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Mathenaticians from a French research institute are planning to use linking to create virtual journals containing freely published articles from Cornell Universitiy's arXiv server, providing further competition for academic publishers

The latest release of the unofficial fork of Firefox for 64-bit Windows systems combines the updates of Firefox 17 and 18 after a compiler bug delayed the last version

From the Linux Foundation's Consumer Electronics Workgroup is a Linux 3.4 kernel that's part of their Long-Term Support Initiative. The LTSI Linux 3.4 kernel will be maintained for two years while back-porting some of the features of newer Linux kernel releases...

Red Hat recently acquired ManageIQ, an enterprise cloud management company, and now the Raleigh, NC-based company is integrating its administative services with its Linux-based cloud systems.

The project hosting site GitHub is currently inaccessible from China, cutting off the country's developers from the valuable resource. A ViewDNS.info check shows that the service cannot be looked up throughout China. The blocking is frustrating many Chinese developers who cannot access one of the world's major repositories of open source software. As the country's firewall controllers rarely give any information on why sites are blocked, it is suggested by some that github.com is being blocked because of a dispute over a train ticket booking plugin.

Keeping track of airport information can be a challenge even for a nonstop, there-and-back trip. Multiple legs increase the number of things that can go wrong geometrically, but I recently took the risk, in a week-long loop from Los Angeles to Los Cabos, Mexico, then to New York City (Newark, to be precise) and back to LA. In other words, I had an ideal test environment for Mobiata's FlightTrack app.

A sad day indeed for many users of the .deb format, 2 of my favourites repositories getdeb and playdeb are now closed forever (?), this is the message posted on G+ by their author:

After the server crash where also the GetDeb and PlayDeb database was lost and given the fact that GetDeb and PlayDeb now have too many packages to be handled as a one-man-project I decided to discontinue GetDeb and PlayDeb. In the last years I have spent so many hours in the project that now it is just too much for me to maintain beside my usual job.

But this does not mean that all the work in GetDeb and PlayDeb is lost.

For a Linux distribution only a little over two years old, the uptake of Mageia has been impressive, with the distro now regularly being found Distrowatch's top five distros, along with heavyweights such as Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint.

As a professional academic, I spend my weeks between the fall and spring semesters working on research projects, preparing for the classes I’ll teach next term and, occasionally, sleeping. At MIT, however, students are taking advantage of the winter break to learn more about OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure, through a program sponsored by Rackspace that brings open source cloud computing and academia together in novel ways.

To calibrate a monitor and generate a color profile for it on Linux, you need two things: a colorimeter and color profiling software. High-quality professional colorimeters tend to be rather expensive, but you can use the excellent open source ColorHUG device instead.

On February the 19th, Wellington will be awash with some of the greatest and brightest minds in computing as the Multicore 2013 Conference kicks off at Wellington Town Hall. I caught up with one of the keynote speakers, Paul McKenney, who is IBM's Chief Technology Officer of Linux and got to pick his brains on the rise of Linux and machine intelligence.

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Ubuntu 12.10) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Ubuntu 12.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

It’s now been a full year since ownCloud, the open source data syncing platform, launched as a commercial entity. I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical back then that the company would be able to succeed in a market already inundated with competing products. But ownCloud managed to hold its own and more in 2012, and has its sights set on continued expansion in 2013, according to recent statements from the company.

Alan Pope had the pleasure of announcing on Google+ that Stuart Langridge released the first game for the Ubuntu operating system for smartphones, also known as Ubuntu Phone OS.

ArchPup 12.12.2 is available! ArchPup is minimalistic Puppy Linux variant built using Arch Linux packages, with Pacman installed and configured as the default package manager. Combining speed and low-resource requirements from Puppy Linux with this powerful and efficient package manager, ArchPup provides a light-weight, portable operating system and gives full control to the end user.

Well, you have probably read a million guides on how to backup your personal data using rsync, a highly useful and versatile data copying tool. Here's another one. I would like to show you some basic tips and tricks for smart and safe rsync usage, how to make a flexible and useful setup, and how to automate your backup procedure, as a part of a comprehensive backup strategy, which you must have.

A newly proposed Fedora 19 feature is to do away with MySQL and drop in MariaDB instead, per this official proposal from Red Hat's Jaroslav Reznik. In Fedora 19, MariaDB would become the default SQL database package. MySQL would still be available in the Fedora repository for at least one release as the more conservative users make the migration from MySQL to MariaDB. "We would like to replace MySQL with MariaDB in early development cycle for Fedora 19. MySQL will continue to be available for at least one release, but MariaDB will become the default."

Work continues on the GNOME 3.8 development branch under the guise of the 3.7.x development tree. GNOME 3.7.4 was officially released on Sunday January 20th providing Linux desktop users will a solid view into the future of GNOME.

OpenSSL is a powerful cryptography toolkit. Many of us have already used OpenSSL for creating RSA Private Keys or CSR (Certificate Signing Request). However, did you know that you can use OpenSSL to benchmark your computer speed or that you can also encrypt files or messages? This article will provide you with some simple to follow tips on how to encrypt messages and files using OpenSSL.

Great things for open government happened last year on November 15-16 at the 4th annual Capitol Camp event, organized and hosted by the New York State Senate and the New York State Office of Information Technology Services, in collaboration with the Center for Technology in Government. I have discussed recently the NY State Senate progressive stance on open government and its embrace of open source. Capitol Camp 2012 was another display of the powerful benefits the adoption of open practices in government can bring to the public. The event involved an unconference-day and a hackathon-day, both of them fully open to the public.