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Valve is adding more individuals to its select group of beta participants on a regular basis. So far things are going well for the Valve Linux beta...

Two servers part of the FreeBSD.org cluster were intruded upon last week...

An interesting post appeared today in the Planet KDE news feeds. Introducing Homerun almost gave me a mild coronary until I realized it was an add-on. Homerun gives KDE that GNOME 3-like application launcher.

Linux Game Publishing recently lost the license they had for selling the X-series of games. Now, we know why. The developer Egosoft is taking care of the porting themselves and aims to sell X3 with all the expansions (some of which were not previously released on Linux) on Steam.

Egosoft is looking to hire a new developer for this, so if you have experience with OpenGL and SDL, be sure to apply for the job.

The volatile ranges feature provides applications that cache large amounts of data that they can (relatively easily) re-create—for example, browsers caching web content—with a mechanism to assist the kernel in making decisions about which pages can be discarded from memory when the system is under memory pressure. An application that wants to assist the kernel in this way does so by informing the kernel that a range of pages in its address space can be discarded at any time, if the kernel needs to reclaim memory.

The biggest change in JW6, at least on the surface, is the player UI itself. The player hadn’t changed dramatically since being launched in 2005, and it kind of looked that way. The new version follows the trend toward modern, chrome-less video players, with bigger controls to make it easier for users to navigate the video or turn on and off features.

Web server benchmarking is a way of determining the performance of a web server with the aim of establishing how well it copes under a sufficiently high workload. Performance testing is important to help maintain continuous system performance.

Two newer filesystems of importance to Linux are exFAT and Btrfs. exFAT is the controversial Microsoft filesystem for Flash memory devices, and Btrfs is for "big data". Once upon a time there was much sound and fury around these, but lately it's been quiet, so let's see what's been happening.

In the week ending 17 November - Google open sourced Android 4.2, an RC of Linux Mint 14 arrived and Popcorn Maker 1.0 was released. Also, an interview with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and the Kernel Log looked at filesystems and storage for Linux 3.7

Unquestionably Linux is still struggling to claim a respectable share in desktop market. The trend does not seem to vary drastically in enterprises too. However in contrast to Linux share in desktop operating system, Linux claims a considerably larger market share when it comes to operating system used by enterprises. The post presents some latest stats depicting where does a Linux stand as an operating system for business. The post also details some enterprises that rely on Linux for their everyday computation.

Apple settled its patent disputes with HTC last Saturday, and lawyers from Samsung were paying attention. Papers filed in federal court Friday show that by Monday afternoon, Samsung was asking to get a look at that license agreement. It isn't exactly clear what patents are covered in the agreement, but at least two of the patents Apple was using against HTC were also being used against Samsung. If Apple licensed those patents, that wouldn't be in accordance with how a key Apple witness described the company's patent policies.

Perusing the open source news today I came across this piece by “DarkDuck” titled "Top 5 Free Suites to Replace Microsoft Office”. It strikes me as odd that still, towards the end of 2012, the open source community is still interested in replacing the bloated corpse of Microsoft Office. In my mind, we now have so many other options available.

Fancy giving Linux a whirl? Here are all the factors that you should look for when choosing from the wide range of available Linux distributions.

Dream Studio 12.04.1 has been officially released. New features include: upgraded base system, based on the Ubuntu 12.04.1 install disc; many upgraded packages, such as Ardour, Blender, and GIMP; the Dream Studio audio indicator by default, instead of QJackctl; the addition of a hardware-specific software installer for some audio hardware; the addition of all the KXStudio repositories; the addition of slowmovideo by default, as well as a new graphics repository; many, many, small tweaks and performance upgrades. This is the latest release in the 12.04 series for Dream Studio. Any current 12.04 users will be upgraded automatically.

Back in July, we covered Verizon's argument that network neutrality regulations violated the firm's First Amendment rights. In Verizon's view, slowing or blocking packets on a broadband network is little different from a newspaper editor choosing which articles to publish, and should enjoy the same constitutional protection. Plenty of folks disagree with Verizon's view. On Thursday a number of public interest groups, academics, and former commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission filed amicus briefs taking issue with Verizon's constitutional argument. Verizon, they argued, was ignoring the fundamental distinction between Verizon's own speech and its role as a conduit for the speech of others.

A (well, now former) coworker let me know about a problem he was having with a Lenovo Thinkcentre M92p. It booted Fedora UEFI install media fine, but after an apparently successful installation refused to boot. UEFI installs on Windows worked perfectly. Secure Boot was quickly ruled out, but this could still have been a number of things. The most interesting observation was that the Fedora boot option didn't appear in the firmware boot menu at all, but Windows did.

Two years ago, after Jay Bradner made a remarkable breakthrough—the discovery of a molecule that, in mice, appeared to trick certain cancer cells into becoming normal cells—he did something unusual. Instead of huddling with lawyers to file for a patent on the molecule, Bradner simply gave his work away. Hoping to get the discovery into the hands of any scientist who could advance it, he published the structure of the compound (called JQ1) and mailed samples to labs around the world. The move, he says, felt like “the more efficient way to do science—and maybe the more honorable way.”

The release of a first alpha of PHP 5.5 marks the official beginning of the 5.5.0 release cycle for the scripting language's next major version. PHP 5.5 also marks the end of support for Windows XP and Windows 2003.

Many educators might have been hesitant in the past regarding embracing open source software. But not any more as the number that has taken to open source software (OSS) has increased significantly over the years. As more teachers as well as institutions are now engaging with organizations such as Open Source Schools, SchoolForge among others. Consequently, these educators have begun to realize the potential inherent in OSS that can help transform education in many ways.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (This year on the 2nd & 3rd of February). It’s one of the few community-centered conferences in Europe, and the largest volunteer-run Free Software event in Europe as well. Proposals are now invited for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics. KDE will be in the Cross Desktop Developer Room (devroom), along with Enlightenment, Gnome, Razor, Unity and XFCE. This is a unique opportunity to share KDE with a wide audience of developers.