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NVIDIA employee Jason Kotzin created FLIRC, a device which lets you use any IR remote on your computer, to help fund the cancer institute that saved his life during his own battle with the disease.

Members of the Xen Project team attend Linaro Connect in Hong Kong to discuss details about the new Xen ARM port.

So the Steam Hardware Survey got updated again, this time they are now including lots of Linux distro's so we can see just how popular they are!

The first in a multi-part series aimed at turning you into a master or mistress of the Linux command line.

Digikam has released a new version of their popular photo management software. Exciting new features and plug-ins are now available for users to try. Unfortunately 3.1 has also just been released, though the changes are not as significant. I still wanted to look back to make sure nothing important was overlooked. Here I will investigate some of the most important changes offered with the Digikam 3.0 release.

A lot of the software packages I've covered in recent articles have been focused strictly on doing computations on your machine, separate from the real world. So in this article, I explore how to use your computer to design something you can build and use in the real world: your own model rocket. Let's take a look at the OpenRocket utility and see how it can help you design your own rockets. OpenRocket even can run simulations on your designs to show how they should behave in flight.

Wikimedia has activated Lua-based templating on several of its sites including English Wikipedia. Driven by a new MediaWiki extension called Scribunto which allows scripting languages to be embedded in MediaWiki, it is hoped that the Lua templating will help improve performance where editors take advantage of its capabilities.

If you've followed Google for any length of time, you already know that the company has donated many open source projects and leverages a lot of open source code internally. But did you know that Google has a dedicated video channel for information on open source topics? If you haven't explored it, it's worth visiting, found here. Here is more on what's available there, and other good open source resources from Google.

Ubuntu publicly announced its plan for the future of its Unity graphical shell on March 4, a plan that includes a new compositing window manager designed to run on the distribution's device platforms as well as on desktop systems. The plan will reimplement the Unity shell in Qt and replace Compiz with a new display stack called Mir that will incorporate a compositor, input manager, and several other pieces. Mir is not designed to use the Wayland display protocol (although the Ubuntu specification suggests it could be added later), a decision that raised the ire of developers in several other projects.

Following the GNOME developers' decision to focus on porting their desktop environment to the Wayland display server, the KDE project has also indicated that it will go ahead with a Wayland port of its own project. Currently, the developers are debating which display manager will be used in the port. KDM, the display manager the project is using currently, has apparently already been discounted in favour of LightDM or possibly the QML-based SDDM.

While the Linux-based operating system wasn't really cracked at Pwnium, Google has decided to award a hacker $40,000 for finding an unreliable Chrome OS exploit.

From the deepest darkest corner of the deepest darkest dungeon of Bizarro World, Brian Lunduke releases Linux Tycoon, his closed-source game about an open source operating system for a closed source operating system no one uses. That’s right, you thought today’s earlier headlines were a pump-fake-pass for April Fool’s Day, but this takes things one step further. Linux Tycoon, the “premier Linux Distro Building Simulator game in the universe”, is now available for DOS.

Plex comes to Raspberry Pi, threatening to usurp XBMCs throne by adding a server functionality to a Pi HTPC

Hashicorp has announced Vagrant 1.1 and, as the result of adding functionality that allows it to control virtual machines other than VirtualBox, a commercial "provider" for VMware Fusion. Vagrant is a command line system for configuring and provisioning virtual machines from the command line, with created VMs being prepared with key-based SSH authentication, Ruby, RubyGems, Chef, and Puppet. The latter two packages then make it easy to deploy applications to the provisioned VM. The entire configuration is encapsulated in a single Vagrantfile making it easy for developers to replicate setups. Initially, Vagrant was designed for VirtualBox only, but the developers set out in August 2012 to allow it to work with other platforms.

The United Kingdom’s official endorsement of open source software, which became public just a few days ago, seems too important to miss, particularly for the implications it could have for businesses, governments and other organizations throughout the industry.

The automotive industry is undergoing a major technological shift and Jaguar Land Rover is at the forefront. The UK-based JLR has embraced Linux as the operating system underlying its next generation In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. The company has also taken a leadership role in advocating for open source development within the automotive industry.

With so many flavors of Android, and some so radically different from one another is it fair to still consider Android a single operating system or many smaller ones?

Etherpad Lite was recently security audited by Mozilla. The developers say the result of that audit was an urgent effort from them to fix "gaping loopholes" in the collaborative editor's security and, in turn, release version 1.2.9 of Etherpad Lite. Issues addressed include a major security problem where an attacker could submit content as another user and a problem with unescaped user input.

Because of the differences between traditional systems and Linux, there exists a certain amount of anxiety in most people when considering switching. For these problems there are groups that are created to assist those wanting to install Linux as a trial or as a permanent replacement. In my area of the country we have initiated a group called Linux Neighbors for that purpose. The group has as its mission to help those thinking about using Linux to make a smooth transition.

Jon Masters summarises the latest happenings in the Linux kernel community, including the closing of the development ‘merge window’ for the 3.8 kernel