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Some features on the WordPress Jetpack plugin are duplicated by other plugins. However, if I need a function that’s available in Jetpack, I’ll try running that version first before installing another plugin to do the job. Why? I’ve already got Jetpack installed, so why install another plugin if it’s not necessary? If I’m not happy with the way the Jetpack version works–and sometimes I’m not–I can always go plugin hunting to see if I can find another solution.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: June 4, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI: http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced a partnership initiative with Big Data Cloud (http://www.bigdatacloud.com/) -- a not-for-profit organization evangelizing the new technology movement regarding Big Data and the Cloud. The partnership initiative will promote events and other educational resources for LPI alumni on topics related to Big Data and the Cloud. Big Data Cloud hosts annual events and monthly meetups and has over 2700+ members. It is founded and operated by Third Eye Consulting Services & Solutions LLC (http://thirdeyecss.com/).

Valve has released the results of the hardware and software survey of May. As part of this monthly survey, Steam users are being asked what CPU, graphics card or operating system they are using.

Monit is a free open source tool used to manage and monitor processes, programs, files, directories and filesystems on a local or remote LINUX/UNIX systems. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.

Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced last evening, June 3, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of his popular Snowlinux 4 operating system.

The Epiphany development team announced a few days ago that the unstable version 3.9.2 of the Epiphany web browser for the GNOME desktop environment is available for testing. The good news in this release is that the developers removed the support for the WebKit1 API layer, in favor of WebKit2, which is far more advanced. Moreover, Epiphany 3.9.2 is now able to start up with Wayland, and it allows users to run a standalone instance with a custom profile.

The White House announced a set of executive actions on Tuesday to crack down on abusive patent infringement lawsuits. The steps will rein in firms, described by detractors as “patent trolls,” which acquire portfolios of patents and make money by suing other companies. Critics of these firms say they do not create new products themselves and hamper innovation by tying up legitimate businesses in costly court fights.

The Wasteland 2 developers have shown off a new update which gives us a small glimpse of inventory management. They also state they are still a few months away from a Beta release. Wasteland 2 is the Kickstarted sequel to Wasteland (an RPG released in 1988) that gathered nearly 3 million dollars in funding so it's still one of the highest earning Kickstarter games ever, next to their other Kickstarted game Torment: Tides of Numenera which got just over 4 million!

From the 'Open to Code' files:

There a a lot of different metrics to validate the health of an open source project. In my opinion, one of the most critical is the number of different code authors. The open source OpenStack cloud platform this week has crossed a key threshold in that regard, now boasting 1,006 different source code authors (from the period of may 2010 to June 3, 2013).

Since the beginning the Linux desktop era, users and pundits have been asking when the year of the Linux desktop would be here. This past week saw three different answers to that question with the release of Linux Mint 15, Fedora 19 beta and the closing Ubuntu bug #1.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Debian Wheezy and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

On June 1, the City of Oakland will co-host ReWrite Oakland as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. ReWrite Oakland will be an all day writeathon that will culminate with the launch of a new website called "Oakland Answers," based on last year’s Code for America project "Honolulu Answers." Oakland Answers will be citizen-focused website, written in plain-language, that makes it quick and simple for people to find City information and services they are looking for online. City staff and the community will collaborate to answer common questions generated by citizens.

Several Android tablets running on Intel Clover Trail+ Atom processors broke cover at Computex Taiwan. Intel’s dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom Z5260 is fueling a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 tablet, as well as Asus’s 6-inch Fonepad Note and 10-inch MemoPad FHD10 tablets, while Asus also unveiled a hybrid 11.6-inch Transformer Book Trio, combining an Android slate [...]

So it goes in America. No one's immune from the threat of patent litigation, not even 18-year high school students in possession of an award-winning science project in one of the most prestigious science fairs around.

PulseAudio 4.0 is now available and with it comes many changes to this commonly used but sometimes controversial audio server...

Bugzilla is an open source bug-tracking system that prides itself on offering server software that is free but skillfully designed to help developers manage their work. Their installation list is long and robust. So, how do they manage to not charge expensive licensing fees like most other commercial vendors? I emailed Dave Miller to find out. He's the Project Leader at Bugzilla and an IT Infrastructure Engineer at Mozilla, where Bugzilla is constantly being put to the test.

We were all waiting for it and many of us have been working hard for the last four years to make it happen. Today, Symfony 2.3.0 is available and this is the first long-term support release for Symfony version 2.

Broadcom announced a system-on-chip aimed at network attached storage (NAS) devices and 802.11ac routers, supported by a Linux SDK. The StrataGX BCM5862x Series combines a single- or dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with a Cortex-R5 based “FlexSPARX” ARM core designed to accelerate storage performance, and features a cryptographic accelerator and dual 6Gbps SATA interfaces. The [...]

Allan McRae announced a few days ago that the Arch developers are preparing the merge of /lib, /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin and /usr/lib, in order to unify all binaries and libraries into a single directory. Long story short, during your next update, you will encounter an error message right after all packages have been downloaded and before the installation process begins. Therefore, in order to safely udpate your Arch Linux installation, you need to follow the next instructions exactly.

ARM announced a 28nm-fabricated Cortex-A12 processor design claimed to offer 40 percent higher performance than the Cortex-A9, while drawing the same power. The Cortex-A12 is paired with a power-efficient Mali-T622 GPU and Mali-V500 video coprocessor, and supports hybrid Big.Little SoC configurations in partnership with the Cortex-A7. Billed as a successor to the popular Cortex-A9 processor, the similarly ARMv7 Cortex-A12 design advances to a 28nm process that offers 40 percent faster performance in the same power envelope, claims ARM.