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It happened faster than I had thought, considering the slow pace at which slackware-current has been evolving these past months. But there is a massive flurry of activity and Patrick Volkerding has pushed lots of updates to the development branch of Slackware lately. Quite interesting was the addition of the elilo and gnu-efi packages of course, which indicate future support in Slackware for UEFI-based hardware (UEFI being the sucessor to the good old BIOS). Slackware already supported GPT partition tables (successor of the good old MBR) so this looks promising for buyers of “Secure Boot” computers. Don’t forget to wipe that awful Windows 8 first! It would not make any sense to keep it on a computer if you can install Slackware on it in its place.

KDE Plasma Active developer Aaron Seigo has been working to bring a tablet running open source Linux-based software to market for over a year. While the project has hit some roadbumps, Seigo says factory tooling for a new tablet has begun, and the first models could roll off the production line by May. While Seigo isn’t ready to provide specs for the new tablet yet, he says the Vivaldi tablet that’s currently in the works has a higher-resolution screen and faster processor than the model the team had planned to release in 2012.

GNU R offers a wide variety of packages for its users. There are all kinds of packages for R, which allow to display graphics or perform statistical tests. Some packages are designed for applications specific to a given industry. Many packages are already a part of the basic R installation, however, some of them need to be additionally installed into GNU R. This article will describe how to install and use packages under R.

On two recent occasions I've been asked to share why the open source economic model is sound. The first was on the elevator with an academic researcher while attending a recent meeting. We talked about open source, and he asked me: "If the software is open source,how are developers suppossed to make a living?".

The ZaTab, advertised as a tablet for hackers, is out of stock with no indication of whether it will be coming back into circulation again.

Linux has now also captured the largest share of consumer computing, if that category is defined to include, as it should, mobile devices and tablets as well as personal computers. According to a Goldman Sachs (GS) report issued last December, Google's (GOOG) Android -- which is Linux-based -- enjoys a 42% share of all newly sold consumer computing products, compared with 24% for Apple (AAPL) and 20% for Microsoft (MSFT).

Minor over-the-air release to arrive in waves Owners of Google Nexus devices have reason to hover anxiously over their System Updates screens once again, with reports surfacing that the Chocolate Factory has slowly begun rolling out the latest update to Android 4.2 "Jelly Bean".…

The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.0.1-incubating release of the CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform. This is a minor release in the 4.0.0 branch, which contains fixes for more than 30 bugs.

ForLEx 2.0.2 has been released. ForLEX is a lightweight Debian-based Linux live CD which boots into an LXDE desktop. The distribution's primary goal is to provide several useful utilities for forensic analysis.

Terraria a once widely popular 2D game can be played on Linux natively!

The first stable release of the XBMC 12 based, open source media centre distribution turns the Raspberry Pi into an HD capable entertainment centre that can be installed without previous Linux experience

Oracle plans to release iOS and Android ports of JavaFX as open source in the coming weeks and months. Both will run with an unreleased Java SE for iOS/Android and with OpenJDK ports

Two bugs in Rails and a bug in the JSON gem expose Ruby on Rails applications to new attacks, some of which involve the possibility of remote code execution. Updating is recommended

In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

It may not come as a surprise to anyone who regularly reads my column that I tried to be first in line to order the Raspberry Pi. I mean, what's not to like in a $35, 700MHz, 256MB of RAM computer with HDMI out that runs Linux? In the end, I didn't make the first batch of 10,000, but I wasn't too far behind either.

Chris Wilson announced a couple of days ago a new development version of the Cairo 2D graphics library, which fixes a few bugs found in previous releases.

Canonical announced a few minutes ago, February 12, in a security notice, that a new kernel upgrade for its Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system is available, fixing four vulnerabilities found by various developers in the Linux 3.0 kernel packages.

Craig Lamparter announced a few days ago that version 9.25 of the Ubuntu Management Component Pack for HP ProLiant servers is now available for download/update.

Will enable cross-platform Java-based UIs – but why? Oracle says it plans to open source the Android and iOS implementations of its JavaFX UI platform "over the next couple months," which it says will allow Java developers to use the technology to write cross-platform smartphone apps for the first time.…

Jeffrey Ratcliffe had the pleasure of announcing a couple of days ago a new release of his gscan2pdf open source software, which helps users produce a multipage DjVu or PDF file from a scan.