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Debian developers are still working on making the operating system compiler agnostic so that its packages can be built with LLVM/Clang and other compilers rather than continuing in a monogamist relationship with GCC...

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 18 desktop (with the XFCE desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

This project provides tools to play with geographical data. But it also works with non-geographical data!

Razor-qt is the lightweight Qt-based desktop environment that's come around in mostly the past two years as a much more slim desktop alternative to KDE. It's similar in nature to Xfce but written in Qt rather than GTK. This Qt desktop environment is on initial approach for its next release and further out they are getting excited over Qt 5 and Wayland...

GCC 4.8 will feature a few improvements when it comes to LTO, a.k.a. Link-Time Optimization, but will this reflect in any greater performance for the resulting binaries?..

FreeBSD developers are working on enabling support for the C11 and C++11 programming language standards within their operating system...

The famed developer behind the Enlightenment window manager, "Rasterman", shared that Enlightenment E18 might be released this Christmas. While it took more than one decade to release Enlightenment E17, they're looking at now getting into the swing of doing a major release every year...

Fuduntu is a very strange distribution. It's based on Fedora, but tries to be more user-friendly, sort of like Ubuntu. Then, the big difference between Fuduntu and other RedHat-based distributions like CentOS and Scientific is that it aims specifically for the desktop crowd, bringing you the latest kernel technologies and apps.

My last experience with it was ok, but there were some problems in the overall integration, some visual glitches, a handful of unnecessary programs, plus some plugin quirks. All in all, it was okay. Now, there's a new version that I want to test, and it's labeled 2013.1. For those of you who like small-print, you will like the idea of Gnome 2, full functionality out of the box, a semi-rolling-release-like model, optimization for laptops, and a handful of highly popular mainstream programs bundled with the distribution. There, follow me.

I bricked a Samsung laptop today. Unlike most of the reported cases of Samsung laptops refusing to boot, I never booted Linux on it - all experimentation was performed under Windows. It seems that the bug we've been seeing is simultaneously simpler in some ways and more complicated in others than we'd previously realised.

While GNU/Hurd isn't on par yet with GNU/Linux in terms of kernel functionality and hardware support, the developers do have plans for the future and a surprising number of user-space packages are now building on a GNU/Hurd platform...

Years before the JSTOR scraping project that led to Aaron Swartz's indictment on federal hacking charges—and perhaps to his suicide—the open-data activist scraped documents from PACER, the federal judiciary's paywalled website for public access to court records. (The acronym PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which may sound like it's straight out of 1988 because it is.) Swartz got 2.7 million documents before the courts detected his downloads and blocked access. The case was referred to the FBI, which investigated Swartz's actions but declined to prosecute him.

Aside from all the Phoronix video recordings of the X.Org and Wine development rooms during the FOSDEM 2013 meeting last weekend in Brussels, Vincent Untz went over the direction of GNOME and whether the GNOME community has gone crazy...

At long last, the Linux Foundation fix to Windows 8 Secure Boot lock-in is out, but it's not ready for ordinary users yet and not all Linux desktop fans are happy about it.

Steam for Linux, the digital distribution platform developed by Valve, has just received an important update and gets a little closer to a stable release.

In the week ending 9 February - Munich disagrees with HP, GNOME chooses JavaScript as its official application language, Oracle fixes 50 vulnerabilities in Java, and LibreOffice 4.0 and KDE 4.10 are released

The Linux kernel RNG implementation for providing random numbers has worked quite well for its years in use. However, a new jitter entropy generator implementation has been proposed that is capable of providing 100 kB/s throughput of randomness...

A list with 5 of the best photo editing apps for your Android smartphone and tablet.

A little more than two years after it forked from OpenOffice.org, the free office suite LibreOffice has come out with a sleek and faster version 4.0.

RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.

The Amarok 2.7 release delivers nearly 500 bug fixes, and an impressive list of new features. Here I will be reviewing some of the latest features after experimenting with 2.7 for a few days. Installation instructions for Ubuntu 12.10 are provided for anyone who would like to try this version.