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Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel sat down at LinuxCon Japan 2013 for a "fireside chat" (sans fire), ostensibly to discuss where Linux is going. While they touched on that subject, the conversation was wide-ranging over both Linux and non-Linux topics, from privacy to diversity and from educational systems to how operating systems will look in 20-30 years. Some rather interesting questions—seemingly different from those that might be asked at a US or European conference—were asked along the way.

The Lima driver is slowly but surely progressing for supporting ARM Mali graphics hardware in an open-source world. A Mesa driver has been started, their demo code can be faster than the binary driver, user-space memory management is being tackled, and evidently the management at ARM Holdings isn't too happy...

I was recently on a quest to find a CMS solution to redesign and maintain the LXLE website. I wanted light yet robust and feature packed. Kinda of a tall order but was managed very well once I discovered GetSimple CMS. It's quick and powerful. It has features that every website needs, but with nothing it doesn't.

Ubuntu Tweak, a very useful utility designed for Ubuntu users who want to tweak various aspects of their open source operating system, reached version 0.8.5, as announced by its developer, Tualatrix Chou.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Wheezy server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

In a world with hundreds of Linux distributions, standardization is the key to fighting fragmentation for the sake of both users and developers. How to achieve such conformity? Look no further than the Linux Standard Base, which offers a way to standardize the file-system hierarchy and application and operating system software structures used by Linux.

It may be time for Microsoft to simply face facts about its mobile strategy. The numbers don't lie and Win8 smartphones and tablets are barely making a dent.

In some recent python code I was playing with I had the need to sort a bunch of lists based on elements within their elements. Thankfully python's built in sort function is plenty powerful and allows us to do this in a fairly easy manner.

The author installs the Xen Hypervisor on Fedora 19 in just a few commands. Quick and easy.

Linux, like other operating systems, has a desktop with a wallpaper. This wallpaper can be customized in many ways. Users can use one wallpaper, or they can make the wallpaper change to one of many wallpapers after a set time. Applications that change the wallpaper after a set time without the user's help is called a wallpaper changer. Three of the most popular wallpaper changers are Wallch, Cortina, and Wally. However, there are others, but they may not be stable.

François Dupoux proudly announced last evening, June 5, the immediate availability for download of the SystemRescueCd 3.7.0 Linux-based operating system, which can be used for rescue and recovery tasks.

For a couple of years now I've been hearing rumors about YaST being switched to Ruby from the proprietary YCP language. However, up to recently I haven't stumbled across any substantiating evidence. Fact of the matter now though is that it is happening, and the next openSUSE release may even use the new Ruby based YaST.

Although emerging markets such as Indonesia and China have embraced open source in their classrooms, adoption has been much spottier in the US. Observers and practitioners cite three broad reasons: 1. Lack Of Market Share. 2. Unfamiliarity. 3. Technical Gaps.

The White House on Tuesday announced a broad set of legislative recommendations for Congress and executive actions aimed at thwarting abusive patent infringement lawsuits.

The creators of open source software benefit people they will never meet in person. The kindness is baked right into the product. I'm a former computer programmer, and whenever I use an open source program I have an appreciation for the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of hours of work that went into creating the program.

A significant chapter has closed in the ongoing smartphone patent war between Apple and Samsung. A case that Samsung opened at the International Trade Commission (ITC) in 2011 concluded on Tuesday, with the ITC determining that a variety of older Apple products infringe the claims of a Samsung patent, US Patent No 7,706,348. If the decision stands, a "limited exclusion order" would go into effect that would ban the AT&T models of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G.

Two years after it acquired Novell and took the company private, the Attachmate Group says its decline has been arrested. It anticipates being able to hold that line next year.

The Tiny Parallel Proportion Scheduler (TPPS) is a new I/O scheduler for Linux to appear on the kernel mailing list. Robin Dong explains in his mailing list announcement for this new I/O scheduler to use cgroup on high-speed devices., "We want to use blkio.cgroup on high-speed device (like fusionio) for our mysql clusters. After testing different io-scheduler, we found that cfq is too slow and deadline can't run on cgroup. So we developed a new io-scheduler: tpps (Tiny Parallel Proportion Scheduler).It dispatches requests only by using their individual weight and total weight (proportion) therefore it's simple and efficient."

Version 1.1.1 of GStreamer Core and Plugins have been released, which provide new features and plug-ins for this important open-source multimedia framework. Since GStreamer 1.0 included new plug-ins include Microsoft Smooth Streaming (mssdemux), DASH adaptive streaming (dashmdemux), Bluetooth device interaction via the bluez plug-in, JPEG2000 encoding/decoding via the openjpeg plug-in, and other yadif, srtp, sbc, fluidsynth, midiparse, mfc, ivtv, accuraterip, and audiofxbad plug-ins.

When your data and work grow, and you still want to produce results in a timely manner, you start to think big. Your one beefy server reaches its limits. You need a way to spread your work across many computers. You truly need to scale out.