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Nokia on Monday confirmed months of speculation with the unveiling of its X family of smartphones running Android. The X, X+ and XL are priced at $123, $136 and $150, respectively. Like Nokia's low-end Asha line, the X devices come in bright colors.

IBM thinks that opening its middleware stack to the cloud in BlueMix will prove to be winning bet.

A gaggle of Chinese web firms have come together with a plan to protect Windows XP users in the Middle Kingdom for at least the next two or three years, according to local reports. The unusual step will see messaging giant Tencent, search engine Sogou, software company Kingsoft and several others offer technical support for XP including system upgrades and security services, said Xinhua.

I'm not saying I own a XP machine and use it for anything..but if I did this would be interesting to me.. - Scott

Linux distributions are flexible and modular in nature, allowing them to squeeze into all sorts of interesting niches. Some distributions package as much software as possible, others remain lean, some focus on the desktop market while others operate best in the server room. This week we take a look at projects working in a variety of markets. We start off with Chakra, a distribution which brings cutting-edge software and fast performance to desktop systems. Then we turn our eyes to the Ubuntu community where Canonical is making progress in their march to bring Ubuntu to mobile devices. We also discuss how Canonical is handling user privacy and confusion around the company's licensing policies. Plus, we share updates on the OpenBSD project's fund-raising efforts. In our Questions and Answers column this week we cover a few simple ways to protect servers against brute-force password guessing attacks. We are happy to bring you news of distribution releases from the past week, plus we look forward to fun new developments to come. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com January 2014 donation is the QupZilla web browser project. We wish you all a wonderful week and happy reading!

Like IPv6, DNSSEC is one of those great forward-looking protocols that nfortunately hasn't seen wide adoption yet. Before I implemented it myself, I could see why. Although some people think BIND itself is difficult to set up, DNSSEC adds an extra layer of keys, key management and a slew of additional DNS records.

Today in Open Source: Do too many Linux distros disappear? Plus: Proper Linux advocacy, and photos of the new Ubuntu phones.

I've been playing with the idea of converting to Arch Linux, at least on a trial basis, for some time now.

Welcome again, it's time for a brand new Humble Indie Bundle.... The Humble Indie Bundle 11 is here!

So, this annoyed to the point of having to write about it. Hero Siege was sold on IndieGameStand DRM free and without warning the developer has now removed the DRM free version and has tied it to Steam.

When you install a Linux distribution, a set of programs comes along with it. It's easy to add and delete elements of the programs that don't fit with your needs, but what about altering the look and feel of the distribution to suit you? The key is to add a second desktop environment or window manager. This is an example of how Linux is all about freedom of the user, by the user.

Vendors and original equipment manufacturers (OEM)—and their IT customers, governments, and academics—are all using, buying, and making open source software, and often all three activities at once. This is a good way to think about one’s relationship with open source software projects. There are three activities one typically engages in with respect to the open source software project: make, use, buy.

Stencyl is an interesting toolkit that enables you to create games without traditional programming, and they have just released the big 3.0.

In Barcelona today, Nokia not for the first time laid out its plans to capture the next billion smartphone users. The new approach: Nokia X, a third line of smartphones to slot between the low-end Asha and the high-end Lumia range. The Nokia X range will run the Andrcusoid Open Source Project (AOSP) operating system, but without Google's stack on top of it. Instead, it'll have a Nokia store, Microsoft services, and a custom front-end.

The overview includes only games which are completely free, with a permissive license for both the code and their content. I could not include here games like Urban Terror or Warsow, since their assets are not free, nor Steam games.

Our second official testing release for Parsix GNU/Linux 6.0, code name 'Trev', is available now. This version ships with GNOME Shell 3.10.3 and Linux 3.12.9 kernel built on top of rock-solid Debian 'Wheezy' (7.0) platform. Almost all GNOME packages have been upgraded to the latest stable versions and base packages have been synchronized with Debian 'Wheezy' repositories as of February 16, 2014. The artwork is also pretty much final.

Network Manager is a feature-rich network configuration service which is used by default in most Linux desktop environments nowadays. While Network Manager comes with various sophisticated features, you might just prefer the old plain network service. This tutorial describes how to disable Network Manager in various Linux desktop environments.

For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.

Per an announcement to the vim developers, Diego Viola who's interested in Neovim explains it as "to refactor and modernize the [vim] codebase." This was already criticized by vim's Bram Moolenaar who was quick to say, "It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly? Total refactoring is not a solution. It's much better to improve what we have. Perhaps with some small refactorings specifically aimed at making Vim work better for users."

The company, which is famed mostly for its Firefox browser, has partnered with Chinese low-cost chip maker Spreadtrum. While not as powerful as more expensive models, the device will run apps and make use of mobile internet. It would appeal to the sorts of people who currently buy cheap "feature" phones, analysts said.

Any project that does not rely on financial motivation to get workers to contribute needs special skills to encourage people to do their best... and to avoid the terrible effect when a group implodes politically. These hard-won lessons might save YOUR open source project.