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Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. He is a professional 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that since the release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012, it has seen 40 million downloads of the 3.4.x release series. This number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge; language packs and source tarballs were not counted. The ASF has released a comma-delimited text file with the download numbers for every individual day and has plotted the results in a graph showing the cumulative and daily downloads.

The X Window System is old, but it works. Many distros including Ubuntu, had been headed toward the use of Wayland as an alternative Linux display technology. Though apparently Wayland is not good enough for Ubuntu anymore. "The traction that Ubuntu Touch is creating is great and the team is happy with where this is leading us," Ubuntu Developer, Oliver Ries wrote. "However, in order to implement the vision of converged devices, some changes to our Display Stack are necessary. After thorough research, looking at existing options and weighing in costs & benefits we have decided to roll our own Display Server, Mir."

A new system launched to curb online piracy of intellectual property is meant to be educational, not punitive, says the organization behind it. But suspended Internet service or slowing service to a crawl sounds pretty punitive to critics of the Copyright Alert System (CAS).

Miguel de Icaza, well known the GNOME project founder and leader of the Mono camp, has left Linux for OS X...

Over the last couple of months there have been a number of discussions on the Arch boards about the forum policy of only providing support for Arch Linux, culminating in this long thread about Archbang users (login required) being denied support and having their threads summarily closed. As it emerged in the discussion, there seem to be two separate issues at play here; the question of Arch-derivatives using the Arch brand (logo, colours and even the forum style sheets), and how the wider community of GNU/Linux distributions are treated on our boards.

This week, a vote on updating the project bylaws, fixing the "Tomcat situation" after 4.1, and discussions around the support lifecycle. Some respectable progress in knocking out major and blocker bugs for 4.1.0 as well. The project also welcomes two new PPMC members and three new committers.

You must be thinking: “What do you mean by refreshing storage? I didn’t think you could drink storage?” No, sad to say, this blog post isn’t about the type of refreshment you get from a crisp cold glass of Anaconda Cola (yum!) It’s about the action of manually refreshing anaconda’s view on the storage configuration it’s working with. Why would you want to do that?

Let’s step back a second first. The custom partitioning tool in Anaconda (Fedora’s installer) still has a lot of rough edges to the design in Fedora 18 GA. The Anaconda team has been putting a lot of work into improving it in their Fedora 19 branch. We’ve got a ton of bugs, thoughtful (and some not so thoughtful ) comments from forums and blogposts, and some preliminary anaconda usability test data! (You’ll be hearing a lot more about that last bit soon, don’t worry! ) The team has pored over all of this information and has had a number of brainstorming sessions and discussions on how to address the identified issues, both over IRC, the mailing list, in bugs directly, and in person.

At the beginning of last year I tested the CompuLab Trim-Slice, which was a great ARM-based Linux desktop for the time. While the hardware now shows its signs of aging in the fast-paced ARM world, modern Linux distributions can still be loaded up on the platform...

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair. A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.

A week back, we discussed Fedora 18 Spherical Cow with the MATE desktop environment. Overall, it worked well, but it did lack the wow effect, and certain improvements were needed in the visual polish space, as well as the application set. Mind, this was the first time we saw MATE on top of Fedora, so goblins came and pushed splinters under your fingernails.

This week, we will discuss Cinnamon. The more astute among you will surely recall my amazement at how well Fedora 17 performed when blessed with this desktop. The Beefy Miracle became a miracle and earned itself a spot in the top five charts for 2012. Well, it's time to see if the magic can be achieved once again, with Spherical Cow as the scapegoat. Oh so many animal references, it's almost animal farm.

PC-BSD, the popular desktop FreeBSD-based operating system that's rather friendly towards conventional end-users, has now become a rolling release platform...

The legality of unlocking one's cell phone to run on any network has flipped back and forth in the past several years. It was deemed illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—then it was made legal by the Library of Congress in an exception to the DMCA passed in 2006. The Library chose not to renew the exemption in 2012, however, and it expired in January of this year. That inspired a petition to the White House, which a few weeks ago passed the 100,000 signature mark. The White House then promised to respond.

The latest coverage of today's surprise announcement of Canonical developing Mir, their own display server for Ubuntu, is information on building and running the Mir display server with the code they open-sourced today. There's also a Phoronix video showcasing the (sad) state of the Mir client demo.

The White House has announced support of a consumer's right to unlock their phone once their contract has expired. The FCC is reviewing its alternatives and Congress is encouraged to take action. Here is the full text of the Whitehouse response:

George Grey, CEO of the Linaro organization, gave a keynote speech on benefits of collaboration in Linux development at last month’s Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco. In his keynote, Grey expounded on the benefits of multiple companies collaborating to accelerate Linux development. Additionally, he explained the purpose and goals of Linaro and reported on [...]

Alan Levy, with Plextek Consulting, has published an interesting whitepaper that examines various issues associated with embedding Android in applications other than the typical smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. In the nine-page whitepaper, “Using Android in your embedded product,” Levy provides a brief overview of Android and its origins, and then proceeds to evaluate its pros and cons relative to applications in the general embedded market.

Plenty of industry heavyweights were active at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) last week, but there was a very noticeable, major absence: Google. The company's invisibility in Barcelona was a microcosm for perhaps the biggest trend coming out of the conference: co-option

IBM announced today that its entire array of cloud software and services will be based on the open cloud architecture, allowing end-users and customers to buy various equipment from contributing members of the OpenStack software group without having to face tie-in with one particular vendor.

In the past, we’ve written about several cool KDE apps. I’m now going to show you some desktop applets – called plasmoids – that have caught my attention. They are all included in KDE 4.9. KDE and productivity junkies, read on!