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Steam is now being used by thousands of gamers running a Linux OS, and Valve has got to the point where they are happy to start urging Windows users to make the switch. Proof of that comes from the screenshot you see above. It’s the Steam website, and placed prominently near the top of the page is a “Join the Beta” promotion suggesting you try Steam for Linux. There’s even a download link to get Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which removes yet another barrier to entry.

Release early, often, and with rap music.Evan Roth is a maker of things with a specific i nterest in tools of empowerment, open source, and popular culture. We covered him and some of his work recently in an article about how open source is disrupting visual art. And here, we give you some insight into the guy behind open source rap, graffiti, and Brooklyn’s first and only R&D lab for the public domain: F.A.T. Lab.

A couple of days ago, the developers behind the Unity Tweak Tool software released the second development version of the one stop configuration utility for the Ubuntu operating system.

Kyle Rankin gets the nod from the SCALE staff to give the second keynote at SCALE 11X in February. Rankin joins Matthew Garrett in keynoting the 11th annual first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America next month.

Statistics are a matter of your viewpoint.

ownCloud Inc, announced a couple of days ago, January 19, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta release for the upcoming ownCloud Client 1.2.0.

After the launch of Steam Linux beta, you may have seen a big Tux logo on Steam client download page.

In addition to the Intel driver now always enabling floating-point textures, a patented feature but something that's required for GL3 compliance, the Intel DRI driver is set to play better with S3TC, the also patent-troubled but widely-used S3 Texture Compression...

Intel's Mesa DRI driver now is unconditionally enabling floating-point textures. Up to this point, the floating-point textures feature of GL3 hasn't been enabled by default due to patent worries...

Earlier this month I ran some new benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D MSAA support that was merged into the R300g driver. Unfortunately, the performance was very disappointing, but last week there were luckily some anti-aliasing performance optimizations that were merged into Mesa. I have now done new benchmarks of the new Mesa R300g driver with these multi-sample anti-aliasing performance optimizations, which show quite a noticeable difference from the open-source driver compared to earlier this month.

I have to give Kyle Rankin all the credit for my Raspberry Pi collection. I never really felt geeky enough to do anything with an Arduino, and for some reason I mentally lumped the RPi into the same world. Boy was I short-sighted! Thankfully Kyle showed me the light, and I managed to snag some of the new 512MB model B units. You'll be hearing about the Raspberry Pi from Kyle as well, but this month, I want to introduce the RPi to those folks who have been hesitant to buy one, thinking they weren't geeky enough. I had to ask a lot of dumb questions when my Raspberry Pis arrived; hopefully, I can save you that embarrassment.

Linux now supports F2fs, a filesystem that is specially designed for storage media with flash chips. The developers say that Btrfs is now faster to complete certain tasks and that Ext4 is more efficient when handling small files.

Hi everyone I decided to do a wiki for Crowdfunded games since there wasn't any way to track them for Linux currently.

The final KDE 4.10 release candidate is now out, with features for the final release including faster indexing, better notifications, and Qt Quick

Note: The English translation of the interview follows the Croatian one, about half way through the page.

There’s no real way to compare how the various desktop Linux distros are doing against Windows 8, Microsoft’s newly crowned flagship product, since Linux isn’t offered preinstalled in any meaningful way by the major OEMs. What we do know is that the new Windows would seem to be failing to excite buyers; folks haven’t been rushing to the big box stores to purchase a new desktop or laptop running the new operating system.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping across four single storage servers (running CentOS 6.3) with GlusterFS. The client system (CentOS 6.3 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.

However great the strides made by user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu and Mint in recent years, it seems fair to say that Linux has not yet enjoyed any sweeping successes on the desktop the way it has on the mobile side with Android. That, however, may be changing. Thanks once again to none other than Google, Linux is now appearing with increasing frequency in the PC lineups of hardware makers.

The media player can now make use of the Nepomuk semantic framework to find music and its metadata anywhere on the system. Other enhancements include statistical sync with Last.fm and the return of audio CD playback for some users.

Opensource.com is about to celebrate our fourth year and one of our favorite ways to celebrate our community is with the annual People's Choice Awards. We realize that our community would not be as vibrant and educational if it were not for the countless authors who invest time into sharing their open source stories.