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Lubuntu 14.04 Beta 1 is available. Lubuntu is a fast, lightweight and energy-saving variant of Ubuntu using the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) desktop. It is intended to have low-resource system requirements and is designed primarily for netbooks, mobile devices and older PCs.

Newark Element14′s $79, Linux-ready “SAMA5D3 Xplained” SBC showcases Atmel’s SAMA5D3 processor, with features like dual LAN ports and Arduino compatibility. Last year we saw two Linux-supported, SODIMM-style computer-on-modules based on the Atmel SAMA5D3 system-on-chip: the Glomation GECM-5100 and the ShiraTech AT-501. Now, in collaboration with Atmel, Newark Element14 has delivered an open source “SAMA5D3 Xplained” […]

Not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled road trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 500 figuring out intellectual property in technology is a wild ride. I thought about this for a while and since I am not a lawyer (IANAL) especially not one of the caliber of Dr. Gonzo’s sidekick lawyer Raoul Duke so I’ll have to speculate.

In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a “blob”) which talks to the hardware. In our case, this blob runs on the VPU vector processor of the BCM2835 (the SOC or System On a Chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi); our existing open-source graphics drivers are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing.

Although the Head Up Display (HUD) will remain the default, Canonical will be bringing back the local menus as an option.

Around two in five people who fall victim to CryptoLocker have agreed to pay a ransom of around ?300 to recover their files, according to a survey of victims.

While a lot of headway has been made during the GNOME 3.10 and 3.12 development cycles for allowing the GNOME Shell and rest of the desktop run natively on Wayland without a hard dependency on X11, it was decided that enabling the Wayland support by default will not happen now until at least GNOME 3.14. GNOME 3.12 will still work as a very reasonable Wayland tech preview, but there's some unfinished tasks to be addressed.

Door Kickers is a fantastic indie game for Linux gamers to own. It mixes strategy and action with squad-based tactics.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, with help from chipmaker Broadcom, is laying out a path toward an open source graphics driver for the tiny computer. Broadcom today "announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license," Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton wrote in a blog post.

If you have Linux Skills...and if you're reading this we presume you do, you should be making MORE money!!

Uget is a free and open-source GTK+ 3 download manager for Linux and Windows operating systems. Uget download manager comes with many great and useful features. The latest version of Uget version 1.10.4 is now available to install on Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr using PPA.

Getting started with new software can be overwhelming. It's even more frustrating when you transition from one tool to another, because you have to unlearn some habits in order to make room for new ones. But, there are huge benefits to switching from closed software to open source alternatives.

Planetary Annihilation has been again updated and set into the "Gamma" development phase. Featuring a new interface, social features & more!

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at Munich's progress in dumping proprietary software, privacy on Mozilla's mobile Firefox OS, and more.

We've recently made some changes to the Opensource.com points and badge system that we'd like to inform you about. Based on feedback we got from our readers and Community Moderators, we have recently implemented the changes outlined below.

GLX_MESA_query_renderer is the extension devised by Mesa developers for universally exposing details of the system's OpenGL driver, GPU, and system information in order to assist game developers, among other OpenGL developers. Patches have finally emerged for supporting GLX_MESA_query_renderer by all Mesa and Gallium3D graphics drivers.

The first Tizen phones may still be on the horizon, but at least one software provider is already planning ahead. Infraware Technology debuted software that can port Android apps to the Tizen mobile OS without additional development or customization. Both Android and Tizen are based on Linux, of course, but that doesn't mean their native apps are compatible.

The reasoning doesn't really matter. There's no reason that continued online support for these consoles should be at the whim of a company that obviously has no financial interest in them anymore. Nintendo and other console and game makers should take steps to release versions of their server code that allow players to run their own online infrastructure after the corporate servers are no longer available.

Rikomagic has spun a mini-PC version of its quad-core Cortex-A9 Rockchip RK3188-based MK802 stick computers that run Android or Ubuntu, starting at $105. The same week that Rockchip launched a new quad-core Cortex-A17 RK3288 system-on-chip, one of its earliest and most successful customers has eeked out some more life from the Cortex-A9 based RK3188.

Ubuntu GNOME (formerly Ubuntu GNOME Remix) is an official flavor of Ubuntu, featuring the GNOME desktop environment. It is intended as a mostly pure GNOME desktop experience built from the Ubuntu repositories.