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Great intro by guru Juliet Kemp-- With Android phones and tablets making their way into more and more pockets and bags, dipping a toe into Android coding is becoming more popular too. And it's a great platform to code for -- the API is largely well-documented and easy to use, and it's just fun to write something that you can run on your own phone. You don't even need a phone at first, because you can write and test code in an emulator on your Linux PC.

Look at the founders of any Internet startup, and you're almost certain to find an open source expert among them. Take Google, the biggest Internet success story of them all. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built and ran their brand-new web indexing tool on servers running the open source operating system Linux—and still do, 13 years and several billion dollars in profits later. Pick an Internet startup—Facebook, Zynga, Groupon—and chances are you'll find open source software running on its servers (and an open source-savvy founder in the boardroom).

While Epic Games hasn't allowed for Unreal Tournament 3 to be released for Linux, the first native Linux game using Unreal Engine 3 was released today. Yes, Unreal Engine 3 for Linux...

Being "fed up with the existing open source CRM applications", the team at Zurmo have released their own open source customer relationship management (CRM) software – Zurmo 1.0. The CRM software, which has been in development for two years, includes deal tracking features, contact and activity management, and has scores and badges that can be managed through a built-in gamification system.

We are close to Christmas and it’s that time again Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) number seven is been released this is the list of games that you’ll find this time: The Binding of Isaac (and its DLC, Wrath of the Lamb), Closure, Shank 2, Snapshot, and Indie Game: The Movie! And if you pay over the average, you’ll also get Dungeon Defenders (and its DLC) and Legend of Grimrock !

When talking about open source, many people's first thought is the GNU General Public License (GPL). While the software world has been revolutionised by GPL, the hardware world has seen little change. 

The first beta release of Mageia 3 Linux is now available...

This isn't a final decision by the USPTO. Apple will get to respond before any patents are truly killed off, and reexams are generally a long, dragged-out process. However, it is notable that all three of the utility patents Apple used to win its case are now having their validity seriously questioned.

Intellectual Ventures is at it again -- playing the "oh, little innocent us? we're not doing anything that should really concern anyone" card in the press. Wired is running an op-ed by Raymond Hegarty, IV's "VP Of Global Licensing in Europe." He's a long term patent maximalist... and it shows. The article is entitled: Intellectual Ventures: Why the Patent System Needs Aggregators Like Us, which should give you an idea of the fanciful rewriting of history you're about to read.

The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 9.1 is now available. This release includes many exciting new features and enhancements, such as a vastly improved system installer, ZFS 'Boot Environment' support, TrueOS (a FreeBSD-based server with additional power-user utilities), and much more. Highlights: FreeBSD 9.1; new system installer, greatly simplified for desktop and server installs; support for ZFS mirror during installation; support for SWAP on ZFS, allowing entire disk ZFS installation; support for setting additional ZFS data-set options, such as compression, noexec;

A full review of Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon, including a gallery of images.

Valve has announced that their Steam Linux client is now available to all Linux gamers. It's open beta period now and just in time for the holidays...

This is awesome, Legend of Grimrock is now available via the Ubuntu Software Centre! The game is really awesome and plays much like the old Dungeon Master game (if anyone besides me remembers that!).

Many programming languages include libraries to do more complicated math. You can do statistics, numerical analysis or handle big numbers. One topic many programming languages have difficulty with is symbolic math. If you use Python though, you have access to sympy, the symbolic math library. Sympy is under constant development, and it's aiming to be a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS). It also is written completely in Python, so you won't need to install any extra requirements. You can download a source tarball or a git repository if you want the latest and greatest. Most distributions also provide a package for sympy for those of you less concerned about being bleeding-edge. Once it is installed, you will be able to access the sympy library in two ways. You can access it like any other library with the import statement. But, sympy also provides a binary called isympy that is modeled after ipython.

Well here it is and it's a good one too! Humble Indie Bundle 7 is here!

OpenMW, the open-source game engine re-implementation for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, is out with a new release this week...

Steam has had some more updates recently to it's client!

After yesterday sharing the general feedback submitted by over a thousand GNOME users (Part 1, Part 2) from the 2012 GNOME User Survey about their views on the popular Linux desktop environment, here's all of the responses to another one of the questions. The question came down to what features of GNOME are most important from your personal use and would not like them to go away.

I recently visited a relative who is studying in the natural sciences and who, surprisingly, is even less capable in certain technical aspects of computing than I am. He was trying to create, on his Mac, a script that would run as a cron job, and asked me for some pointers. Though I know the basics about cron and was willing to pitch in, I wasn't so sure about the script: you see, calling my bash skills rudimentary would be high praise. Nonetheless I decided that, with some web searching, I might be able to assist with that, too. Sure enough, I was able to find just the sort of information that would help us create a script that would tar and compress, then encrypt, a target directory. Details--shamelessly lifted from various locales on the web--are included below.

Imagine drawing anywhere with your tablet. It's now possible! KDE and KO GmbH have released Krita Sketch, the first tablet and ultrabook version of Krita, the award-winning digital painting application. Optimized for touch screens and developed with a QML interface, Krita Sketch provides everything needed to create artwork from beginning to end.