Showing all newswire headlines

Hundreds of new open source software projects are published on Internet each day. The vast majority are built by private individuals in their spare time, or at least this is how the projects are starting. The usefulness of these projects is secondary in nature, most of the time the goal is learning and personal development, or how somebody else put it, scratching one developer’s personal itch.

Apple's move to offer its latest desktop operating system, OS X Mavericks, for free isn't going to affect the Linux operating system at all, its creator Linus Torvalds said.

The Raspberry Pi has replaced the textbook at the State University of New York at Albany in the class, Information in the 21st Century. Ethan Sprissler is the instructor for the 900 student class (split into two sections, 400 and 500 students respectively). He uses the Raspberry Pi instead of the traditional textbook in order to:

Two of the country’s top secure email providers, Lavabit and Silent Circle, shuttered their doors shortly after Edward Snowden blew the lid off the NSA's domestic surveillance program. Now encryption services continue to drop like flies.

The latest is CryptoSeal Privacy, a VPN service that provides a secure and private way to use the internet. The company announced it's shutting down its consumer privacy product in order to avoid government attempts to access and monitor users’ encrypted communications.

Online TV service Aereo continues its nationwide expansion on Tuesday by launching an app on Android devices, shrugging off opposition from networks including Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC, which appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to shut down the service.

Although I still like to have a few icon shortcuts on my task bar, many folks prefer a quick keystroke to bring up Gnome-Do, or Unity's launcher, or even OS X's spotlight. If you're one of those people, but can't seem to find a smooth way to accomplish your launching on Windows, check out Launchy.

Lars Gustavsson, the creative director of the game studio DICE, thinks that one killer app would be enough for making Linux more popular as a gaming platform.

So, some see Unity3D as one of the saviours of Linux gaming along with Steam. I, however, have been thinking more on this recently, and feel that it could be dangerous, not just for Linux, but for Indie developers in general to be so heavily reliant on one game engine.

Skully Helmets has begun beta testing a motorcycle helmet equipped with an Android based heads-up display (HUD). The Skully P1 is equipped with voice controls, Bluetooth sync to smartphones, GPS navigation, and a 180-degree rearview camera.

The Linux Foundation used to be just about Linux. Now it's also directly backiing virtualization with support for Linux and the Open Virtualization Alliance's KVM.

A Willow Garage spinoff called Unbounded Robotics announced a mobile manipulation robot designed for research and business automation and due to ship next summer for $35,000. The UBR-1 runs Ubuntu Linux and Robot Operating System (ROS) on a 4th Generation Intel Core processor, has a 7 degrees-of-freedom arm with a dexterous gripper, and moves at speeds up to 1 meter per second.

In this article we will discuss two command line utilities (ttyrec and ttyplay) that let you record, save and play terminal sessions.

Today, Linux desktops have diverged to the point where exchanging one for another can feel like switching to another operating system. KDE is no exception. Although it remains the single most popular desktop, a higher percentage of desktops use GNOME technology, and for many users of GNOME, Linux Mint, or Unity, KDE might hardly exist.

Building on the announcement earlier this month that it would be bringing live TV streaming to mobile devices, AT&T U-verse has just announced that Android users now have access to over 100 channels in its app. The service lets U-verse TV subscribers authenticate within its app on either a phone or tablet and have access to live TV along with On Demand programming and the ability to manage your DVR remotely.

Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its middleware solutions portfolio today with the JBoss Portal 6.1 release, integrating social media authentication capabilities via Facebook, Google+ and Twitter as well as enabling a new era of mobile devices.

A full review of Xubuntu 13.10. In my last review I took at Lubuntu 13.10, a light-weight Ubuntu spin. As good as Lubuntu is, it's not the only minimalistic distro based on Ubuntu. Xubuntu 13.10 has also been updated, and it's definitely worth considering if you want the advantages of Ubuntu without the desktop bloat.

Google's bold claims that Android doesn't have a malware problem and is more secure than Apple's iOS have singularly failed to convince security researchers.

We are proud to announce that Simplicity Linux 13.10 is now available for download. From today you can download Obsidian, Netbook and Desktop. Media and X will be available in a few days, as we're still not 100% happy with them. Simplicity Linux 13.10 is based on Upup 3.9.9.1 which in turn is based on Puppy Linux. Desktop has the biggest change this release cycle. We have now brought back OnLive; improvements in WINE and video drivers mean that OnLive works better than it did in the past. We know it's not Steam, but with OnLive if you have a decent Internet connection, at least you don't have to worry about big downloads, you can just get on with gaming. Desktop also has Dropbox integrated into it, so you can sync your files and get them on any device with a browser.

The most important features it now has are support for tabs and split screens – horizontal and vertical.

Whatever you may think about Macs and OS X, Apple hardware is very nice. Take the 5 year-old iMac (2008 model) with 24? LED screen – a bit slow now for Mountain Lion but nevertheless the screen is vibrant, all the hardware is in one box with a 2.8ghz dual core CPU, camera, speakers, DVD, 256mb Radeon video card, 6gb of RAM, lots of ports (USB and Firewre 800) and all. I picked one up for a song with a view of turning it into my new Linux workstation.