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The Zorin OS team is proud to finally release the Zorin OS 7 Core and Ultimate, the latest version of our operating system designed for Linux newcomers. Zorin OS 7 brings about a plethora of changes and improvements such as a wide array of updated software, the Linux kernel version 3.8, the introduction of new software (Pidgin replacing Empathy and Steam in Zorin OS 7 Ultimate) and an enormous design overhaul. We have given the brand a facelift with our new logo. In addition to this, Zorin OS itself includes a brand new desktop theme. Zorin OS 7 is based on Ubuntu 13.04.

It's been a big week for solid-state device (SSD) storage and the channel. Earlier this week, Intel (INTC) unveiled a new line of SSD hardware for the cloud and Big Data. Then, a day later, SolidFire, which provides SSD storage infrastructure for cloud hosts, announced a partnership with Red Hat (RHT) that will integrate the company into Red Hat's OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. Here are the details on this latest news.

The project, which is called Raspberry Pi Cloud, is the idea of four lecturers at the University’s School of Computing. The four doctors believed that the knowledge about the cloud will play a very important role in their students’ future as IT professionals. But it was hard for researchers and students to develop a good practical knowledge due to the secrecy nature of how cloud computing infrastructure works.

Question: How do you get more developers to contribute to a free and open source software project? Contribution is the lifeblood of a FOSS community  Without contributions the community can’t grow beyond the initial project founders. People don’t just show up ready to work. They very likely start as users, even of the fledgling software before it really starts to take shape as the robust solution it could become. Let’s approach the question of getting more developers involved as "software engineers" instead of as "community organizers" by asking a different question: Why do we use software versioning a.k.a. software configuration management tools?

The Register’s story was almost believable and anyone who was taken-in by this telling could certainly be forgiven. The writer played straight into the paranoid fears of many in the GNU/Linux crowd and did a good job of seamlessly integrating his tale of Microsoft misdeeds into the facts as they are known. It was easy to read this and think you were having a genuine “aha” moment. All of us, or many of us anyway, had already been scratching our heads over GNOME. Some of us were surprised when they made big changes to the UI at all, especially following the grief KDE went through several years back with the advent of KDE 4.

Adobe released a security update for its Flash Player on all platforms including Linux. Linux users should update to version 11.2.202.291. According to Adobe, this update addresses "vulnerabilities that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system."

The battle to decide which database technology will define the future of Big Data continues to rage, but the NoSQL camp scored a victory today with the announcement of a new partnership between Talend and Couchbase. The agreement will connect Talend's open source Big Data platforms to the enterprise NoSQL software developed by Couchbase.

Real Time Logic announced an Linux-compatible embeddable webserver designed for supporting server-side web applications. Based on the Lua scripting language, Mako Server integrates technologies such as Apache, SQLite, and SMTP and HTTPS clients, and is said to be compact enough to host web services on a Raspberry Pi.

Oracle has announced public availability of Java EE 7, the first major release of the enterprise formulation of Java since the database giant took control of the platform in 2010. The last version shipped way back in 2009. Support for HTML5 and related technologies is one of the key themes of this release. Among the new APIs included with Java EE 7 are version 2.0 of the Java API for Asynchronous RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) and new APIs to support WebSockets and JSON processing.

Red Hat (RHT) has teamed with CommVault (CVLT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel (INTC) and Supermicro to develop reference architectures for data backup, content clouds, Big Data storage and other industry-specific storage solutions intended to handle large amounts of unstructured data.

Variscite announced what it calls “the world’s tiniest Cortex-A9 system-on-module,” measuring 52 x 17mm. The Linux- and Android-compatible DART-4460 module is based on a 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP4460 SoC, is available with up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM and 8GB eMMC flash, and can run at 400MHz on only 44mA, says the company.

ROSA Desktop Fresh R1. ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 is a new distribution based on the ROSA Fresh platform. The 'R' series is targeted at advanced users and enthusiasts who will appreciate rich functionality and freshness of distribution components without serious loss of quality. This series is developed by ROSA with significant help of community. Users of ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 are able to update their systems to ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 using official update mechanisms. The new version has a set of important new features: Windows Azure and Hyper-V support; Steam support; font smoothing has been improved significantly.

Here is the complete list of the most popular applications in the Ubuntu Software Center in May. Steam and Stormcloud remain the most downloaded applications.

Cinnamon is still too unstable, MATE seems to exhibit a little latency, and Compiz appears to be entirely out of whack.

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly concurrent environments, lock contention sometimes hurts overall system performance more than data copying, context switches and so on. Thus, moving the hottest data structures from a locked to a lock-free design can improve software performance in multicore environments significantly.

BeyondTrust recently combined its "context-aware" approach to vulnerability assessment with user-privilege management on Windows. Now, it has taken another step in the same direction with new software that delivers similar features for systems reporting, analytics and password security on Linux and Unix servers.

While many are super excited about Wayland and the thought of X11 finally going away in the coming years, some who have been enthusiastic about Wayland/Weston are starting to lose interest. Here's the reasons by one Wayland enthusiast for losing motivation in the project.

Canonical are discussing the possibility of replacing Firefox with Chromium in the next version of Ubuntu

Thanks to all the Indie games, Steam and Humble Bundle recently the market of games for Linux has become most active than ever and so I’ve bought some arcade/action/platform games. Perhaps it’s just me but I don’t like too much to manage around 10 different keys on the keyboard and remember all the combo that I've to do with them, a joypad it’s a much simpler way to play that kind of games, and what’s the best joypad around?

IBM announced on June 11 at the Red Hat Summit in Boston that it will be bringing Linux's built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to its Linux-only Power servers. What's technically interesting is that while the KVM hypervisor is an integral part of the Linux kernel, it's a feature that's only been available on the x86 architecture. Specifically, KVM needs either the Intel VT or AMD-V virtualization extensions in the chip to work.