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In a 2010 post here on OStatic, I asked this question: "Is It Too Late for an Open Source Challenge to Android?" And in a follow-up post a few weeks ago, I discussed the impending arrival of a slew of mobile phones based on Firefox OS and Ubuntu. Now, there are even more concrete signs that we are going to see heavy competition among open mobile operating systems this year. Not ony have Firefox OS-based phones arrived (seen above), but Ubuntu phones are coming faster than many people thought they would.

A new site aims to more scientifically study and rank the relative popularity among Linux and BSD distros. Using multiple data sources, distros are ranked according to popularity factors, such as the number of news articles published about that distro, search engine results and visitor surveys.

HP may have finally decided on its primary tablet and smartphone operating system, and it's not WebOS or Windows, it's Android. While HP still hasn't made it official, sources are reporting that HP has decided that at least part of its tablet and smartphone future lies not with Windows or WebOS but with Google's Android. Who'd thought it!? Well, I for one did. Look at the facts. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that in the last quarter Apple sold 23-million iPads, while HP—the world’s largest PC maker—sold 15-million PCs. And, who's catching up with the iPad in a great hurry? According to IDC that would be Android tablets. Since there's no way in heaven and earth, HP will ever be selling iPads, HP CEO Meg Whitman is hitching HP's wagon to Android's ascending star.

We are proud to announce that Firefox Flicks will welcome back: Edward Norton (Oscar Nominated Actor), Shauna Robertson (Producer of hit comedies, including Superbad & Knocked Up) and Couper Samuelson (We Own the Night and Sundance Winning short, Whiplash ), to the judging panel, along with new judges Bob Harvey (EVP Global Sales and Marketing for Panavision), Franklin Leonard (founder of the Black List) and Catherine Ogilvie (EMEA Marketing for Dolby).

In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributor Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy conference week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.

A project with a quiet voice in the community is about to turn the volume up with the addition of familiar Open Source evangelist Russell Pavlicek.

The Linux kernel now includes everything that is needed to use 3D acceleration with all GeForce graphics chips. Drivers have also been added for a Wireless Gigabit chip and a PCIe WLAN chip from Realtek. In his email announcing the release of Linux 3.8-rc6, Linus Torvalds emphasised that he wanted the seventh release candidate to be the last one. When he released RC7 on Friday, however, he made no mention of whether there would be an eighth RC before the final version of Linux 3.8.

MariaDB is an alternative choice for a database when professionals are looking for a robust, scalable, and reliable SQL server. It is an opensource drop-in replacement for the MySQL database and behaves in the exactly same way as MySQL. In this article we will install Joomla CMS with combination of the MariaDB database and the Apache2 webserver.

The Lua IDE Decoda, which has been used to create code for many Lua-based games, including its author's game Natural Selection 2, is being open sourced to help the tool improve with a wider community

Badly chosen warning messages caused some consternation with Google recently as its Chrome browser began declaring supported Linux systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 obsolete. The problem was brought to public attention by Red Hat evangelist Jan Wildeboer in a Google+ posting when his browser announced "Google Chrome is no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete".

This tutorial shows how you can install Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop on Fedora 18. Since it has now been included in the repositories this can now be done quite quickly. Fedora's default desktop at the moment is GNOME 3.

Valve has launched `Steam for Linux Celebration Sale` and all the games available for Linux are now on sale. During this campaign, the discount ranges between -50% and -80%.

This means that you can get Serious Sam 3 with a -80% discount (5,59 €), Counter Strike: Source with -75% (3,74 €), Half Life with -75% (1,99 €), Trine 2 with -75% (2,79 €), Crusader Kings II with a -75% discount (9.99 €) and so on.

Good news everyone! CRYAMORE has hit it's stretch goal to switch to Unity3D so they can support more platforms which includes Linux!

task spooler is a Unix batch system where the tasks spooled run one after the other. The amount of jobs to run at once can be set at any time. Each user in each system has his own job queue. The tasks are run in the correct context (that of enqueue) from any shell/process, and its output/results can be easily watched. It is very useful when you know that your commands depend on a lot of RAM, a lot of disk use, give a lot of output, or for whatever reason it's better not to run them all at the same time, while you want to keep your resources busy for maximum benfit. Its interface allows using it easily in scripts.

Cloud storage may be on the move, but local network-attached storage (NAS) systems continue to be in hot demand, especially as they integrate cloud backup and mobile access. In the enterprise NAS, unified storage, and SAN (storage area network) world, Linux shares the pie with Unix and Windows. But in the faster-growing small and medium business (SMB), small office and home office (SoHo), and consumer NAS segments, Linux is clearly dominant.

Linux users rejoice! Valve has just released the official Steam client for Linux. At the same time, a huge celebration sale for all Linux games hast been started. There are 50% to 75% discounts on all games for Linux.

Want to improve the integrity of your data? Place constraints in the database, as well as in your application. NoSQL, the catchall phrase for non-relational databases, is all the rage among Web developers. However, it's somewhat unfair and unhelpful to use the term NoSQL to describe them, given the variety of technologies involved. Even so, there are some fundamental differences between traditional relational databases and their NoSQL counterparts. For one, as the name implies, NoSQL databases don't use the standard SQL query language, and use either their own SQL-like language (for example, MongoDB) or an object-oriented API. Another difference is the lack of two-dimensional tables; whereas SQL databases operate solely with such tables, NoSQL databases eschew them in favor of name-value pairs or hash-like objects. And finally, NoSQL databases typically lack the features that led to the development of relational databases, namely transactions and data integrity.

LibreOffice 4.0 has been officially released one week ago. This article describes how to install LibreOffice 4.0 on Debian-based / Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, with or without replacing a previous LibreOffice version.

The Linux kernel developers have long been aware of the need for better testing of the kernel. That testing can take many forms, including testing for performance regressions and testing for build and boot regressions. As the term suggests, regression testing is concerned with detecting cases where a new kernel version causes problems in code or features that already existed in previous versions of the kernel. Of course, each new kernel release also adds new features. The Trinity fuzz tester is a tool that aims to improve testing of one class of new (and existing) features: the system call interfaces that the kernel presents to user space.

On Monday was the original "work in progress" patch to improve the DIO code in the Linux kernel. As Overstreet wrote then, "The end result is _vastly_ simpler - direct-io.c is now ~700 lines, vs. ~1300 previously. dio_submit is almost gone, I'm down to 4 things left in it. It relies heavily on my block layer patches for efficient bio splitting, and making generic_make_request() take arbitrary size bios...It also gets rid of the various differences between async and sync requests - previously, for async reads it marked pages dirty before submitting the io (in process context), then on completion punts to worqueue to redirty the pages if any need to be. This now happens for sync reads, too."