and crying to Congress, who changed the law to create a retransmission setup, saying that if cable companies wanted to retransmit broadcast TV they had to pay fees. Aereo got around that by setting up a very different system -- or so we thought.

A controversial patent that has been used to wring millions of dollars in settlements from hundreds of companies is on the verge of getting shut down.

US Circuit Judge William Bryson, sitting "by designation" in the Eastern District of Texas, has found in a summary judgment ruling (PDF) that the patent, owned by TQP Development, is not infringed by the two defendants remaining in the case, Intuit Corp. and Hertz Corp. In a separate ruling (PDF), Bryson rejected Intuit's arguments that the patent was invalid.

Competition surrounding OpenStack in western Europe is heating up. OpenStack vendor Mirantis has opened a new office in Grenoble, France, to strengthen its position in the open source cloud computing market in western Europe. Red Hat acquired eNovance last week, another OpenStack specialist with roots in the same country.

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just […]