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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.

Not being the sort who rest much, we're already at work on Plasma Active Four. We met up on irc to firm up our plans. You can read the minutes here, thanks to Thomas who took the time to summarize the multi-hour session.

We are moving to a devel workflow in which we aim to have an "always-releasable" master branch. All development will happen in branches, something we essentially do already, but we will now also have an integration branch so we can bring the various branches together for testing before merging them when ready, branch by branch, into master. We have been working towards for some time, adjusting our habits one step at a time. This will only cover the plasma-mobile, share-like-connect and plasma-active-maliit repositories for now, but my hope is that as Frameworks 5 arrives we'll be able to broaden this to the bigger shared repositories such as kde-workspace.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Xubuntu 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Xubuntu uses the lightweight XFCE desktop environment.

Wayland is the next big thing in Linux Desktop since ..the beginning? It is meant to work aside with the problematic X (with the tremendous amount of functionality) and eventually (in many years!) is gonna replace it. Few days ago Wayland released a 1.0 stable API and while GTK and Clutter have also been updated to support these changes, we have long way ahead of us to see a full Gnome support for Wayland.

Last week marked eight years since Ubuntu made its appearance on the GNU/Linux scene. Since October 2004, there has been a release of this distribution every six months, the initial buzz being very loud and then gradually fading away.

After writing this morning about the most interesting Linux 3.7 kernel features, I also decided to list some of the work that's likely to land for the Linux 3.8 kernel, This list is far from being exhaustive but just some of the interesting and known features that will likely be ready for the Linux 3.8 merge window.

The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is moving ahead at full steam in its quest to develop, or spur the development of, humanoid robots that it can use for its own purposes — in this case, disaster response in areas too dangerous for humans but in need of a human touch (DARPA cites the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown as one example).

Microsoft has finally released their SmartGlass app for Android, allowing their Xbox console to be directly controlled by an Android device.

Critically Acclaimed realistic first person shooter Receiver is now available for Linux. The game has been developed by Wolfire Games, creators of popular cross platform game Overgrowth and Humble Indie Bundles.

Being roughly half-way through the Linux 3.7 kernel development cycle, here's a recap of some of the most interesting features for this forthcoming major kernel release...

Canonical has relesed a Desktop Installer app which allows you to install Ubuntu 12.10 on the Nexus 7 tablet with one click. Suitable only for devs for now.

Jono Bacon announced yesterday, October 26th, on his personal blog that the upcoming Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system will support the Nexus 7 tablet from Google.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about what Kickstarter was, and how it has helped developers create games which may not have otherwise existed. Wasteland 2 is a prime example of this. Funded nearly half a year ago, the sequel to Wasteland was more than 2 decades overdue. While I could attempt to explain why Wasteland 2 took so long coming to fruition, their Kickstarter video quite humorously details Brian Fargo’s own feelings on the subject. I got in contact with inXile’s Design Director Chris Keenan to chat about the upcoming Wasteland 2.

Like many others, I’ve been patiently awaiting the arrival of my Raspberry Pi order. For now, I have lots of time to figure out what to do with it once it arrives. I have a few projects I’d like to do, but one in particular stands out – Advanced Alarm Clock. I certainly can’t take credit for the initial idea of making an advanced alarm clock out of a Raspberry Pi computer, but I do look forward to making one just how I want it to be.

Xubuntu is the lighter weight brother of the ever popular Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. At the forefront, XFCE is the desktop environment of choice and it removes all the bells and whistles that we currently see in the star of the show, Ubuntu. It’s not just focused on older systems but those who want a great looking desktop and don’t need the extras.