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In surprising news from jolly old England, Canonical announces that Ubuntu has developed an Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. We'll be able to switch out Android for Ubuntu on many existing devices. The company also hopes that manufactures will ship devices with it pre-installed.

Snowlinux 4 "Glacier" is based upon Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 "Wheezy" and uses Linux 3.5. MATE 1.4 is the default desktop environment and LightDM as new default login manager to replace GDM 3. It was built an own greeter for LightDM. There were introduced much new features like snowMenu, the Snowlinux menu and snowMount, the Snowlinux mount tool for drives.

Charles H Schulz has announced, on behalf of the Mandriva community, that the submission to create the non-profit OpenMandriva Association as an NGO under French law (Association de loi 1901) has been approved by the relevant authorities. With this, the organisation governing the development of the Mandriva Linux distribution "is now legally independent and fully autonomous," according to Schulz.

Could one radio be all you ever need for data, cellular calls, wifi and more? Software defined radio holds that promise. Andrew Back looks at how free software is one of the enablers in helping to put the technology into the hands of consumers

“Software Wars” is an in-development documentary by Keith Curtis, based on his 2009 book of the same name. It’s a look at how free and open source software can make our world a better place, and the possibilities that are available to us by abandoning closed source proprietary systems and working together towards an open technological society:

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from February 13th - 15th, 2013.

As we head into 2013, the data versus instinct debate will continue to rage, but as baseball stats geeks have learned, no matter how many metrics you create, you can't come up with a perfect formula for success -- probably due in large part to the human factor.

The rumoured Ubuntu Phone was revealed last night at a Canonical event in London, and Linux User was there to see it…

Obviously, this early in the game nobody, including Canonical, has even a clue as to how this will work out. But that doesn’t stop some writers from getting out the old crystal ball and having a go at Free Software fortune telling.

So far, the “Secure Boot” feature that Microsoft requires for Windows 8-certified hardware has caused a lot more anxiety in the Linux community than actual harm. Most Linux distributions have viable plans for working around the potential problems that Secure Boot poses. Nonetheless, the Free Software Foundation has embarked on a campaign to fight the feature tooth-and-nail. And it wants your help.

The FreeBSD Foundation, the maker of the FreeBSD open source operating system, proudly announced on the last day of 2012 that the FreeBSD 9.1 release is now officially available.

A few months ago, Ars took a look at how cars are getting smarter, mainly in the aid of fuel efficiency and safety. All that technology stuffed under the hood creates data, and where there’s data, there are nerds eager to analyze it.

In 2001/2002 I wrote a tutorial on how to configure Gnu/Linux desktops on limited hardware. Before that, I had also written down my own, very personal motivations for playing with that kind of tricks, to clarify what itches I would try to scratch. I rediscovered that 2002 file this morning. Reading it again, in these days of Unity, tablets and touchscreens, made me think it may be fun to share it. Remember when it was written, judge by yourself and let me know.

Sometimes, privacy and open-source can seem like an odd mix. People who prioritize openness and transparency in their software might appear less likely to obsess over the privacy of their data. But in a reminder that rock-solid privacy standards and open-source software are not mutually exclusive, the GNOME community has announced a new campaign centered on making the GNOME desktop interface “one of the most secure computing environments available.”

Well another holiday season has come and gone, leaving more than a few jangled nerves and expanded waistlines in its wake. Holiday pressures are bad enough by themselves, of course, but Canonical's splashy and yet profoundly confusing Wednesday announcement so soon afterward hasn't exactly helped.

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1956 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2013, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2052.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. (The law in the EU is different – thousands of works from authors who died in 1942 are entering their public domain on January 1.) Even more shockingly, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Congress can take back works from the public domain. Could Shakespeare, Plato, or Mozart be pulled back into copyright? The Supreme Court gave no reason to think that they could not be.

No matter how brazenly people abuse the DMCA takedown process, and no matter how ridiculous the notices get, it seems like there's always someone waiting to do something even stupider. This latest incident, submitted by Anonymous American, is a serious contender for the crown dunce cap: a DMCA takedown over a login page. And not just any login page, but the barely-modified default login page of an open source website platform, which the operators of iPhotographyCourse.com claim infringes on... their own barely-modified default login page of a different open source website platform. Yeah.

One company found that switching to a cloud-based phone system from a hard-wired pbx, not only cut the monthly phone bill in half, it put end users in charge of most of their phone maintenance.

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

The figlet command makes turns ordinary terminal text into big fancy letters, like this: