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The GNOME developers announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME System Monitor 3.10 application.

July seemed like it was a long time ago, but it's time to take a look back at the best month opensource.com has had to date. We start with a list of the top five articles, then move on to other hot topics, like OSCON, licensing, text editors, OpenStack, and other open source news. Aloha!

The GNOME Project announced the availability for download and testing of the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Chess 3.10 application for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.

The GNOME developers announced a few day ago the immediate availability for download and testing of another development version (2.37.6) of the GLib library for the GNOME desktop environment.

Simplicity Linux 13.10 alphas are now available. 13.10 is based on Raring Puppy 3.9.9.1 by Pemasu. The kernel is 3.9.9.1, as you might guess, and it is a non-PAE kernel, meaning you do not need a machine with PAE to be able to run it. The window manager is LXDE for all releases except Obsidian which uses Openbox (released tomorrow due to unforeseen problems). Desktop is our big release, it comes with media players, LibreOffice, and a lot of other software. Desktop is a full-featured Linux distro compared to the cut-down editions like Netbook and Obsidian, and less specialised than Media.

Linux has a few bootloaders to choose from. Usually, Linux administrators leave the distro's default bootloader installed. Sometimes administrators need to use a different one or the distro's installer gives the administrators a choice between bootloaders. Clearly, it helps to know about the different Linux bootloaders.

Drupal is one of the most popular open source content management systems today. Unfortunately the default Drupal installation often requires a lot of customization to meet an organization's needs, so you have to rely on Drupal's thousands of extensions to tailor the software to do exactly what you want, and that takes time. It would be easier if you could install Drupal with all the extensions that you want to use straight out of the box – and you can do just that by using Drupal distributions.

Some of you might already know Spirits, because it was featured on the Humble Bundle for Android 3 and it has been on the Linux store of Steam for quite some time now, but you might also have missed it like I did.

After many months of development, the ported open-source AMD Radeon DRM/KMS driver from the Linux kernel has been merged into FreeBSD trunk. This AMD kernel graphics driver now provides modern Radeon/FirePro graphics support for BSD users with FreeBSD 10.0 but might be backported to FreeBSD 9.

There are various tools that allow you to edit the metadata in digital photos or pdf documents. ExifTool is a powerful command-line utility that can read or write meta information in a file. This tutorial describes how to view or edit metadata in pdf documents or digital pictures from the command line on Linux with ExifTool.

Open source evangelist Matt Asay, now a VP at 10gen, describes how the NoSQL database provider has been embracing partnerships with Amazon, IBM, Windows Azure, and plenty more.

Last month I published benchmarks showing Windows 8 beating Ubuntu Linux when it came to the Intel OpenGL performance for the latest generation Intel "Haswell" desktop processors. Since then there's been lots of commits to Mesa and continued improvements to the Linux kernel and for some tests the open-source Linux driver is in better standing. For the testing today is a comparison of Windows 8 Pro against the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development packages when using a System76 Gazelle Professional laptop with Core i7 4900MQ CPU.

India is the second biggest market for MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the world, following the US. In time, however, India may surpass the US. After all, India's population is second to China's and India is third in terms of university enrollment worldwide; respectively the US and China are first and second for university enrollment at the moment but this may soon change. MOOCs represent a huge opportunity for Indians in terms of an open education revolution. It could potentially give millions access and availability to high quality learning if they have Internet connectivity. First, there are more applicants than slots at top Indian universities. Second, millions of Indians live in poverty and are unable to afford or gain access to a higher education.

The upcoming sixth game in the Tex Murphy series, "Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure", developed by Big Finish Games, will be released for Linux.

He makes a somewhat valid point, but he’s attempting to draw a hard boundary between usability and user-friendliness, forgetting that one derives from the other. If you build a “usable” system, people will tend to say that it is “user-friendly,” regardless of the technical capabilities of the users.

Open-source NoSQL database vendor Couchbase has raised a new $25 million Series D round of funding to further the technical and business development of the company's namesake database.

To process and analyze all the data generated on a multi-core embedded device, a safe and efficient database management system is necessary. ITTIA DB SQL addresses the challenge of increasing data volume on multi-core systems.

The world's largest patent-holding company, Intellectual Ventures (IV), has opened up a Washington DC office, according to The Washington Post's Capital Business blog. The move appears to be a ramping up of the company's lobbying efforts in a year in which "patent trolls" have come under unprecedented criticism in Congress.

EMAC announced a fanless, Linux-ready PC/104 format single-board computer built around Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, available in a wide temperature (-40 to 80°C) model. The PCM-1812 SBC ships with 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a CompactFlash socket, supports dual VGA and LVDS displays, and offers a variety of interfaces including IDE, dual SATA, dual gigabit […]

Both OSes fail to ensure that browser cookies, document files, and other sensitive content from one Internet domain are off-limits to scripts controlled by a second address without explicit permission, according to a just-published academic paper from scientists at Microsoft Research and Indiana University. The so-called same-origin policy is a fundamental security mechanism enforced by desktop browsers, but the protection is woefully missing from many iOS and Android apps. To demonstrate the threat, the researchers devised several hacks that carry out so-called cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks to surreptitiously download user data from handsets.