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Eight carriers have joined the Ubuntu phone Carrier Advisory Group (CAG). CAG members will influence the Ubuntu Phone roadmap and participate as launch partners. The carrier group includes: Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Korea Telecom, Telecom Italia, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, SK Telecom and the leading Spanish international carrier.

(Sacramento, USA: June 18, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI: http://www.lpi.org), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced it has completed an extensive review and update of the exam objectives for their LPIC-2 and LPIC-3 certification programs. The new exams for LPIC-2 will be available November 1, 2013 in English and LPIC-3 will be available October 1, 2013 in English. Other language for both certification programs TBA.

For those looking for the latest drama in the Ubuntu Linux land, the fighting over whether KDE and GNOME should support the Mir Display Server to complement the in-development Wayland support continues to be hotly discussed.

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), a confederation of German open source providers and users, and its French counterpart, the Conseil National du Logiciel Libre (CNLL) have agreed on a wide-ranging collaboration. The two organisations want to better coordinate their campaigning at the European level and to collaborate with other European open source organisations.

The latest in the Webconverger line of internet kiosk distros is out now, with all important upgrades to its Linux core and web software

With the volcanic rise of the Android OS, smartphones are becoming predominantly open devices. Millions of people are happily walking around with Linux in their pockets and they don’t even know it. Nor should they have to; your average consumer will not choose a smartphone based on its open operating system. If sales are any indication, it’s no longer an uphill battle for open source on smartphones.

No it's not just cloud, cloud, cloud (though it could be..)

On Friday June 7, the German Parliament decided upon a joint motion to limit software patents (see English translation by BIKT). The Parliament urges the German Government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs. Software should exclusively be covered by copyright, and the rights of the copyright holders should not be devalued by third parties' software patents. The only exception where patents should be allowed are computer programs which replace a mechanical or electromagnetic component. In addition the Parliament made clear that governmental actions related to patents must never interfere with the legality of distributing Free Software.

Researchers at EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory (Biorob) announced a cat-like robot that is claimed to be the fastest quadruped robot under 30 kilograms. The Cheetah-cub Robot, which runs real-time Xenomai Linux on an x86-based RoBoard control board, mimics the biomechanics of a cat to increase the speed and stability of it quadroped legs, helping it achieve speeds of 1.42m/s.

Up to 300 various medical devices from 40 vendors have been identified as vulnerable to a hard-coded password issue and two government agencies are working to get the word out and protect against exploits. The Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) at the Department of Homeland Security, and the Food and Drug Administration are warning that the vulnerability could allow attackers to change critical settings and modify firmware.

Logic Supply has signed a deal with RapidRollout to offer the latter’s custom Linux appliance platforms on embedded computers aimed at non-desktop applications such as interactive kiosks and digital signage. RapidRollout is a lightweight, customized version of Ubuntu enhanced with features like remote management tools and easy-to-use configuration and set-up utilities, says the company.

Intel's Daniel Vetter is attempting for the Intel DRM graphics driver to remove support for its FBDEV frame-buffer layer with a new patch-set entitled "fbdev no more!", but will this finally usher in the killing of the Linux kernel's FBDEV subsystem? Going back to last year there's been a call out to deprecate the Linux kernel's FBDEV layer. David Herrmann, among other Linux developers, have been working on projects like KMSCON to have a KMS/DRM-based terminal console from user-space, new KMS drivers, and other related initiatives in an attempt to kill FBDEV.

Today we’re proud to announce the start of the 2014 Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow application process. Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is looking for five developers and technologists to spend a year writing code in collaboration with reporters, designers, and developers in some of the best newsrooms in the world.

The Via Technologies recycled cardboard-housed Android mini-PC received a Design and Innovation award at Computex 2013 earlier this month. The hackable $99 “APC Paper” and its internal $79 “APC Rock” motherboard run a custom Android 4.0 OS on an 800MHz Via WonderMedia ARM Cortex-A9 SoC, and offer 512MB RAM and 4GB flash, along with HDMI, USB, and Ethernet connections.

Red Hat has made a name for itself as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and it has proven that its Linux-focused strategy is very profitable. In fact, the company is the first open source-focused company to hit the $1 billion revenue mark. That said, though, Wall Street has been questioning where else the company might be able to generate revenues in the future.

Let's talk about a touchy subject: the Linux desktop. It's touchy because, by any reasonable measure, Linux on the desktop has yet to capture a significant market share of the desktop and portable PC platform. This has to be said, right up front. It does not make me particularly happy to point this out, given all the great work being done on the desktop by openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and all of the environment and application projects out there.

It is easy to take a screenshot in Ubuntu. You can use the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (if it comes with one), the default screenshot tool or any other third-party software like Shutter. What if you want the system to take a screenshot automatically at a regular interval, say every 5 seconds? The above tools won’t be able to do the job. Here is a quick way you can take screenshots in Ubuntu at regular interval.

Sad that Game of Thrones has wrapped up its third season? Looking for some drama to fill the time? We've got just the thing for you. One of the Internet's longest-running and most-hated lawsuits is back: SCO v. IBM has been reopened by Utah district court judge David Nuffer.

The story sounded plausible. Red Hat was said to have announced that the next version of its flagship operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 would ship with the MariaDB database management system (DBMS) installed by default, instead of Oracle's MySQL. Too bad the story was wrong.

Newly stable Debian 7 “wheezy” is receiving its first update, 7.1, which mainly includes bug fixes and corrections to security issues