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Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such "Linux apps" at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming.

The City of Santa Cruz is the smallest community to ever partner with Code for America, but it had one of the largest problems to solve: how to make it easier to take an idea for a small business from conception to reality. From a concept to a permit.

Wink, a software package for creating tutorial and presentation screen shots, works reasonably well when it works at all. However, getting it to run may not be worth the bother, given the better alternatives available. Wink's premise is a good one for anyone who needs to create a show-and-explain presentation on how to do things with a computer.

Fedora 18 was published a month ago and now it is available in versions for the ARM architectures known as ARMv5tel and ARMv7hl in the Linux space. The Fedora Project is providing pre-built images for Versatile Express (QEMU), Trimslice (Tegra), Pandaboard (OMAP4), GuruPlug (Kirkwood), and Beagleboard (OMAP3).

Yet another development version of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.8, a sophisticated application to easily and quickly access remote or virtual systems on the controversial and popular GNOME 3 desktop environment, has been announced last evening, February 5.

But by the time you are done with this tutorial, GRUB 2 will be in the Partition Boot Record (PBR) of the boot partition of the Fedora installation, and Windows 8?s boot program will be restored to the boot manager, making it the primary boot manager, so that every time the computer is rebooted, you will see this screen, or a bland, black one.

Berkholz, a long-time X.Org and Gentoo contributor and employee of RedMonk, also reiterated facts about the X.Org Foundation not being accepted to the Google Summer of Code project last year and other shortcomings. His development statistics on X.Org slowing down in the past few years incorporates not only code activity but also mailing list messages, contributor count, and other metrics.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s announcement — or today, depending where you are — of the availability of KDE 4.10, the software compilation has already been packaged by the hard working Kubuntu team over at Blue Systems. This should come as a surprise to no one, as the Kubuntu team has a healthy track record of bringing packages to backports as soon as possible. Are you using Kubuntu but haven’t seen your update yet? You might not have the backports repository enabled. Simply follow these steps to install it to your system an join the bleeding edge..

(Sacramento, CA, USA: February 6, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced its participation at CeBIT 2013, March 5-9, 2013 (Hannover, Germany: http://www.cebit.de). During the conference, LPI representatives will present on the subject of advancing IT workforce development in Linux and Open Source, specifically during the conference's activities for CeBIT's Partner Country of Poland. CeBIT has a 20+ year history as one of the world's largest conferences and trade shows for IT and telecommunications solutions and LPI has been a regular participant for several years.

Bio-Linux 7.0.5 was quietly released. Bio-Linux is a full-featured, powerful, configurable and easy-to-maintain bioinformatics workstation. Bio-Linux provides more than 500 bioinformatics programs on an Ubuntu base. There is a graphical menu for bioinformatics programs, as well as easy access to the Bio-Linux bioinformatics documentation system and sample data useful for testing programs. Bio-Linux packages that handle new generation sequence data types can also be installed.

FOSDEM, held annually in Brussels, Belgium, is a free event for open source communities to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. It offers a mix of focused devrooms and themed main track talks, with no requirement for registration. It has a reputation of being highly developer-focused, this year brought together over 5,000 geeks from around the world.

An even cheaper Raspberry Pi has gone on sale in Europe with less stuff on it so the tiny ARM-compatible Brit-puter can consume even less power. The Model A Pi was touted during the hype-gasm surrounding the Raspberry Pi's launch in February last year. But it was the Model B circuit board that went on sale first, and went on to sell a million units to date, whereas the A-series is now available.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to configure PureFTPd to accept TLS sessions on a Fedora 18 server.

Since September 2011, Nicholas Clark has been working on improving the Perl 5 Core, funded by a $20,000 grant from the Perl Foundation. The term of the work is coming to an end and Clark is now seeking another $20,000 to continue the work of the original Improving Perl 5 grant. The Foundation is consulting with the community before making the final decision whether to go ahead with the extension which would see Clark devoting another 400 hours of dedicated work to the project.

Install the DSLR Dashboard app on your Android device, and you can use it to control a Nikon DSLR camera via a USB connection. But in certain situations, tethering the Android device to a camera using a cable is not ideal. This is where DSLR Dashboard’s wireless functionality can come in rather handy.

A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher's career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

id Software’s venerable code magician John Carmack has taken to Reddit to discuss the prospects of Linux support for mainstream games. Carmack said “I don’t think that a good business case can be made for officially supporting Linux for mainstream games today.”

Do you feel that someone is attempting to access you server? To find out, you can deploy a honeypot within your system to help you ease your paranoia by either confirming or dismissing your initial believe. As an example you can start the Kippo SSH honeypot, which allows you to monitor brute-force attempts, collect up today exploits and malware. Kippo also automatically records hacker's shell session, which you can replay to explore various hacking techniques and later use this gathered knowledge to harden your production server. Another reason why to install a honeypot is to take away an attention from your production server. In this tutorial we will show how to deploy a Kippo SSH honeypot on the Ubuntu server.

Patent trolls have gone after some pretty ridiculous things recently. Online shopping carts, scanners, Windows Phone tiles, and yes, rejecting a call and sending it to voicemail. On Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it’s now gearing up to tackle the latest completely absurd troll, who claims to have invented podcasting.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) has invested in Piston Cloud Computing, which develops an OpenStack distribution for private enterprise clouds. The investment comes only a few weeks after Cisco pumped money into Parallels, which develops cloud automation software. Is Cisco hedging its cloud bets? Sort of.