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Imagine being a high school freshman walking down the halls of your new school on the very first day. You somehow make it to first period without becoming epically lost in the unfamiliar halls. Finally, the bell rings, signaling that you've officially made it through your first high school class. Taking a look at your schedule, you see your next class is Exploring Computer Science. You think: "Wow, computers! This should be fun!"

In the 10 years since the CentOS project was launched there has been no board of directors, or legal team, or commercial backing. The developers who labored to build the community-led version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) worked largely unpaid (though some took a few consulting gigs on the side.) They had a few hundred dollars in their bank account to pay for event t-shirts and that was it. And the project's direction was decided based on the developers' immediate needs, not a grand vision of future technology. That's all changing with the news last week that CentOS will join Red Hat, said Karanbir Singh, CentOS project leader and one of four CentOS developers going to work for Red Hat as part of the new collaboration

My unit had Win 8.1 pre-installed on the SSD, but I could easily install various versions of Linux. I'm currently playing with the MINT distro. The NUC easily booted from any of the USB CD Drives I had laying around the house and quickly into Linux Mint. The machine immediately recognized all the weird USB devices I had hooked to a hub connected to the little box.

Today in Open Source: Should you use CentOS on the desktop? Plus: Linux and the Nest Labs acquisition by Google, and the openSUSE forums are online again.

In the wake of NSA spying revelations, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has seen its traffic numbers soar.

Reports this week that the National Security Agency uses radio signals to collect data from tens of thousands of non-U.S. computers, some not connected to the Internet, is sure to fuel more acrimony towards the U.S. spy agency.

The returned call she promised was as icy and distant as our initial meeting had been warm and cordial. She informed me that her director of IT strongly recommended against such a change. What it all boiled down to was his statement that:

“It might even be illegal for us to remove Microsoft Office or Windows from previously purchased computers, due to the vendor agreement the school district signed with Microsoft.”

Kids are quick learners and have great imaginations. When pursuing an electronic or hardware project with a kid, the most important thing to keep in mind is: keep things playful. As long as their hands are in gunk and they are taking things apart, or there's the possibility of blowing something up, kids will stay interested. As soon as the activity starts to seem like work, they switch off. Here are four fun and easy projects for teaching kids more about electronics and hardware in a couple hours or an afternoon. Then, they may be on to the Arduino board or Raspberry Pi before you know it! Note: For kids between 4 - 8 years old, more adult supervision may be required. First, I'll share with you three excellent businesses where you can purchase open hardware tools, kits, and electronics for these projects and more.

Today's court ruling invalidating the anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules in the Federal Communication Commission's Open Internet Order was not a surprise to observers who were aware of one inconvenient fact—the FCC really screwed this one up.

Developers behind the digiKam digital camera software for KDE continue piling on new features for the digiKam 4.0 release. The second beta of digiKam 4.0 is now available.

Managing virtual machines and hypervisors can be a real pain. Managing multiple ones across multiple platforms is even worse Convirture is easing the headaches.

The GNOME development team behind the Glib project, a library used in the GNOME desktop environment, has announced the immediate availability for download of Glib 2.39.3, which introduces lots fixes.

The latest benchmarks of the AMD A10-7850K APU to share on Phoronix and to complement yesterday's Windows vs. Linux OpenGL comparison are benchmarks of the APU's Radeon R7 Graphics compared to numerous AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

The open source PHP programming language is being updated this month with a pair of non-security updates. PHP 5.4.24 and PHP 5.5.8 are now both available of developers and server admins to fix a long list of bugs.

The upcoming OpenDaylight Summit shows the momentum of software-defined networking (SDN) and where this open source project is headed.

The remotely-piloted Beam+ bot, which can be controlled via a WiFi, runs low-latency Skype-like video conferencing software on top of a Ubuntu-based embedded Linux OS. The original Beam model was introduced about two years ago, and currently starts at $16,000 (not including charging dock). The new Beam+ consumer model will be sold for about $2,000 (including charging dock) after all the 1,000 specially priced pre-order units have been sold.

Munin the monitoring tool surveys all your computers and remembers what it saw. It presents all the information in graphs through a web interface. Its emphasis is on plug and play capabilities. After completing a installation a high number of monitoring plugins will be playing with no more effort.

In a Reddit exchange yesterday, Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon answered a commenter’s question about the expected arrival of phones running the new Ubuntu Touch interface. Wrote Bacon: “This is a long road though with many components, and I would be surprised if we see anything like this before 2015.”

conf.kde.in was announced in November, to take place February 21 – 23, 2014 in Gandhinagar, India. This three-day conference, the biggest KDE event in India, will bring together Qt developers, KDE contributors, open source enthusiasts and users from all across the nation. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn, share, contribute, innovate and create around Qt and KDE technology.

Today in Open Source: The top Linux distros for 2014. Plus: Chrome 32 released by Google, and is Microsoft worried about Firefox OS?