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“The requirements of small-screen mobile devices are incompatible with those of large-screen fixed devices,” Norman says. “Windows 8 has a problem. The real business workhorses of Microsoft Office are not well supported by the mobile apps. So Microsoft had to provide a backwards-compatibility mode, which provides the necessary power, but makes things even more confusing.”

[Not FOSS, but still of interest to LXer readers]

In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore.

We talk a lot about what might be done to fix the problems of software patents, but not much about abolishing them. What would that look like? Could abolishing software patents all together be the solution to our patent problems?

What is new in ROSA Desktop 2012? I believe there was a huge work for the "under the bonnet" stuff. But this is not so much visible to users. The interface changes are more likely to attract the attention.

Did you know that the Android SDK comes with nearly two dozen development tools? Here’s a visual guide to many of them to help you design, develop and test your own apps

I am sure that my first experience with the original Postal was very much the same as it was for many of the other people who have decided to give it a go over the years. Having by that point been finally convinced to play and thoroughly enjoy the game's much more infamous and elaborate sequel

Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Free. As we near the release of the biggest consumer-oriented commercial software to ever hit Linux, some negative realities from other platforms may make a nasty appearance in Ubuntu.

Well, it just so happens that the company is no stranger to Linux, because their CURRERA-R series of machine-vision, smart cameras (integrated with an Intel-based personal computer) has support for Linux.

Thanks to digiKam’s geocorrelation capabilities, you can geotag photos using a GPX file created with apps like Open GPS Tracker. But there is also another way to use your Android device for geotagging.

Jon Masters examines the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community – and the release of the 3.6 kernel, hot off the press

Apparently, problems caused by last week's Ext4 bug only occur when combining several critical mount and umount options; this renders the bug harmless for most Linux users – so far, it has only affected one user. Nevertheless, ext4 lead developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o plans to draw the necessary conclusions from the incident.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on an OpenSUSE 12.2 server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

LXer Feature: 28-Oct-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

We are happy to announce the latest DEFT Linux release, version 7.2. This is the last 32-bit release but it will have bug-fix support until 2020. Please note that the next release will be for 64-bit systems only. What's new in this release? Virtual appliance based on VMware 5 with USB 3 support; Linux kernel 3.0; Autopsy 3 beta 5 (using WINE, please note that you will need a minimum of 1 GB of RAM); Log2tmeline 0.65; guymager 0.6.12; VMFS support; some minor fixes. Thank you for choosing DEFT Linux and enjoy the project!

GnuPG stands for GNU Privacy Guard. GnuPG is an open implementation of OpenPGP ( Pretty Good Privacy ) standard as defined in RFC 4880. In this article we will cover the installation and the basics of generating keys using gnupg. This article is part of our ongoing series on Cryptography. If you are new to cryptography, refer to our earlier article on Introduction to Cryptography.

We've written about patent trolling giant Intellectual Ventures many times, including how it is notoriously secretive about almost everything. Its deals with companies (often involving them forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to not get sued) are hidden away behind strict non-disclosure agreements. It also hides the various patents in over 1,000 shell companies. At other times it "sells" patents to independent trolls, but most people believe that it still gets a cut of any revenue that comes out of those trolling operations. An operation called IP Checkups -- a "patent analytics firm" -- is trying to shine some more light on IV's secret patent portfolio and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to investigate the company's patents.

There are plenty of discussions about the problem of patent trolls, but if you think that's the only problem with the patent system, you haven't been paying attention. There have been a ton of major clashes going on between big companies, spending billions buying up patents, suing each other... and not putting that money into innovation or lower prices. So it's nice to see Cisco CEO John Chambers speak out against the patent system by calling out both the trolls and the big tech companies for abusing the system and hindering innovation.

GNU MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing system for images, video, and audio. You can think of it as a federated replacement for things like Flickr, YouTube or SoundCloud that you or anyone can run. MediaGoblin is building the world's most beautiful and user-responsive media publishing future, but we need your help!

A new version of the bzzwolfsp co-op modification for windows, mac and linux has just been released (v.0.9.1).

Apple always loves to do weird things. When MacOS Lion was released, the mouse scrolling direction is reversed and called "natural scrolling". It means you will have to scroll up the middle wheel to read the lower part of the page and vice versa. And Pear Linux adopt this feature too to make it behave like Mac OS.