Showing all newswire headlines

In an overnight, grassroots movement, the open source platform Drupal has made an impact in Oklahoma. A group of more than 70 volunteer code sprinters—made up of developers, designers, and sys admins—congregated late Tuesday night at DrupalCon in Portland to create help4ok.org.

The Western world's smartphone market has devolved into a duopoly of Apple's iOS and Google's Android. In the rest of the world, however, the mobile story has yet to be written... and this is where Mozilla hopes users will embrace its mobile operating system, Firefox OS. The browser-maker wants Firefox OS to be the gateway drug to the wider Mozilla software platform for the web's next billion users.

No degree? No problem. Free software companies value aptitude and community involvement, and apprenticeships offer a leg up

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Debian Wheezy server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP).

The Professors' Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop is being held this year in Philadelphia from June 2-4. To prepare for the workshop, online activites are were assigned to be completed in stages and culminated on June 1.

I had to laugh at the notion that a Linux distribution operated by a multi-national for-profit company that’s pretty much wholly owned by a charismatic billionaire could ever be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, a community thing.

It's official: Microsoft's near-monopoly on personal computing is over. At least, so says Ubuntu founder (and space traveler) Mark Shuttleworth, who has declared Ubuntu's infamous Bug #1 -- titled "Microsoft has a majority market share" -- closed. Actually, Shuttleworth's ruling says much more about Canonical's future focus on tablets, smartphones and the cloud than it does about Microsoft's traditional dominance of the OS market. But it still offers huge insight into where Ubuntu is headed in the future, and the types of challenges on the horizon for Canonical.

Karl Denninger compares the mobile and desktop OS figures for his forum.

Door Kickers is an innovative Real-Time Tactics game that puts you in charge of a SWAT team. We broke the news about it coming to you last month. I had a chance to test it before the Linux version went out (thank you developers!) and fell in love with it, good graphics mixed with interesting gameplay. It actually reminded me of Frozen Synapse a little bit. Analyze the situation, plan team routes, choose equipment and breach points and coordinate multiple troopers to reach the hostage room before the bad guys get to press that trigger.

Most shared hosting packages and even most shared hosting reseller accounts don’t offer a choice of operating systems. When they do, the choice is often only between Linux and Windows, with Linux being whatever distro they have on their servers, which is subject to change without notice at upgrade time. However, when you step up into the VPS or dedicated server world, you’ll find yourself being offered a choice like the one we’re offering in our poll.

Microsoft can only hope that it's re-invention of Windows 8, Windows 8.1 aka Blue, works because Windows 8 continues to fall behind even Vista's dismal desktop operating system market acceptance numbers. As for the mobile operating system space, Microsoft needs a miracle.

From headline-grabbing threats by Microsoft to more subdued court battles involving the cloud, the open-source ecosystem has a pretty good record of winning patent challenges. But a crushing defeat has now tarnished that record with Google's (GOOG) grudging surrender in a campaign to make the open-source VP8 video codec ubiquitous across the Web. Free-software stalwarts need not panic, though: In this case, they can blame Google, not a systemic failure by the open-source world itself.

While there's OpenCL drivers available for Linux, on Ubuntu there is no OpenCL driver shipped by default and the proprietary driver implementations aren't always great. Intel has their closed-source OpenCL SDK for the CPU, AMD has their OpenCL support in the Catalyst driver, and NVIDIA has their OpenCL/CUDA support bundled within their binary driver. When it comes to open-source support, the Gallium3D OpenCL support is still primitive and isn't shipped by default. Intel has the Beignet project for open-source OpenCL but that's even worse off than the Gallium3D OpenCL support.

The fourth release candidate to the Linux 3.10 kernel is now available. Last week Linus Torvalds was upset with 3.10-rc3 being so large, but now he's happier that this new kernel is smaller in size than its predecessor. The work found in Linux 3.10-rc4 is the usual assortment of bug fixes across the driver and architecture subsystems in particular.

Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) number eight is been released and this is the list of games that you’ll find this time: Dear Esther, Capsized, Awesomenauts, Thomas Was Alone, and Little Inferno. If you choose to pay over the average, you’ll also receive Hotline Miami and Proteus!

Bsquare announced an Android 4.2 Mobile Development Platform (MDP) based on Qualcomm’s new 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974) SoC featuring four ARM Krait 400 CPU cores plus an Adreno 330 GPU. The Snapdragon 800 MDP is available in both 11.6-inch tablet and 4.3-inch smartphone versions, and features surround sound, USB 3.0, and 802.11ac WiFi for up to 1.3Gbps streaming rates.

Dozens of computer scientists urged an appeals court today to block the copyright claims over application programming interfaces (APIs) in the Oracle v. Google court battle, arguing that APIs that are open are critical to innovation and interoperability in computers and computer systems.

Last year, I installed and wrote a review for Linux Mint 13 Maya, the MATE version. It had worked really well on my laptop so even when Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" was released, I still kept using Maya. But after a year, I think its the time for an upgrade, and on the same occasion that Linux Mint 15 Olivia was recently out, I decided to download and install the new Linux Mint 15, MATE version.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 'Olivia'. Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML 5 and two new tools, 'Software Sources' and 'Driver Manager', make their first appearance in Linux Mint. MDM now features 3 greeters (i.e. login screen applications): a GTK+ greeter, a themeable GDM greeter for which hundreds of themes are available, and a brand-new HTML greeter, also themeable which supports a new generation of animated and interactive themes. Cinnamon and MATE screenshots are available.

The IP Commission Report on the "theft" of American IP is the gift that keeps on taking. We've already discussed the commission's suggestion that infringers' computers be loaded up with spyware and malware and the apparent "fact" that China has singlehandendly destroyed every IP-reliant industry in America. Hidden towards the bottom of the report is (yet another) terrible proposal, guided by the heavy hand of self-interest. It plainly spells out the commission's priorities: American IP above all else, even the health and well-being of other nations.