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Linux.com has published a short Q&A with Steven Rostedt, kernel developer at Red Hat and maintainer of the stable Linux real-time patch. Rostedt discusses issues such as “hard” vs “soft” real-time, what the Preempt-RT patch can and can’t do, and how to get started using it.

This week, we look at 7 free Android editors, Microsoft's personality disorder and the most profitable mobile apps.

Automated installation a lot of useful software extras on Ubuntu after the initial desktop install.

Intel hasn't yet even released their Haswell processors to the general public for use within notebooks, ultrabooks, and desktops, but Google engineers are already hard at work on prepping Haswell Chromebooks. Hitting the Coreboot repository yesterday was some Haswell-related commits by Google/Chrome developers, e.g. haswell: use dynamic cbmem and haswell boards: support added chromeos function, among others.

Sabayon is Gentoo-out-of-the-box, but does the “for human beings” approach not work for the Linux distro built on being infinitely customisable?

Describing themselves as “a disruptive open source software company”, Open-Xchange - a team made up of some of the key developers of OpenOffice, has announced the launch of OX Documents, a cloud-based office productivity suite, featuring OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool.

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I'd been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

ecurity vendors analyzing the code used in the cyber attacks against South Korea are finding nasty components designed to wreck infected computers. Tucked inside a piece of Windows malware used in the attacks is a component that erases Linux machines, an analysis from Symantec has found. The malware, which it called Jokra, is unusual, Symantec said.

SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") is a new networking protocol whose goal is to speed up the web. It is Google's alternative to the HTTP protocol and a candidate for HTTP/2.0. SPDY augments HTTP with several speed-related features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. To use SPDY, you need a web server and a browser (like Google Chrome and upcoming versions of Firefox) that both support SPDY. mod_spdy is an open-source Apache module that adds support for the SPDY protocol to the Apache HTTPD server. This tutorial explains how to use mod_spdy with Apache2 on CentOS 6.4.

Have you ever dreamed of playing good old Playstation games on your favourite O.S.? This is exactly what you need! Ladies and gentlemen, i give to you the best PSX emulator for Ubuntu... PCSXE!

A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: "We're not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house."

If you have a Web hosting account, but not enough resources to host Piwik, OpenShift Online presents an alternative platform to host it on. OpenShift Online is a cloud computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) provided by Red Hat, Inc.

Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013. For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has signed a deal with the Chinese government to create a new version of Ubuntu. For China, this is widely seen as an attempt "to wean its IT sector off Western software in favour of more home-grown alternatives," the BBC reported.

South Korea was under a huge cyber attack recently and according to Symantec, the code used in the attack was tucked inside a Windows malware to target Linux computers. This is a very interesting case, according to the security firm. "We do not normally see components that work on multiple operating systems, so it is interesting to discover that the attackers included a component to wipe Linux machines inside a Windows threat," said the company on its blog.

Parasound, a purveyor of fanatically high-end consumer audio equipment, has introduced a CD player that’s controlled by an internal Mini-ITX computer running embedded Linux. Using a CD-ROM drive for playing CDs, the “Halo CD 1? sucks in the CD’s contents at 4x normal speed, giving its CPU time to detect and eliminate disc errors before outputting near-perfect audio.

A single TCP connection reaches more than 50 Gbps by using Multipath TCP to pool six 10 Gbps interfaces together.

As much fun as I’m having picking on poor Mr. Limi, these are all valid concerns, especially for someone who works in project design. Indeed, designers with any software project, especially when the product is as complex as a modern browser, need to constantly question how much control is useful and try to discover where the ability to customize gets in the way of the user experience. According to his blog, Limi believes in a 2% rule; if an option is used by less than 2% of the user base, then that option should be removed. To his thinking, the 2% who use the function wouldn’t be left in the cold, since they could simply use a plugin to reintroduce the missing option.

A little over five years after the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, Glyn Moody looks at Android's global market position and the challenges that Google faces to avoid Android disappearing under a plethora of other companies' interfaces and apps.

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.