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It's already no secret that Linux tends to dominate as the operating system of choice on the world's fastest supercomputers, but the release on Monday of the 40th edition of the twice-yearly Top500 List of the world’s top supercomputers made that connection more clear than ever.

Engineers from Google's Books team have released the design plans for a comparatively reasonably priced book scanner under an open source licence on Google Code. The Verge reports that the engineers developed a prototype during the "20 per cent time" that Google allocates to its employees for personal projects. Built using a scanner, a vacuum cleaner and various other components, the Linear Book Scanner can automatically digitise entire books.

Have you ever heard the following? "Welcome to the team! Here's a list of 15 applications to install, the instructions are in the team room, somewhere. See you in a week!" Or: "What do you mean it broke production, it runs fine on my machine?" Or: "Why is this working on her machine and his machine, but not my machine?" Development environments are becoming more complex, with more moving parts and tricky dependencies. Virtualization has been a huge boon for the IT industry in saving costs, increasing flexibility and maintaining control over complex environments. Rather than focusing on virtualization on the delivery side, let's look at how you can provide that flexibility and control to developers to manage multiple development environments easily using Vagrant.

Unity 4, the latest version of the popular multi-platform game engine tech, is finally out and now includes Linux deployment previews

Distance the futuristic arcade racing game that will come to Linux has been fully funded on Kickstarter!

Free, open source software projects have relied on a wide array of strategies and procedures to attract new contributors. Retaining newcomers and having them become valued sustainable contributors is a much more delicate challenge. What a person experiences when he or she is a project newcomer seems to have an important impact on the kind of contributor this person will become within a project. There has been little research about what it takes to provide a greater newcomer experience to ensure that projects keep getting quality contributors. This is what I am trying to find out in my PhD thesis.

Gnumeric is a lightweight spreadsheet program that is fast and feature complete. Much like its chief open source competitors OpenOffice and LibreOffice, its graphical user interface is nothing fancy. What it lacks in colorful design or exciting visual menu displays, however, it surpasses with its format flexibility and easy operation.

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) version 0.14 is out. All users must upgrade as soon as possible. Notable user-visible changes include: Tor upgrade to 0.2.3.24-rc, enable stream isolation; upgrade Iceweasel to 10.0.10esr, with anonymity enhancing patches from the TorBrowser applied; fix Iceweasel's file associations No longer should you be prompted to open a PDF in the GIMP; hardware support - upgrade Linux kernel to 3.2.32, support more than 4 GB of RAM, support more than one CPU core; fix memory wiping at shutdown; gpgApplet can now handle public key cryptography; add a persistence preset for NetworkManager connections.

So, using the computer I assembled using an ASRock motherboard, and the same hard drive, I made my first attempt to set up a dual-boot system between Windows8 Pro and Linux Mint 13 on a computer with UEFI firmware, and on a single hard disk drive (HDD).

Along with the release of the new Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet on Tuesday and the rollout of updates to Android 4.2 to several existing Nexus devices, Google has also pushed the source code for the new Jelly Bean flavour of its mobile operating system to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). In a post on the Android Developers Blog, the company detailed the features in the latest Android version, which also brings with it a new SDK revision (API level 17).

Since first being announced back in July 2011, Mozilla has slowly but steadily revealed new details of its upcoming mobile operating system, Firefox OS (formerly Boot to Gecko). Now, a few months after giving a Firefox OS introductory talk in Brazil, Mozilla has decided to share both the videos and the slides from presentations by Andreas Gal, Mozilla’s Director of Research, and Philipp von Weitershausen, one of Firefox OS’ lead engineers.

How much time do I spend turning this laptop on each time? I don't know about you, but my company laptop takes about 5-10 minutes to boot. That is not only because of MS Windows XP, which was installed God knows when and then never properly "cleaned up" of the inevitable mess. That is more to do with all the corporate applications that start with Windows. All those antivirus, screenshot tools, internal communicators, remote access tools and so on.

What is the solution when you're on-the-run?

There may be the situation that you have to monitor a MySQL server remotely. There are some linux tools to do performance and query monitoring locally, and these tools can also used to monitor remotely - but only unencrypted! Also often MySQL is only listening on the loopback interface, so it is even not reachable remotely over the net (which is very good seen from the security viewpoint). But there is an easy solution in the Linux world.

While Firefox OS isn’t here yet, it is coming soon— sometime in early 2013. If you are interested in the OS and want to give a test drive, you previously could use a nightly build and throw it onto the Raspbery Pi or even flash it to a Galaxy Nexus. These methods were both quite complicated, though. Good news, a new Firefox browser plug-in allows you to emulate FireFox OS on Mac, Linux and Windows.

The plug-in is called r2d2b2g and works pretty well.

There's a call for unification of the four largest *BSD operating systems in a move to create a "unified BSD" with the best features in order to better compete with GNU/Linux. It's unlikely that this call for unification will result in any action, but an independent user has written a brief statement cross-posted to several BSD mailing lists about a Unified BSD? The user asks why the BSD community can't band together and form a unified platform rather than fragmenting their resources into several different projects/forks/distributions. He wants to see the four largest BSD variants merged: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD.

Brian Manderville proudly announced a couple of days ago on Twitter that the development for the upcoming Descent|OS 4.0 Linux operating system has started.

Last week, we discussed Microsoft's patent filing on a content distribution system that counted heads and charged license fees accordingly. Utilizing the Kinect or some other unnamed technology, Microsoft had the beginnings of the copyright industries' wildest dreams: an opportunity to treat the public's living rooms like theaters and collect "admission" from every viewer.

Rick Falkvinge has amusingly pointed out that "prior art" exists for this "Content Distribution Regulator" -- in the form of a satirical piece published at BBspot (and covered here years ago, noting that it "hit too close to home") five years before Microsoft's filing.

Quoting:Six years ago, a satire site wrote a story about how the copyright industry wanted more money if you invited friends to watch a movie in your living room. This notion has now been patented in new technology: automated headcounts coming to a living room near you, to enable new forms of restrictions. Apparently, the copyright industry takes six years to catch up with the very worst satire of it.

MOOCs—or Massive Open Online Courses—have been getting a lot of attention lately. Just in the last year or so there’s been immense interest in the potential for large scale online learning, with significant investments being made in companies (Coursera, Udacity, Udemy), similar non-profit initiatives (edX), and learning management systems (Canvas, Blackboard). The renewed interest in MOOCs was ignited after last year’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered via Stanford University, when over 160,000 people signed up to take the free online course. 

With Xubuntu I can customise the way my desktop works and I can keep the system highly responsive even on older hardware. This article shows how.

We're proud and happy to announce the first re-spin of Peppermint Three in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. The downloads are live now via our standard download links and are also available for purchase in both CD and USB format. The re-spins offer a fully updated install as of November 5th, 2012, so you aren't left needing to download hundreds of megabytes of updates immediately after the install. In addition, we changed the desktop notifications back to the way they were in Peppermint Two after several users noted that the way they were implemented in Three seemed to be a bit of a step backward compared to the previous iterations. For users already running Three that also want this, it's actually quite simple: simply install the packages 'notify-osd' and 'notify-osd-icons'.