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Last week on the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for an Aggressive Low Memory Booster. This is potentially an interesting feature for Linux systems with limited amounts of RAM...

On Sunday was the release of the xf86-video-intel 2.20.19 DDX driver. This is the 19th point release in the long-standing Intel X.Org 2.20 series that's been largely led by Chris Wilson out of Intel OTC...

AMD is getting back in the Linux game with a huge driver release that should be able to save face on the open source platform.

On January 18th, KDE released the third release candidate (RC3) for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

Gear Up is a multiplayer online game where you can build tanks and participate in online challenges such as battles, races and missions.

Since last week when writing about the LLVM/Clang compiler being ported to GNU Hurd, readers have asked via the forums, email, etc about the state of this open-source kernel backed by the Free Software Foundation. GNU Hurd and its Mach micro-kernel continue to be developed, just not at a rapid pace like the Linux kernel.

Encouraged by the very positive trend shown in the last release, I decided to see how well Fedora 18 would behave. As you guess most correctly, this is a first of several reviews. We will follow up with Cinnamon and MATE articles, too. For the time being, let's do KDE, as the Gnome version is out of the question. Shall we commence?

This howto describes a shared local git server setup for a small team. This is a repository layout that is familiar to anyone used to working with a traditional version control system. One of the tutorial objectives is to show detailed steps to prepare the server and publish the code on a public service like Github, Gitorius et. al. A second objective is to introduce the Git Lite Workflow in team development. This serves as an introduction to gits powerful branch and merge features. Your personal favorite workflow may be different compared to this model.

When something goes wrong on your Linux server or desktop, is important to understand which process is taking all the resources, in the past I’ve published some information about top and htop, two great tools to have a general overview of your system with just a glance, but sometimes you need to gather more information of a particular process and for this task the command pidstat is perfect.

Adam Gowniak is indefatigable: last weekend, Oracle released an emergency patch for the 0day hole in Java, and the security researcher has already found the next loophole. In a posting on the Full Disclosure mailing list, the expert has only revealed that the flawed MBeanInstantiator method inspired him to search for further holes. Brian Krebs had previously mentioned a new exploit that can't be neutralised with Oracle's patch; whether this concerns the same vulnerability remains unclear.

It has been approximately three months since the previous 'Waldorf' images were built, so I figured the time was right to upload some updated builds. To be honest, I was tempted to wait until Debian 'Wheezy' migrates to stable before updating the builds, but Debian being Debian (released when ready), it could mean waiting a week, a month, or even a year. Anyhow, the new images contain some fixes to the installer that affected installations performed using DVD media.

This page discusses the relevant changes introduced in CRUX 3.0. Everybody upgrading from the previous release is advised to carefully read the following notes.

We've been discussing the ridiculousness of the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, including the fact that if a federal prosecutor decides to take you down, it's not at all difficult to find something they can try to pin on you, especially when it comes to "computer" crimes. Law professor James Grimmelmann explains how it's quite possible that prosecutors could go after him under the same laws as it went after Swartz. He notes that he used to run the (excellent) blog LawMeme (which we used to link to frequently). After it died, he wanted to preserve many of the articles, and so he wrote a script to pull the articles off of the Internet Archive. While it all depends on your interpretation, he shows how a prosecutor could make the argument that he violated the Internet Arvchive's terms of service -- and that some of the decisions he made in writing the script could be taken out of context to be used against him.

Fedora 18 was officially released this week for x86/x86_64, but the ARM version of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow" is still under development. Fedora 18 for ARM went into beta last week and since then benchmarks were carried out comparing Spherical Cow on ARM to other popular ARM Linux distributions.

I'm very pleased to announce the release of UberStudent 2.0 Lightweight edition. It is designed to reinvigorate older or slower computers, and for netbooks, as well as for anyone who simply prefers a lightweight Linux distribution. Great care and testing has gone into aiming this release as the most feature-filled, polished, and stable lightweight Linux distribution available for education. It features a synergy of smartly chosen installed applications and web apps. The result is a remarkably full-featured desktop that enables you to be productive even if you lack Internet access.

Intel's Mesa DRI driver received a new patch this weekend that's capable of enhancing the open-source graphics driver's performance for some OpenGL games...

The folks at Fight for the Future noticed the proximity of Internet Freedom Day to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and decided an interesting form of celebrating internet freedom would be to share a video of MLK's famous "I have a dream..." speech.

A Phoronix reader has announced his work on SDDM within the Phoronix Forums this weekend. SDDM is a very lightweight display management that takes advantage of Qt's QML...

Redmond first announced CU-RTC-Web in August. Along with the specification itself, the company produced a rationale; a list of reasons why it felt that WebRTC was a bad fit for the problem at hand, and why CU-RTC-Web was a superior solution. Perhaps the most specific complaint was that WebRTC was quite deeply linked to a specification called SDP, an open industry standard used extensively for VoIP and video conferencing systems in conjunction with SIP, with Microsoft arguing that this is over-complicated and hinders interoperability with non-SDP systems. SDP is used to negotiate the parameters of the connection; things like the bandwidth, the IP addresses and port numbers to use, and so on.

It just happens that Microsoft has non-SDP products of its own—Skype (which remains stubbornly proprietary and undocumented) and Lync (which can bridge with SIP systems, and hence understands SDP, but offers alternative APIs too).

I have spent the last 3 or 4 years slowly getting a reputation for extending Emacs in mad ways. So much so that fsbot on #emacs will tell you that nicferrier-fix is:

most problems can be fixed by writing more elisp

I will be continuing this trend in 2013. There's a lot going on so I thought I'd write a summary of everything that I see happening.