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For years, Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical has been pursuing a single dream: One operating system and one interface, Unity, for PCs, tablets, and smartphones. That dream is now becoming a reality.

This week saw a flurry of news about new mobile processor developments that will significantly impact the Android and mobile Linux worlds. Nvidia unveiled Project Logan, a Tegra SoC (system-on-chip) with faster graphics than a PlayStation 3 at a third the power of an iPad; Samsung revealed a new Exynos 5 SoC with six Mali GPUs; and Intel confirmed that a tablet-focused 4.5 Watt version Haswell-based SoC is on the way.

Several Phoronix readers have brought up an important topic recently on Twitter and within our forums: what Linux distribution should really be be benchmarked the most? Ubuntu has traditionally been the most tested Linux platform here, but times may be changing.

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in OpenJDK, an implementation of the Oracle Java platform, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code, breakouts of the Java sandbox, information disclosure or denial of service.

Several security issues were fixed in MySQL.

A roundup of the major stories this week in the world of FOSS.

A buffer overflow has been discovered in the Radius extension for PHP. The function handling Vendor Specific Attributes assumed that the attributes given would always be of valid length. An attacker could use this assumption to trigger a buffer overflow.

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in squid: Due to incorrect data validation Squid is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack when processing specially crafted HTTP requests.

Here's how you can install VirtualBox 4.2.16 in Linux Mint 15.

It's still being investigated, but early indications are that the Linux 3.11 kernel is consuming less power at least for Intel CPUs.

This guest column by Alejandro Erives, brand manager for Sitara processors at Texas Instruments, celebrates BeagleBone.org’s fifth birthday. In a lighthearted and entertaining missive, Erives highlights the history of BeagleBoard.org, the benefits of open source hardware and software to embedded development, and the advantages of open development platforms for students, makers, entrepreneurs, and even silicon vendors.

This week we look at the CIO's hierarchy of needs, five monumental cloud project missteps, and the growing irrelevance of Microsoft.

At the Def Con hacker conference early next month, O’Connor, a security researcher who runs the consultancy Malice Afterthought, plans to unveil Creepy Distributed Object Locator or CreepyDOL, a system of Linux computers that cost less than $60 each and are designed to be hidden around an urban or suburban area. The little black boxes can wirelessly track the movements of cell phones or other mobile devices, feeding the information they collect into a database where an administrator can monitor targets on a map-based interface. A proof-of-concept version of the system that O’Connor has built includes ten of the spy nodes, each capable of reading the wireless signals of nearby devices and communicating back to a central server by piggybacking on any available Wifi network.

In part 1, we covered what Suricata is, why we are using it, and how to install it to our system. It wasn’t hard, and the following won’t be much worse, either. Now we are going to do some basic configuration of the program and get it working!

It took a few good weeks of testing, but since yesterday (July 25), the Arch Linux operating system uses the stable Linux 3.10 kernel packages.

If you are using a virtualization package, your main concern will be its performance, or in another word, its virtualization overhead. This article presents performance evaluation of two most popular virtualization packages, VMware Player and VirtualBox.

We are pleased to accept nominations for this year's Readers' Choice Awards! Please peruse the following list of categories and write in your favorites to nominate them. We will accept nominations until August 18, 2013. Voting will begin on August 26, 2013, so please check back at that time to cast your vote.

Geeksphone has started taking pre-orders for its first commercial smartphone running Firefox OS. The Peak+ offers double the RAM and offers better battery and graphics performance than the original Peak developers phone, and it runs the latest Firefox OS 1.1 build.

Elizabeth Leddy gave the next talk I attended entitled, Wish I Knew How to Quit You: 10 Secrets to Sustainable Open Source Communities. Elizabeth works with Plone but wasn’t really involved in open source until about five years ago. With open source we often start by working at a company that supports a specific open source application and there are two paths we can take. One path is that you start to get annoyed with the way things are going and so you jump to another open source project. Or you can get involved in the open source community so thoroughly that you can move from one related company to another (this is what I have been doing with Koha so I totally understand this path).

A perennial challenge faced by standards advocates is how to quantify the economic benefits they contend standards can provide.