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Open source news for your reading pleasure. May 3 - May 9, 2014, 2014 In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at the new Unreal Tournament game's collaborative development plan, a website to help voters get their voice heard, and more.

Slackel Live KDE 4.10.5 has been released. Slackel Live KDE 4.10.5 includes the current tree of Slackware Linux and KDE 4.10.5 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE-centric software. Linux kernel is 3.10.30. Firefox 24.5.0esr is the web browser, KMail and KTorrent are the main networking applications included in this release, followed by Akregator, an RSS reader for KDE, Kopete, the KDE instant messenger and more. It comes also with OpenJRE 7u51, Rhino, IcedTea-Web, GParted. The wicd utility is used for setting up your wired or wireless networking connections. In the multimedia section, Dragon multimedia player, Clementine 1.2.1 and K3b 2.0.2 are included. The Salix codecs installer application can be used to install patent-encumbered codecs.

The focus of this article is to select the finest Erlang books which are available to read for free. Some of the books featured here are released under an open source license. All of the texts have a lot to offer for a budding Erlang programmer.

Cut out the middleman by managing your own webmail for personal accounts and avoid any unnecessary downtime

The Wine development release 1.7.18 is now available.

As Canonical announced two weeks ago, Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS is the X-Gene 1 from Applied Micro and the Thunder from Cavium Networks. Red Hat has demonstrated its Fedora development Linux on the X-Gene 1 and AMD’s “Seattle” Opteron A1150 processors, and Jon Masters, chief ARM architect at Red Hat, said at the ARM Tech Day that 98.6 percent of the packages in RHEL are “ARM clean,” and added that this is a full-on 64-bit implementation of the stack and that Red Hat would not support 32-bit code and that the support for 64KB memory pages made it impossible to do a 32-bit port.

The developers of Calibre 10 Racing Series have stated that they love Linux and a Linux version is based on how much demand there is for one.

Recently, an interaction problem between systemd and the kernel was reported. After a calm discussion, developers of both projects found ways in which behavior could be improved and set about coding up the solutions. The technical press was filled with glowing reports on another success of collaborative problem solving... or, perhaps, most of the preceding text is entirely fictional and the systemd "debug flag" problem spiraled out of control in several ways at once.

Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr is an official derivative of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that uses the popular KDE desktop environment. According to information from the development team, this version offers more stability and also brings the latest apps for KDE.

We sort of expected this to happen after the appeals court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held its oral arguments back in December, but CAFC has now spit at basic common sense and has declared that you can copyright an API. As we noted, back when Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to better understand the issues in the case) ruled that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, his ruling was somewhat unique in that it was clearly directed as much at an appeals court panel who would be hearing the appeal as it was at the parties. Alsup rightly suspected that the judges on the appeal wouldn't actually understand the issues as well as he did, and tried to break it down clearly for them. Unfortunately, the three judge CAFC panel did not pay attention.

Every week brings us new reports about the destructive effect of software patents in the US, and of a patent office there that is only too willing to grant them and other undeserving patents: an excellent if depressing article by Timothy Lee points out that the "allowance rate" - the percentage of patents that are eventually granted by the USPTO - is now a staggering 92%.

There are very good grounds for fearing that the imminent new Unitary Patent system will bring exactly the same problems to Europe, and yet there has been almost no discussion about it, certainly not here in the UK. Similarly, British citizens have not been asked whether they want this new system foisted on to them. You might say that's an unreasonable thing to expect, since patents by their very nature are complex, specialised subjects. That may be true, but the fact that Denmark will be holding a national referendum on the subject in a few weeks' time, shows that it can be done.

Several security issues were fixed in cups-filters. Sebastian Krahmer discovered that cups-browsed incorrectly filtered remote printer names and strings. A remote attacker could use this issue to possibly execute arbitrary commands. (CVE-2014-2707)

Phillip Hallam-Baker discovered that window property values could be queried in rxvt-unicode, resulting in the potential execution of arbitrary commands.

This week, we look at why Oracle keeps missing the point of the cloud, an AT&T video naming the cloud from 1993 and why internet companies back net neutrality.

Docker is an open-source container technology for application virtualization and currently runs on multiple Linux distributions, including Red Hat and Ubuntu. What CoreOS is aiming to provide is a purpose-built Linux operating system, optimized for Docker containers. CoreOS is backed by venture capitalist firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, told eWEEK that so far he has raised a seed round of financing in an amount that has not yet been publicly disclosed. CoreOS has been in alpha since August 2013.

D-Link has jumped into the IoT space, with a Linux-based smart AC power socket for IP-based monitoring and control of lights and other appliances. We all know D-Link as a maker of routers, NAS devices, surveillance cameras, and media players, but the “DSP-W215 Wi-Fi Smart Plug” represents a new milestone for the company: its entry into the brave new world of the “Intenet of Things” (IoT).

These days, it seems as though anyone who uses the Internet is a tasty morsel for insatiable data thieves. Marketers, governments, criminals and random snoops won't be satisfied until they can snarf whatever information they want about us at any time.

If you want to dodge ad trackers, have sensitive sources to protect or you just want to conduct your normal online activities without being spied on, then The Amnesiac Incognito Live System (better known as Tails) could help.

We can program our humble Bash prompt to display all kinds of useful information, and pretty it up as well. We're sitting there staring at our computers all day long, so why not make it look nice? We will learn how to quickly test new configurations and quickly reverse them, how to make nice colors, how to display different types of information, customize it for different users, and make a multi-line prompt.

It's no secret that open source has shaken up the software world, not least for the savings it's brought both organizations and consumers. Now it's starting to look like open source hardware could have a similar, game-changing effect.

Though still nowhere near as ubiquitous as FOSS, open hardware is gaining ground rapidly -- especially with the booming popularity of open source 3D printing -- and some very compelling benefits are becoming clear.

Set up this DIY stop-motion studio and see what you can do