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Critical Link announced a tiny, Linux-ready, SODIMM-style module based on the Altera Cyclone V SX-U672 ARM/FPGA SoC. The MityARM-5CSX builds on the Cyclone V’s mix of FPGA logic and dual-core 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processing power, adding two GigE channels, a PCI Express bus, and 145 GPIO lines. The MityARM-5CSX computer-on-module (COM) is designed for a [...]

The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.8.1. This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.8.0 relative to previous releases of GCC.

Back in 2010, champions of a free web were ecstatic over Google's plan to seed the internet with a patent-free video. VP8 was going to crush the patent-heavy H.264, now celebrating its 10th birthday. Or so we were told. In May of 2010, Google open-sourced VP8, the video compression codec component to the audio-visual WebM format, which it had bought and developed earlier that year, and threw open the WebM Project to all comers.

Higher Ed’s in trouble, in case you hadn’t heard. Burdened by runaway costs, unsustainable infrastructure, outrage over tuition increases, declining public dollars, and outmoded degree programs, colleges and universities are struggling to satisfy the needs of their current patrons, let alone cater to a global student population that is expected to double by 2025. Built right into a university’s DNA, however, is the key to its evolution and, ultimately, its survival: the sharing of knowledge, the sharing of resources, and the sharing of power.

With the end of May comes our usual end of the month summary about the most popular Linux news stories this month that appeared on Phoronix and other announcements. For this month on Phoronix there were 202 news postings (an average of over six original news articles per day) and 13 featured-length articles.

Double Fine's super smiley Brad Muir (creator of Iron Brigade) is heading up a new crowdfunding campaign to develop a single player turn based tactical strategy game inspired by X-COM, Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem. Massive Chalice will use Double Fine's Buddha Engine, the same engine used by Brütal Legend, Stacking and Costume Quest, which recently gained Linux support in the Humble Double Fine Bundle.

XAMPP is free and open-source web development bundle, it includes Apache HTTP web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python. OpenSSL, and many more web modules. XAMPP software bundle “distribution” easily provides all these web modules with a few commands. So, don’t bother installing Apache, MySQL, PHP …etc one by one.

Jeremy Hammond was arrested in a major federal sweep last year on charges of computer hacking conspiracy, computer hacking, and conspiracy to commit access device fraud. The self-described hacktivist pled guilty to these counts in court on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

In the post-9/11 atmosphere of ever-increasing government secrecy and surveillance, the real surprise to me about the Department of Justice’s secret snooping on Associated Press phone records was that it would be such a surprise, given the visibly vast security and intelligence apparatus erected by the U.S. government over the past decade (admirably totted up by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in the 2010 Washington Post project Top Secret America and criticized by Glenn Greenwald and others). But the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story. We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import........

A new feature being worked on for the Intel DRM Linux kernel graphics driver is IPS. Short for Intermediate Pixel Storage, this feature should allow modern Intel HD graphics cores to let the CPU enter deeper PC states to increase power-savings...

Think of a world where you could simply download the blueprints of your future home for free just like you download any open source software today. A team of British architects developed just that and they are hoping their project called WikiHouse will radically change the way we think about building homes.

Gumstix announced a touchscreen baseboard for its Linux-ready Overo computer-on-modules built entirely with the company’s new Geppetto custom design platform, and available for further modification via the web-based Geppetto. The Alto35 is available with a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen from InTouch Electronics. Like the Palo35 that it baseboard replaces, the Alto35 supports Gumstix Overo COMs, which [...]

I found lots of people struggling to get catalyst driver work in Ubuntu 13.04. This issue has been persistent for some laptops, ever since Ubuntu 13.04 came out, specially for Intel, AMD dual graphics setup. For people, who have been looking at catalyst drivers ever since http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1930450 post was published, should not be that hard to find the solution, but for those who are new to Linux, or don’t have time for these kinds of issues, this issue might be a show stopper bug.

On Linux, Cairo Clock is a very popular clock that many users love. Numerous developers have made a variety of looks for this clock called themes or skins. This article will provide information on making, downloading, installing, activating, deleting, and sharing Cairo Clock themes.

The Dave and Gunnar Show is a new podcast series talking about government, open source, and a sprinkling of Red Hat projects. I recently discovered it and thought the opensource.com audience might enjoy it too. What do you think? Episode 10, Go Ugly Early particulary struck me. Give it a listen:

Version 19 beta: Still alive or dead on arrival? Review The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, pits the theory of quantum superposition against what we observe to be true.…

Gedit is a popular text editor that many users use to write notes, create BASH and Python scripts, view configuration files, etc. Sometimes, users may want to change the way Gedit displays text. This is very useful to programmers. Gedit gives specific colors to the variables and another color for the commands. Many parts of the programming syntax has a special color. This programmer can immediately identify parts of the code by seeing the color. However, what if the programmer is color-blind or does not like the way some of the colors look? Thankfully, a simple XML file can instruct Gedit how to display programming syntaxes and plain text. This single XML file, that averages around 10kB, is called a Style Scheme or a Syntax File.

And actually, some of the most popular are Free Software. In the just-released Fedora 19 beta, three of those are available for installation. All you need to do is type yum install and you are set to go, provided there is a 3D printer connected to your computer.

Over the past few years, a handful of different encrypted messaging systems have cropped up and gained prominence, notably Cryptocat and the OTR specification. Now a newcomer to the scene proposes a different way of thinking about encrypted communication, one that borrows from its more well-known older brother, BitCoin.

A project has been started that intends to recreate BitCoin’s decentralized P2P model for seamless message encryption and transmission. BitMessage was started by Jonathan Warr en late last year and has now made it up to version 0.2.4. One of the most prominent strengths of the BitMessage system is how it enforces anonymity. Similar to how BitCoin allows one to send money to anonymous recipients without advertising metadata to others, BitMessage communicates via simple addresses generated from public keys, which need not be tied to a specific user’s identity.

Raspberry Pi hackers now have a new OS option built by the The Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT). Pidora is a Fedora remix optimized specifically for the Raspberry Pi based on a brand-new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture."The Pidora build was performed at Seneca's Centre for Development of Open Technology based on our experience operating the Fedora ARMv5tel/armv7hl build farm over the past three years," said Chris Tyler, Industrial Research Chair at the CDOT.