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Due to the unusual nature of this Ubuntu update, this review is going to diverge a bit from the usual formula. The first half will include a hands-on look at the new Unity features. The second half will take a close look at the Ubuntu roadmap and some of the major changes that we can expect to see over the course of the next several releases.

It sounds screwy, but I’m taking some of the elements I like in GNOME 3 and Unity and implementing them in Xfce.

Summary: The gendarmerie will have a fleet of 72,000 PCs on its own Ubuntu distro by next summer, as a result of the looming XP deadline.

Back in January, we reported on a truly stupid idea: making DRM an official aspect of HTML5. Things then went quiet, until a couple of weeks ago a post on a W3C mailing announced that the work was "in scope".

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Jason Hibbets wears many hats. One is red—he's a project manager for the open source leader, Red Hat. And, the rest are for newly defined roles in open source—including local government open source advocate and contributor. But, one of the biggest ways that Jason takes open source beyond technology is by highlighting the ways using open source software, hardware, and methodologies is changing business, education, government, law, and many more areas of our lives on Opensource.com.

Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

Open source news this week: October 14 - October 18, 2013 What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

We're deeply disappointed. We've argued before as to why EME and other protected media proposals are different from other standards . By approving this idea, the W3C has ceded control of the "user agent" (the term for a Web browser in W3C parlance) to a third-party, the content distributor. That breaks a—perhaps until now unspoken—assurance about who has the final say in your Web experience, and indeed who has ultimate control over your computing device.

Play as the daemon-hunter Baron Dashforth in a side-scrolling co-op brawler set entirely on the grand spectacle of a theatre stage that rewards performance over pummeling. Perform shattering takedowns and reversals!

The "Saucy Salamander" Linux release is a milestone on the path toward a complete desktop, server, cloud and mobile operating system.

The Linux Foundation has published a free white paper called “The History of Embedded Linux & Best Practices for Getting Started.” Written by tech-writing veteran Henry Kingman, the white paper shows how Linux advantages like virtualization, networking support, and open source licensing helped it gain market share at the expense of RTOSes.

Today in Open Source: Read reviews of Ubuntu 13.10 from around the web and find out if it's worth checking out

OpenStack Havana, an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud, has added features that make it even better suited for enterprise use.

Pocketwatch Games is set to unleash its action-stealth game Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine onto Linux "along with a ton of free/new content" Oct. 21, according to a post on the game's official Facebook page.

Part deux in the series on shell scripting. How to write a simple shell script that accepts and works with parameters and variables.

Everybody's heard of Git Hub, SourceForge, and perhaps Gitorious, but the little known Savannah Free Software forge is the source code repository of choice, for those who truly value Software Freedom.

Red Hat's Adam Jackson has proposed a set of ten XWayland patches that be merged into the mainline X.Org Server. These changes lay the groundwork for merging the rest of the X.Org Server changes for supporting this X11 compatibility layer to Wayland.

The open-source OpenStack Foundation is out today with its latest milestone release, code-named Havana. The OpenStack Havana release includes new projects for cloud orchestration and monitoring and improves on existing compute, storage and networking capabilities.

The X.org Developer's Conference was held in Portland this September, providing a venue to discuss a range of topics relating to OpenGL, drivers, the X server, Wayland and Mir.

It's been interesting to watch which components of Sun Microsystems' portfolio of products--many of which were open source projects--Oracle has chosen to embrace or abandon since its acquisition of Sun. One project that it hasn't jettisoned is VirtualBox, which has just arrived in a new version 4.3.