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While Wayland 1.4 is set to be released next month with many new features and has seen contributors from many different companies, the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu continues to be developed exclusively by Canonical...

It’s a short and to-the-point Xmas message from Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who is now living temporarily in Russia. It originally aired on BBC’s Channel 4.

Last week was marked by the first Wayland/Weston 1.4 Alpha release ahead of the planned general availability in January. For those that aren't up to date on all of the development activity, I've now had the time go through and highlight all of the major changes that landed in Git...

Bloomberg Philanthropies recently launched the Mayors Challenge, a contest for funding in the European Union where large cities submit new, innovative ideas for solving local problems. The EU contest is modeled on a similar competition for cities in the United States, where more than 300 cities submitted ideas covering issues ranging from sustainable development to education to citizen development. The grand prize of that contest went to a program in Providence, R.I. that works to improve the vocabulary of children in low-income households.

RSA has issued a statement denying allegations stemming from Friday's bombshell report that the encryption software provider received $10 million from the National Security Agency (NSA) in exchange for making a weak algorithm the preferred one in its BSAFE toolkit.

The VideoLAN project has announced the release of libbluray 0.5.0, the latest version of the open-source Blu-ray library. This latest release has better BD-J Java support and other new/improved features...

Hardkernel and its community Odroid project have announced an open-hardware single board computer based on Samsung’s quad-core 1.7GHz Exynos 4412 Prime SoC. The Odroid-U3 is claimed to be “100 percent software compatible” with the Odroid-U2 that began in Dec. 2012 and is now being discontinued. As with other Odroid SBCs, the U3 runs a variety […]

What were the Linux community's biggests achievements in 2013? The answer may depend on your perspective. In a demonstration of what one of the most important organizations in the open source ecosystem thinks, however, the Linux Foundation's director has issued an informal report summing up everything Linux has done in the past year in the cloud, cars, Android, high-performance computing and more.

So I finally did my FedUp upgrade from Fedora 19 to 20, and one of the things hanging me up was the AMD Catalyst driver, the packages for which come from RPM Fusion. I should have looked into this more BEFORE I did the upgrade, because there are no kmod-catalyst packages for F20.

As everything gets more expensive, at times a wonderful low-cost gift is cherished more so then the high priced latest fad gadget, particularly if its done right.

Last year, the USPTO released a widely cited report entitled “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus.” This report emphasized the importance of IP to the U.S. economy, claiming “the entire U.S. economy relies on some form of IP,” and estimating that “IP-intensive industries” accounted for 40 million American jobs and 35% of the U.S. GDP in 2010.

While many pro-IP groups hailed the report as demonstrating the importance of IP to the American economy, the report was widely panned by critics who pointed out that the definition of “IP-intensive industries” was so broad as to be meaningless. Indeed, according to the report, the number one IP-intensive industry by employment in the United States was… grocery stores.

Linus Torvalds has let release candidate five for version 3.13 of the Linux kernel into the wild for some festive footling. The Linux Lord let the new release candidate loose in this post that declares “Nothing really exciting stands out” which is “just how I want it.”

ExTiX is a desktop Linux distribution and live DVD based on Ubuntu and featuring a customised GNOME 3 desktop. The ExTiX ISO is now a ISO-hybrid, which means that it can very easily be transferred (copied) to a USB pen drive. You can then even run ExTiX from the USB stick and save all your system changes on the stick.

Today in Open Source: Dual boot Android and Ubuntu. Plus: Is Debian suitable for new Linux users? And a screenshot tour of Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 Alpha 1.

KDE 4.12 is now available for users to install on Ubuntu or derivative distributions, we will show you how. Users that recently installed Ubuntu 13.10 or any of the derivatives may want to upgrade to KDE 4.12. This version brings improved performance and stability, but not much more.

While Intel's open-source OpenGL Linux driver improved a lot in 2013, sadly not advancing as much is the Intel OpenCL Linux driver for GPGPU support.

This article highlights versatile open source software that aids cross-stitching and knot design. The software featured here helps individuals create their own charts from scratch or generate charts from imported pictures. Good quality open source software in this field is very sparse, fortunately there are still a few real gems.

Many of our best articles in 2013 covered open source projects and businesses, including open business models for heirarchy and modes of operations within the company structure as well as businesses built on and serving up open source software or hardware.

AppArmor, which is considered an alternative to SELinux, is the default application access control system of Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu packages (e.g., libvirt, MySQL) come with their corresponding AppArmor profiles which restrict the capabilities of programs to be installed. If you are suspecting that AppArmor is interfering with particular software, you can try disabling its AppArmor profile as part of troubleshooting. Here is how to disable a particular AppArmor profile.

From Ubuntu 13.10 to a surprise Microsoft Office 365 alternative, here are the 10 most read Open Source blogs and news stories from The VAR Guy in 2013. Hats off to Contributing Blogger Christopher Tozzi for most of this content.