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Just one month ago, the Chromebook Pixel was little more than a poorly sourced rumor. (And personally, while I didn't quite dismiss it out of hand I came pretty close.) Google was releasing a high-end Chromebook with a touchscreen? And that touchscreen would boast a better pixel density than either of the Retina MacBook Pros? The rumor definitely didn’t fit in with the latest (and by all accounts, most successful) wave of Chromebooks, which have turned heads not least because they're cheaper than any Chromebooks have been so far. And yet, here we are: the Chromebook Pixel is real, it’s on my desk, and it starts at $1,299.

Rock the Vote needed a way to manage the fast growth of the data handled by its Web-based voter registration application. The organization turned to GlusterFS replicated volumes to allow for filesystem size upgrades on its virtualized hosting infrastructure without incurring downtime.

Red Hat has announced that it is assuming the leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, just days after Oracle issued what it said would be the final patch for version 6 of its commercial Java SE 6 Development Kit. Oracle posted JDK 6 Update 43 on Monday as an emergency patch for the latest in a series of severe vulnerabilities that have plagued the Java browser plugin. But although Oracle is already investigating other flaws, it said that this would be the last set of public fixes for Java SE 6.

Toradex will soon ship the first member of a new SODIMM-like COM (computer-on-module) family. The 82x42mm Apalis T30 is powered by a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3, and supported with an embedded Linux OS. The company sees ARM as a growing alternative to x86 CPUs, in applications such as digital signage and high-end multimedia, thanks the increasing integration of interfaces such as 3D graphics engines, PCI-Express, gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI within ARM chipsets.

OpenStack Summit 2013 is set to start April 15 in Portland, Ore. The open source platform seems to be gaining momentum with cloud services providers (CSPs). IBM (NYSE: IBM) has just placed a huge bet on OpenStack. Plus, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) have each built their public clouds on the emerging software platform. Some folks think today's OpenStack is a lot like Linux from a decade ago -- destined to emerge as a de facto standard for the next generation of computing. But in reality, OpenStack faces plenty of challenges. As Talkin' Cloud looks ahead to the conference, I hope the OpenStack community addresses these five issues head-on.

Most of the best Linux games from my previous post are available in the official Fedora repository. These games can be installed easily using the yum command. All the games are native to Fedora, some of them are free but not open-source.

Digium's new Switchvox Cloud platform offers Asterisk (the open source IP PBX) in an on-demand format. Backed by its unified communications capabilities, Switchvox Cloud could also be an alternative to Microsoft Office 365 and Lync Online. But is it?

Karim Yaghmour, founder of OperSys founder and a well-known luminary in the real-time and embedded Linux market, led a panel discussion on this topic at the Android Builders Summit in San Francisco last month. “The idea ignited a lively debate among embedded Linux pros with three of the four panelists ultimately siding with Yaghmour,” writes Libby Clark in a post at Linux.com. “What seemed to be their litmus test? If Android can conceivably be used in ‘classic’ embedded projects, it is embedded Linux.”

After several months without posting, Mark Shuttleworth has returned to his official blog with some harsh words for those in the Ubuntu community who have been critical of Canonical's recent efforts to transform the OS into a multi-faceted platform for mobile devices and the cloud. "If you've done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on," Shuttleworth wrote on Thursday morning. "That's normal – there's no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else."

Here in the Linux blogosphere, most fans of FOSS are nothing if not outspoken with their many opinions. Those opinions tend to be unequivocal on matters large and small, so it's always notable when a new technology comes along that leaves bloggers scratching their heads in uncertainty. That's a rarity, needless to say, but just recently a shining example emerged: the Chromebook Pixel.

Self-promotion in an open source world, it starts with a shameless plug—a simple way to make people aware of something you’re passionate about. Then, over time, you get more comfortable with using the shameless plug and that desire to make people aware transforms into purposeful marketing. At some time or another when working on an open source project, you're bound to have to promote it. Self-promotion can be an uncomfortable topic for some people, but I've found word of mouth is the best way to promote open source.

Updated java-1.7.0-openjdk packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical..

The last few years, many users upload their how-to videos (also known as videorials — like tutorials) in Youtube, showing their Linux desktop and explaining how to do a bunch of stuff. So instead of reading an article or a guide with static images and multiple pages, maybe there is a quick educational video waiting for you somewhere in the Internet.

Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult. As a leader in the community I have been bombarded by comments from fellow community members these past few days. On Monday several members of the Community Council jumped on a hangout to talk about how we were handling all the news coming out, where we felt the community was going and what our role in this was. Immediately following this discussion we reached out to Mark to have a chat ASAP and I wrote an email to the internal Community Council list saying, among other things:

Red Hat has instituted changes at platform-as-a-service OpenShift that put outside contributors on more equal footing with Red Hat employees. The Linux kingpin and cloud-wannabe announced a set of features designed to increase community participation in its PaaS in a blog post by the OpenShift Team on Thursday. The most significant change is moving to a pure GitHub pull request format for code contributions, so internal Red Hat developers will have to submit changes in the same way as community participants.

The openSUSE release team has released RC2 to the mirrors a few hours ago. A large number of bugs have been fixed and a number of packages have been updated. Major changes include PulseAudio, the kernel and Firefox. This is the last opportunity to find and fix the last few bugs before the final release." Please do note that the openSUSE live images no longer fit on a 600 MB CD: "Starting with openSUSE 12.3, we have changed the structure of the live GNOME and KDE media. The live images are now designed to be written to, booted and installed from a USB disk rather than a CD; consequently, they are now about a GB each.

The DistroRank Weekly Popularity Rankings have now been posted for the week of 3/7/2103. We had a little movement in the top 10 this week. Debian moved up one spot to number 4 while Arch fell to number 5.

SourceForge is pleased to announce our new Enterprise Directory—a sub-section of our site focused specifically on Enterprise projects. These are the projects that are geared specifically for use within a company. This might include areas such as project management, office suites, or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Often, software in this category is backed by a company, but this isn’t always the case, nor is it a requirement for inclusion in the directory.

Responding to ongoing discussions and speculation about the future for Ubuntu's release cadence, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth published a blog post today, detailing his thoughts on the issue. Shuttleworth, who holds the position of "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" of the Ubuntu project, has in the past publicly stated his opinion on cadence and the importance of regular releases for the Ubuntu project. In his latest post, Shuttleworth is of the opinion that "rolling releases are not real releases" and are therefore not the right method for Ubuntu to adopt, but that he is considering accelerating Ubuntu's release cycle.

It’s long been the tradition in Humble Bundle for Linux buyers to outspend other platforms per payment, but this time Linux users have won another category; total payments by platform. How on the heels of Linux encroaching Apple’s territory in Steam usage, this is just phenomenal. But what does it mean?