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It’s a Christmas miracle! That is, if by miracle, you mean yet another example of the limits of "ownership" in the digital world.

Last Saturday evening, Bill Jackson, a Wisconsin father, sat down to watch a nice Disney film with his two kids, aged two and eight. As they were settling in for a cozy night of “Prep & Landing 2: Naughty vs. Nice,” the elder son discovered that the film that the family had paid $3 for was no longer available.

My colleague Lee Hutchinson had a hell of a time getting Windows onto our SteamOS box. Through a series of mishaps and misfortunes, he somehow managed to destroy a Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive hybrid thing, create multiple UEFI partitions with multiple boot loaders, make SteamOS think it was Ubuntu, and thoroughly confuse both himself and the poor PC we were using.

Datawind is bringing three commercial “UbiSlate” versions of its 7-inch, Android 4.0 Aakash tablets to the U.S., including a model that starts at $38. Datawind’s three new UbiSlate tablets are based on the Aakash 2 educational tablet that shipped in India in early 2012, as well as an upcoming Aakash 3 model. The Aakash 2 was hailed as the world’s cheapest tablet, at about $40, and was available to schoolchildren at lower prices thanks to subsidization by the Indian school system. In India, sales of the Aakash 2 overtook the iPad according to U.K.-based Datawind.

Fedora 20 was released today, with support for ARM as a primary architecture. While x86 will still be the default for most Fedora users, classifying ARM as a primary architecture means that "it receives the same amount of attention that the x86 and x86-64 releases get," Fedora Project release notes say.

It might not get the attention Fedora and Ubuntu do, but its parent is still one of the major enterprise Linux distributions. Released on schedule as always, openSUSE is considered by many as being the best KDE distribution, constantly contributing directly to upstream KDE project. A number of other desktops are also supported, I will take a look at some of them in this article.

On December 12th, the Qt Project released Qt 5.2. This version will form the foundation of Frameworks 5, the upcoming modularized release of the KDE libraries. As part of the Frameworks efforts, KDE devoted considerable effort to integrating valuable KDE technologies into Qt 5.2.

Although many people are excited about the hardware-hacking possibilities with the Raspberry Pi, one of the things that interests me most is the fact that it is essentially a small low-power Linux server I can use to replace other Linux servers I already have around the house.

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 20 ('Heisenbug'), which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Fedora Project. Fedora 20 comes with GNOME 3.10, which has several new applications and features that will please GNOME lovers.

Roku added YouTube to its Roku 3 media player, addressing a glaring omission, and enabled one-click sending of YouTube videos to Roku from a mobile device.

Osdad OS 2.0 is available. Osdad OS is a project created by the OSDAD organization with the aim of research, innovation and community development.

I thought that would be fairly straightforward. Not so much. I thought there would be some utility I could run that would count syllables for me, then I could run /usr/share/dict/words through it, print out all the 6-syllable words, and find one that fit. Turns out there is no such utility.

But Python has a library for everything, doesn't it?

A security researcher with George Washington University, DiMino noticed several IP addresses attempting to hijack the Linux server by exploiting a now-patched PHP flaw that gave attackers the ability to remotely execute commands on vulnerable machines. DiMino was curious to know what the people behind the attacks intended to do with his machine, so he set up a "honeypot" box that, for research purposes, ran an older version of the Web development language.

The ODroid-XU contains 8 CPU cores in a big.LITTLE configuration where four of the cores are active at any time. The Single Board Computer comes with 2Gb of RAM, USB 3, a microHDMI connector able to output 1080p, 10/100 network connectivity, a microSD slot, and the ability to connect up to 64Gb of eMMC flash memory to the system.

Security firm Kaspersky Lab has been monitoring cyber attacks on gaming systems and the firm says that the release of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One coincides with sharp rise in hacking attacks in late November. Kaspersky says they estimate an average of 34,000 cyber attacks per day on a global scale. The firm now knows of 4.6 million malware pieces that are targeting these new gaming systems.

Once you have a fully working Raspberry Pi system, it may not be convenient for you to continue to access Raspberry Pi directly via a keyboard and HDMI/TV cable connector dedicated to Raspberry Pi. Instead, you will want to remote control "headless" Raspberry Pi from another computer. This tutorial will show you how to remote control your Raspberry Pi.

At the request of our users, we’ve decided to create a quick screenshot tour of the brand-new SteamOS Linux operating system from Valve, showcasing the GNOME 3 desktop environment used in the regular desktop mode.

The role of community managers continues to evolve. I started to realize this after attending my first Community Leadership Summit earlier this year. My biggest take-away from it? Community management is an investment and its value is increasing. Heads up to employers: buy, buy, buy, and then invest some more.

We have reopened the discussion about Unix to Linux migration with respect to careers of Unix and Linux professionals and its impact on organizations and the entire FOSS community. Kerry Kim, Director of Solutions Marketing for SUSE, has shared with us his insights regarding the continuing effort in migration from proprietary software.

When Oracle finally joined the OpenStack party last week, it raised a few eyebrows as people questioned their motives, but it could be nothing more than Oracle recognizing a trend it couldn't ignore any longer.

LXer Feature: 17-Dec-2013

Fedora 20 is officially released today with a lot of signficant additions, improvements, and bleeding-edge things to get cut on.