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Canonical, and the open source Ubuntu operating system it sponsors, seem to be in the midst of a major watershed moment. In the past the Ubuntu world was a disparate one, but it is now finally converging around all types of devices. Whether that convergence succeeds will have a lot to do with the channel. But community opinion also plays a big role, and that may be Canonical’s biggest challenge going forward.

How many times have you heard, "there's an app for that"? But sometimes, there actually isn't "an app for that", or the apps that do exist don't meet your needs. As Linux users, we tend to like to scratch our own itches, and if that means we write some code to do it, so be it. However, writing code to run on an Android phone or tablet has a bit of a learning curve, and it's even worse on Apple products. Fortunately, Phonegap provides a simple way to create standalone apps for Android, iPhone, WebOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone, among others. You just need to be reasonably proficient in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and you can develop native apps for the majority of smartphones currently in use. And, the same code base can run, with obvious limitations, on any Web browser.

In a previous interview, former Product Manager, Runa Bhattacharjee, and Lead Developer, Sean Flanigan, gave us some insight into the development of Zanata. Today's Product Manager for the open source translation platform, Isaac Rooskov, tells us what complaints about other products influenced the design of Zanata, clears up some misconceptions about translation tools, and announces the newest release.

The Ubuntu Technical board has given the official designation to two Ubuntu flavours, Ubuntu GNOME and UbuntuKylin. The decision was made in an IRC meeting and announced by the projects this week. Ubuntu GNOME 3 sets out to deliver the GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu, while UbuntuKylin aims to offer a fully customised Chinese user experience on Ubuntu 13.04. The official blessing gives the developers of each flavour access to Ubuntu's build infrastructure and allows them to be managed as part of the Ubuntu project rather than as an unsupported fork.

PHP 5.5 will come with the Zend Optimizer+ integrated into it and boosting PHP performance by 5 to 20 per cent over other opcode caches. It is likely though to result in a delay to the release of PHP 5.5

For this project, we'll use a photo of the famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, Spain. The photo was taken with a Canon PowerShot S90 camera, and the RAW file exhibits several obvious flaws.

On February 23, I participated in my first hackathon event; not a coding event as typical of computer programmers, but an education hackathon—a "Course Sprint" where a group of 14 individuals (educators, open science advocates, community members, and students) collaborated to design and build an open, online course, An Introduction to Open Science and Data, for the School of Open on P2PU. Creative Commons hosted the event at their office in Mountain View, CA and invited both face-to-face and remote participants, of which I was one of four remote. The event was held in support of Open Data Day to raise awareness and involve communities worldwide in exploring how to liberate, promote, and publish open data.

SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") is a new networking protocol whose goal is to speed up the web. It is Google's alternative to the HTTP protocol and a candidate for HTTP/2.0. SPDY augments HTTP with several speed-related features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. To use SPDY, you need a web server and a browser (like Google Chrome and upcoming versions of Firefox) that both support SPDY. mod_spdy is an open-source Apache module that adds support for the SPDY protocol to the Apache HTTPD server. This tutorial explains how to use mod_spdy with Apache2 on CentOS 6.3.

Intel announced the first version of an LLVM IR SDK. The LLVM IR SDK is comprised of an LLVM IR editor plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment...

After Oracle, CentOS has now also released its RHEL 6.4 clone. Among the new features are drivers for Microsoft's Hyper V technology and KVM virtualisation optimisations

Sun Microsystems is a good example of what happens to a company sitting on a huge pile of money when they can’t figure-out a way to turn red ink into black. After the dot-com bubble burst, Sun was able to live off their savings for about a decade before being forced to agree to become Oracle’s bride. It’s doubtful that Shuttleworth would be able to find such a suitor for Canonical as his company’s major assets are programs written under a copyleft license.

The Ubuntu Tech Board approved last week that Ubuntu GNOME is now an official flavor/derivative of Ubuntu Linux...

To say that I coexist with Chrome is more accurate. Two months ago, I absolutely despised Chrome. It was a white-hot hatred that transcended the Mortal Plane. I'm sure such powerful emotions were the trigger for some short bursts of telekinesis around me.

Diana Kimball believes in "coding as a liberal art" - a new approach to university programming classes, one that teaches coding as a creative pursuit, rather than simply as a vocation. Seb Lee-Delisle hosts the Creative Coding podcast, and teaches creative coding workshops aimed at people who don't think of themselves as programmers.

Programming, animation, CAD and 'digital technology' also in the works The Boy Scouts of America have created a merit badge in Game Design.…

The second release candidate to the Linux 3.9 kernel is now available. Standing out in this week's kernel development update is work on WiFi drivers and other updates throughout kernel-land...

LXer Feature: 10-Mar-2013

The big news this week was Mark Shuttleworth and his feelings on the Ubuntu community and reaction to it. Miguel de Icaza decides to use a Mac full time instead of Linux at home. The Chrome OS resists being cracked into and more. Enjoy!

Crunchbang is built for do-ers. The people that use Crunchbang are not bothered about gestures or flashy graphics.

Crunchbang is for people that have a purpose for their computer and the operating system is a tool to help them achieve that purpose. I would imagine that Crunchbang would be great for software development.

If you prefer substance over style then read on.

While the MG probably isn't what the hardcore gamer in your life had in mind, you'd be hard pressed to find a better value for casual Android gaming.

When Mike Mika’s daughter was sad to learn she couldn’t play as a girl character in classic Donkey Kong, her father decided a little hacking was in order. Mika modified the ROM of the game so that the damsel/white-knight roles in the game were switched. Now Pauline ((Nintendo's precusor to the better known Princess Peach) runs, jumps, and dodges rolling barrels to save the dulcet Mario at the top of the screen, according to a Saturday post on reddit.