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An extensive slide presentation on using Android in embedded systems is available for free download on the website of Free Electronics. The presentation provides an efficient technical introduction and overview of the process of developing embedded Android software, on both the OS and application levels.

Francesca Ciceri announces on her blog that the Debian Project now has its own blog at bits.debian.org.

The Croods, a 3D computer-animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation, took more than 9,100 computing render-years to generate images from 3-D models. And all the animation workstations and servers were run on Linux.

More than two years after LibreOffice came into being, it's hard to call the open source office software anything but a success. There are possibly tens of millions of people who use it—or at least have it installed on their computers. But how close is LibreOffice to overtaking OpenOffice, the king of open source productivity suites?

The short answer is that LibreOffice has a long way to go.

How to use scrot - a command line tool to take screenshot

This required more time if compared to Libreoffice versus Open Office, but it seem that the critical mass of users of another piece of open source software is moving away from Oracle, I’m talking about Mysql versus MariaDB. Mysql is probably the most used open source database, it’s used in most of the more successful LAMP applications, such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento, after all the M of LAMP was an acronim for Mysql until today. All started back in February 2013 when two large open source projects, Fedora and openSUSE, announced their intention to abandon the venerable MySQL database, now a property of Oracle, and adopt instead MariaDB.

The Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group surveyed 355 IT staffers who work for enterprises with sales of more than $500 million and/or 500+ employees. Guess what? They found — as the foundation reveals in its 2013 Enterprise End User Report, Linux Adoption: Third Annual Survey of World's Largest Enterprise Linux Users in the most recent quarter (4Q12) — that big business loves big Linux.

The lawyer who has filed a case with the European Commission against secure boot in Windows 8 on behalf of some 8000 Linux users in Spain says the complaint takes "an user and developer perspective, it is an unprecedented approach to the problem of monopoly in operating systems in Europe".

You know the issue of the broken anti-circumvention rules in the DMCA are going mainstream when even USA Today is writing editorials condemning the whole thing as an archaic bit of copyright law that makes little sense today. It is, of course, focusing mainly on the question of unlocking mobile phones that has brought the issue forward lately, but USA Today's editorial board doesn't just focus on the unlocking question, but notes how ridiculous our copyright laws are that lead to this result:

The Google update also addresses two high severity, four medium severity and five low severity security issues in its latest "major" update to the browser. Also added, shortcut profiles on Windows and asynchronous DNS on Mac and Linux

A Spanish association representing open-source software users has filed a complaint against Microsoft Corp to the European Commission, in a new challenge to the Windows developer following a hefty fine earlier this month.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

For many, Gov 2.0 is about putting government in the hands of citizens. Whether it’s a mobile app alerting residents to a local meeting or checking social media networks to see which roads are clear for the morning commute. The term should be defined primarily by its utility in helping citizens or agencies solve problems, either for individuals or the commons, according to a recent article on the subject by Alex Howard on GovFresh.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has awarded the Document Freedom Germany Award to die tageszeitung (TAZ)

Most people don't understand UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) or even know whether their computer has it. An interface layer between an operating system and firmware, UEFI offers much better security than plain old PC BIOS.

CAINE and NBCAINE 4.0 'Pulsar' are out. Changelog: Linux kernel 3.2, LibreOffice 4.0.1, Sqliteman, remote file system mounter, sdparm, netdiscover, NirSoft Launcher with FTK imager and sysinternals tools, new RBFstab and Mounter. Rbfstab is a utility that is activated during boot or when a device is plugged in. It writes read-only entries to /etc/fstab so devices are safely mounted for forensic imaging and examination. It is self installing with 'rbfstab -i' and can be disabled with 'rbfstab -r'. It contains many improvements over past rebuildfstab incarnations. Rebuildfstab is a traditional means for read-only mounting in forensics-orient distributions.

I have spent several months searching for a Linux Distro that meets my requirements. My trusty Acer Aspire One Netbook is equipped with 2 GB ram and a 160GB HDD and has served me well since its purchase in 2010 for $279 US. The changes to Ubuntu Unity and Gnome3 set me into motion in search of a replacement Distro. Last year I tried many Distros looking yet something was missing. I didn't realize what it was until I tried Fuduntu in its 2013.1 version released in January.

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." That is the purpose of Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, which is sometimes referred to as the "copyright clause" (or "the patent clause"), which enables both areas of law to be created via Congress. It's also the part that is most often ignored. As we've discussed, the whole purpose of this clause is to make it clear that the public are the sole stakeholders when it comes to proper policy making decisions regarding these laws. However, with this new push for comprehensive copyright reform, it appears that the copyright lobby is already working on ways to make sure that the public is marginalized in the discussion.

A company developing a low-cost personal computer based on Android launched a Kickstarter project yesterday, to help get the device into production. After just one day, the MiiPC project has already achieved Kickstarter pledges of more than $10,000 beyond its $50,000 goal. The MiiPC (pronounced “me-PC”) is basically a mini-PC running Android. However, it’s being [...]

"This is not some pie-in-the-sky that's never been done before," said William Gale, codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "It's doable, feasible, implementable, and at a relatively low cost." So why hasn't it become a reality?