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This tutorial explains how you can revert failed apt operations (like apt-get upgrade) and roll back to the previous system state with apt-btrfs-snapshot on an Ubuntu 12.10 system that uses the btrfs file system. apt-btrfs-snapshot creates a snapshot of the system before the apt operation. Being able to easily restore the previous system state after a failed apt operation takes away much of the pain system administrators have to deal with normally and is one of the greatest features of the btrfs file system.

This guide describes how to enable the new Social API in Firefox 17 for Facebook.

In addition to featuring an auto-vectorizer, Polly optimizations, and countless other improvements, the forthcoming release of LLVM 3.2 brings numerous improvements to its PowerPC back-end...

It's the most wonderful time of the year: time to give open source presents. The opensource.com team gathered ten of our favorite gadgets to help you pick out that perfect present for that special (open source) someone. Some of these items will be a part of our 2012 open source gift guide giveaway (coming soon). Check them out:

When writing earlier this week about the poor state of the open-source id Tech 4 / Doom 3 community even after one year of the id Software game engine being GPL licensed, several readers wrote in and tweeted about "The Dark Mod" having not been mentioned...

Dot Categories: DeveloperThis week's KDE Commit-Digest starts with three short stories: on Kate search and replace changes; Homerun; and Linux Color Management Hackfest 2012. Of course, it gives also the overview of development activity:

For those interested in testing out a new open-source office suite this holiday weekend, LibreOffice 4.0 Alpha 1 was quietly tagged this week...

I've been using the MK802 almost daily for close to a month now and it shocks that this awesome device hasn't gotten more press in the FOSS world. I plan to write a formal review of the device in the next week, but for now I would like to simply do a comparison between the MK802 and the latest RPI Model B device

Dot Categories: SprintsAfter the successful developer sprint in Berlin in 2010, the Kate and KDevelop teams met for the second time from the 23rd to the 29th of October. This time, the developer sprint was held in the beautiful city of Vienna. In total, 13 contributors discussed and collaborated on the future of Kate and KDevelop for a whole week.

Another Kickstarter called Forsaken Fortress has popped up with support for Linux for $15+.

NVIDIA has quietly released new versions of its Linux 4 Tegra software platform that's currently targeting their "Cardhu" and "Ventana" platforms...

Due to there being much interest in the ARM Cortex A15 benchmarks on Linux, namely with the Samsung Chromebook and its Samsung Exynos 5 Dual, here's a weekend special providing some GCC compiler benchmarks of this new ARM chip.

After having a few more days to run and benchmark the Samsung Chromebook, it continues to be a very interesting notebook computer. For $250 USD this notebook packs a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, which bears a dual-core 1.7GHz ARMv7 Cortex-A15 processor and delivers rather good performance results. Here's some more performance numbers when loading up the Chromebook with Ubuntu Linux...

Two of the most popular control panels are Plesk and cPanel. These are web-based graphical control panels that allow you to easily and intuitively administer websites, DNS, e-mail accounts, SSL certificates and databases. However, they are both proprietary software. Hosting providers will charge a monthly fee for these control panels to be installed on a server. Fortunately, there is a wide range of open source software available to download at no cost that offers a real alternative to these proprietary solutions.

New Enlightenment E17 Alpha releases are coming out at a record pace considering that it's taken a decade to get to the first alpha stage. E17 Alpha 4 came just three days ago and there's already a fifth alpha now available...

But the more important step in the de facto legalization of software patents came in 1982, when Congress created a new court called the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It was given authority to hear all appeals in patent cases. While the new court was still theoretically under the authority of the Supreme Court, the fact that it heard so many patent cases gave it an outsized influence on patent law. And because the majority of its cases were patent cases, its judges spent a lot of time rubbing elbows with patent attorneys. As a result, it quickly shifted the law in the direction patent attorneys prefer: toward an ever stronger and more expansive patent system.

If you plan to upgrade your Linux desktop hardware in the near future or will be shopping for new PC hardware this holiday season, here's a few words of advice on recommended components and manufacturers to go with for the best Linux hardware experience.

Just days after Apple announced it had settled all its patent disputes with HTC, lawyers that had opposed Apple in a much bigger dispute—Apple v. Samsung—said that they wanted to see the settlement. Their argument was that if Apple had licensed to HTC patents it said it originally wouldn't license at all, then that should be considered in post-trial motions to determine whether Apple will be allowed to kick some Samsung phones off the market.

Linux 3.7 can use signatures to verify the integrity of kernel modules, while the new integrity appraisal extension helps to detect malicious software from a third party. The new kernel loads firmware files without udev and includes important container improvements

A group of Ruby on Rails developers has announced Rails::API, a derivative of the original Rails project that provides a slimmed-down set of functions which are useful for developers using Rails to write applications that use a backend API-only server or servers.