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The annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is now preparing for the 2013 cycle of the program which sees Google offer student developers stipends to write code for a wide range of open source projects. Google is assisted by a number of mentoring organisations around the world who help the students achieve their goal of completing enhancements and improvements to open source projects. This will be the ninth year that GSoC has run; over the past eight years, six thousand students have completed the program.

The Linux desktop has long been about two key items, the actual desktop environment and the apps that run on it. This past week saw major advances in both fronts.

Modern copyright law grants copyright automatically to any creative work, including simple things like blog posts – and small pieces of code on github. This default copyright creates an assumption that for someone to do anything further with someone else's creative work requires permission from the author—what Lawrence Lessig calls "the permission culture." The open license ecosystem often takes this permission culture for granted, rather than fighting back—and that may be contributing to the proliferation of unlicensed code.

The international Firefox OS App days event finished just over a week ago, giving people a chance to make their own apps for Firefox OS

ROSA community members have prepared a variation of ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 operating system with GNOME desktop environment.

It was alarming to read in the recent article The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 by Dr. Dobb's editor, Andrew Binstock, that Perl was "continuing its long decline" and was in""an irretrievable tailspin," based on statistics from Google searches. Nothing in the article discussed what was lacking feature-wise in the language that might be behind this decline. While I am not an authority on programming languages, I thought it was only appropriate to reflect on the strengths of Perl that I've relied on during my 14-year affair with the language.

Thunar is the default file manager for XFCE desktops. While it is easy to integrate DropBox into Nautilus, the default file manager for GNOME, it is not so trivial for Thunar. This guide explains how to use DropBox with the Thunar file manager on a Fedora 18 XFCE desktop.

Four or five years ago, if a blog or two had whispered, “Pssst, hey–Microsoft is thinking of releasing a Linux port of Office,” the FOSS blogosphere would have lit-up so brightly that it could be seen from the International Space Station. Man, it would’ve been a crazy week. People would be writing about how suspicious they were, or happy, or sad, or filled with feelings of doom. Some would’ve said it means nothing until Adobe signs on with Photoshop. Others would’ve cussed and said “we don’t need no stinkin’ Microsoft Office.” Lots of us would have been warning folks to stay focused on our FOSS roots, our belief that software should be free, while pointing out that even Microsoft is welcome to offer their goods on Linux for any price they want to charge.

eScholar's only business is helping state and local education agencies get the best bang for their buck from collecting and using educational data to drive better school performance results. That sometimes involves helping its customers work with data gleaned from a variety of commercial and open source enterprise databases.

RhinoLINUX 5.0 is available. RhinoLinux is an Ubuntu-based desktop-oriented distribution which aims to provide many different desktop environments, including GNOME, KDE, MATE, Unity and Xfce.

There's a story going around that Microsoft might be porting Office to Linux. If you believe this story, I have a wonderful, lightly used bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you for a mere million dollars cash. You can run MS-Office on Linux today with WINE or Crossover, but running it natively on Linux is a pipe-dream. Is this technically possible? Sure. In fact, you can run Microsoft Office on Linux today by using WINE or its commercial big brother, CodeWeavers' Crossover Linux. I've done it myself. WINE and Crossover runs Office, and other Windows applications, on Linux by providing an implementation of the Windows API (application programming interface) on top of Linux.

Slick, a database access library for the Scala language designed by Typesafe, has reached its 1.0 release milestone. Slick allows developers to write their database queries in Scala instead of a database native language like SQL, reaping the benefits of static checking and compile time safety afforded by the library's query compiler. The tool can be extended to interface with several different database backends and allows developers to access the data stored in it as if they were directly using Scala collections. For example, creating a table would look like:

If you are running a rolling-release distribution, this short article will likely be of no use to you, but if you are running an installation of Mageia 2, you’ll learn that is brings good tidings, when it comes to upgrading an existing installation of Mageia.

George Dunlop outlines how the Xen project is progressing toward the goals it set for its upcoming 4.3 release.

LibreOffice is introducing their new name and community to the world. All the major Linux distros are already aware, but there are many Windows and Mac users who don’t understand what is going on. People even become attached to names for emotional reasons.

Code Across America is scheduled for February 22-24. It will be a weekend of community building and moving the needle for more openness in local governments across the United States. Code Across America is a multi-day event that any municipality or community can join. Individuals and groups can participate through virtual and in-person activities around the country. The initiative is organized by Code for America and coincides with International Open Data Day on February 23.

GCC 4.8 is set to introduce a new optimization level that provides fast compilation performance and decent run-time performance of the resulting binary while still providing a superior debugging experience. Here are benchmarks of this new GCC general optimization level (-Og) compared to the other long-standing compiler optimization levels.

The Cloud today seems a bit like Dawson City in 1896 when the Klondike Gold Rush was about to get underway. Everybody is talking about the Cloud, and many want a piece of the action. The Open Source world has been abuzz with OpenStack in particular, with some going so far as to call it “the new Linux”.

This is a review of Snowlinux 4 using the XFCE desktop. To be honest I ran into issues. There were issues with connecting to the internet, running synaptic and permissions.....

Printing in Linux can be a confusing territory. Many distributions don’t come with printing enabled by default, leaving it up to the user to set it up. This article will show you how to set up a standard USB printer in Linux.