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Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been the highest profile keynote speaker in the history of the Australian national Linux conference, but after his visit to Australia this year the main organisers of his trip appear to have been left holding the can.

PyGObject 3.7.5 has been announced on February 5 and it brings various internal improvements, as well as many bug fixes.

Ubuntu-driven smartphones will be available to customers in October 2013 according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth from a presentation given in New York on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal reports Shuttleworth as saying that the new phone operating system would be available in "two large geographical markets in October", but he wouldn't say where those markets were and declined to identify carrier or handset partners.

I am a great fan of Staged Event Driven Architecture. Few of my architectures and designs are heavily influenced by this approach and thus have resulted in a proven high performance and low latent systems. Here I'm going to discuss about how an application can be designed using SEDA approach. Later, when I get time, I'll write about designing systems with different queuing systems like AMQP, etc.

With LibreOffice 4.0, the Document Foundation has bumped the major version number of its office suite for the first time since the project split from the OpenOffice.org code base. This version increase is more of a cultural and symbolic change than it is an indicator of major new features. Nonetheless, LibreOffice 4.0 introduces a number of functional improvements and underlying polish to the open source office package that is worth a look.

Canonical’s promise to create an Ubuntu smartphone market will become a reality in October 2013. That’s when the first Ubuntu smartphones will arrive, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said this week. Now here’s the big twist: For developers, the smartphone operating system is optimized for Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus — perhaps suggesting that Samsung plans to back the mobile open source operating system. Still, I remain skeptical. Here’s why.

One of the biggest ongoing challenges for Linux advocates has always been that there is such a paucity of data available to demonstrate the preferences of the people who are actually using the free and open source operating system.

A group of journalists are announcing the launch of their breakthrough open source solution for the problem many writers and journalists have of how to take data in PDFs or images and easily convert it to a spreadsheet or other usable format.

One of the ways that Intel has been trying to make their Mesa driver faster is through proper threading support, but for now the support is unfortunately slower while the code is still being actively developed...

I'm always on the lookout for open source software I might not already know about. I actually keep my own list on Delicious so that when people in workshops approach me and ask me for an open source alternative to the proprietary software they're using, I can recommend something. So, when I saw OSS Watch recently published a list of open source options for education, I had to peruse it.

The new Anaconda is just one feature, albeit a very important one, that shipped with Fedora 18. There are many other features, new and updated, that also shipped. So, this is not going to be all about Anaconda. It will form a major portion of this review, but, certainly, not all of it.

GNOME Online Accounts 3.7.5 has been released earlier today, February 6, and it brings fixes for 8 bugs found in previous releases, as well as numerous updated translations.

The Calligra developers have released version 2.6 of their office suite for the KDE desktop and its mobile-focused Calligra Active version, which is QML-based. Calligra 2.6 is the first production version of the modular office package that includes Calligra Author, a writing and editing tool specifically for e-book creation. With Calligra Author, the developers hope to meet the needs of groups like novel authors who want to write long texts but do not need complicated formatting. The tool is also supposed to take into account the unique aspects of e-books.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), established in 1999, oversees 150+ Apache projects led by a volunteer community of over 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers across six continents. Apache powers half the Internet, terabytes of data, teraflops of operations and billions of objects. Its aim is to shepherd, develop, and incubate Open Source innovations.

The folks over at http://www.iheartubuntu.com recently put up a challenge to the Linux community to get Netflix to work natively under our beloved OS. Thankfully, Erich Hoover stepped up to the challenge and patched the Wine Project in a way to allow Firefox/Silverlight to be installed and actually work with Netflix's DRM'd Silverlight!

In the past I’ve talked about Tomboy, that i was not liking too much to have a Mono application in all my computers, but that Tomboy sync feature was really too good for me, well it seems that someone else has decided that it’s times for me to switch to another Notes program. In a recent post on Ubuntu One blog Canonical announced that its Cloud service (U1, aka Ubuntu One) will cease syncing Tomboy Notes to U1, meaning U1 won’t transfer your notes between computers.

In this quick GNU R tutorial to statistical models and graphics we will provide a simple linear regression example and learn how to perform such basic statistical analysis of data. This analysis will be accompanied by graphical examples, which will take us closer to producing plots and charts with GNU R. If you are not familiar with using R at all please have a look at the prerequisite tutorial: A quick GNU R tutorial to basic operations, functions and data structures.

The game pioneer and id Software's co-founder John Carmack has already expressed some concerns regarding the viability of Linux as a gaming platform. Now he has published a comment on Twitter, in which he said that improving Wine is a better way for Gaming on Linux than porting games to the OS.

Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such "Linux apps" at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming.

The City of Santa Cruz is the smallest community to ever partner with Code for America, but it had one of the largest problems to solve: how to make it easier to take an idea for a small business from conception to reality. From a concept to a permit.