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If power Android users can agree on one thing, it’s that Google, carriers, and smartphone manufacturers are maybe not the best at executing on Android OS updates. Things were going great in the early days when there was only the one flagship Android phone, but as more companies and carriers got involved the update situation fell apart. Google tried to intervene with the Android Update Alliance, which resulted in exactly zero improvements to update timeliness.

For those interested in getting the latest and greatest OS update the second it’s announced, these delays are a known negative of the Android platform. The growing history of OS releases shows all carriers and smartphone manufacturers drag their feet in the application of updates—but some carriers, some manufacturers, and some combinations thereof are marginally better than others at getting updates to their phones.

In the week ending 22 December - Open Source laptops, editors for Wikipedia, Samsung's Android hole, Virtualbox updates, visually editing Wikipedia, HTML5 completion, defending the GPL and educational Pi

A lot of you fine readers are already contributors to your favorite worthy Linux projects. I'll wager there are also some who would love to contribute in some way, but aren't quite sure how. So here are a few ideas to get you inspired and, hopefully, involved.

When writing a few days ago about the GemRB project as an open-source re-implementation of the Infinity Engine for Baldur's Gate and then OpenMW as an open-source re-implementation of the engine used by Morrowind, a Phoronix reader pointed out Xoreos.

Linus Torvalds announced a few hours ago, on December 21, that the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.8 kernel is now available for download and testing.

Steam users, rejoice! The native Steam client for Linux (Ubuntu) is finally here. Previously, you will have to install via Wine to get it working in Linux, but with the release of the native client and is open to the public, you can now easily install it and have quick access to your Steam games. Ubuntu users, here is how you can install Steam in Ubuntu.

A peek at the Planet Python blog aggregator (I’m a big Planet blog fan, in case you didn’t know) clued me in to a project I’d never heard of before: Nikola, a static website/blog generator.

Red Hat has reported that its third quarter revenue is up 18% year-on-year, at $343.6 million, with subscription income rising 19% (to $294.2million). With estimates placing Red Hat at 29 cents a share, the reported earnings beat those estimates, coming in at 30 cents a share. According to Bloomberg, that was enough to see Red Hat shares rising in late trading.

The Linux Mint development team has taken exactly a month to put together the XFCE desktop version of the Ubuntu-based distribution. Other than the desktop, Linux Mint 14 XFCE sees few changes compared to the Cinnamon and Mate desktop versions released a month ago, with just a few bug fixes and a handful of updates merged shortly after the release of Linux Mint 14 in late November.

We are glad to let you know that a new Zentyal 3.0-1 installer is now available. This installer includes a new compilation of packages with all the bug fixes and Ubuntu system updates since the release of the first 3.0 installer. Moreover, we would like to highlight the following: this installer already includes the final Samba 4.0.0 package; it comes with improved UTF-8 support - this is specially useful for those who are not using Zentyal in English, but please note that if you are already experiencing issues with UTF-8, upgrading may not be enough and probably you need to re-install the server in order to fix them; this installer also allows to introduce your Zentyal account credentials from the beginning of the installation to automatically register your server.

What’s the best way to partition your Unix or Linux system’s hard drive? Everybody has an opinion. Most desktop users don’t create separate partitions for things like /tmp, /usr, /var, etc., but some do. Depending on the system’s use, some admins create partitions for /boot, /var/www or /usr/bin.

Oracle made a big splash yesterday when it purchased cloud-based marketing automation firm Eloqua, but I'm not convinced buying a few cloud pieces gives Oracle the agility and simplicity it needs to be considered a real cloud company.

This week, we look at shutdown tips for the end of the world, the 10 worst outages of 2012 and why developers need to embrace their CMS.

Earlier this week I shared some AMD Catalyst OpenCL benchmarks showing the performance gains made by AMD's proprietary Radeon graphics driver this year in bettering the GPGPU results. In this article is similar testing on the NVIDIA side with their binary driver.

Samsung's move to drop all requests for injunctions against Apple in Europe may not be enough to escape sanctions from the European Commission over the alleged abuse of its standards essential patents. EC Vice President Joaquín Almunia said during a press conference on Thursday in Brussels that his office will continue with its investigation against Samsung and will release a "statement of objections" within the coming weeks.

The lightweight Arch-based distro uses Openbox to help make it blazing fast without losing too much functionality

What makes Dream Studio the best creative distribution available? Let's see...

“Commerce Kickstart 2.0 takes all of the core strengths of our flexible eCommerce framework, Drupal Commerce, and makes it easier to use and quicker to deploy for e-retailers,” said Mike O'Connor, president for North America of Commerce Guys. “Leveraging an open-source technology with an engaged community like Drupal was a huge asset when shaping the beta product into what Commerce Kickstart is today.”

Back in 2010, we wrote about a report suggesting that Intellectual Ventures was using somewhere around 1000 shell companies to hide many of its patent shakedown attempts. For years, IV itself liked to say that it wasn't involved in any patent litigation directly (that changed not so long ago), but we had seen some IV patents showing up from some small patent trolls, where it was impossible to determine who actually controlled the patent or the lawsuits. However, at times, other companies have argued that the shell lawsuits were really IV in disguise.

A few months ago, we wrote about an attempt to crowdfund an investigation into all of IV's shell companies. While that attempt to raise money did not reach its goal, it has helped put renewed attention on IV's use of a massive number of shell companies. In response, IV has been trying very hard to play down the whole thing. It published a ridiculous blog post arguing that the use of thousands of shell companies is just a normal business procedure:

I remember first meeting Jeffrey A. "Jam" McGuire in person at DrupalCon Denver. We talked about communities, music, and shared ways to show why open source is a better way. Even before meeting him, I could tell from my first interaction with him that he was passionate about Drupal and open source. He's becoming an in-demand Keynote speaker and presenter at Drupal and other business and software events around the world. He's already a staple for the Intro to DrupalCon session and always seems to incorporate music and singing as part of the performance.