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When talking about open source, many people's first thought is the GNU General Public License (GPL). While the software world has been revolutionised by GPL, the hardware world has seen little change. 

The first beta release of Mageia 3 Linux is now available...

This isn't a final decision by the USPTO. Apple will get to respond before any patents are truly killed off, and reexams are generally a long, dragged-out process. However, it is notable that all three of the utility patents Apple used to win its case are now having their validity seriously questioned.

Intellectual Ventures is at it again -- playing the "oh, little innocent us? we're not doing anything that should really concern anyone" card in the press. Wired is running an op-ed by Raymond Hegarty, IV's "VP Of Global Licensing in Europe." He's a long term patent maximalist... and it shows. The article is entitled: Intellectual Ventures: Why the Patent System Needs Aggregators Like Us, which should give you an idea of the fanciful rewriting of history you're about to read.

The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 9.1 is now available. This release includes many exciting new features and enhancements, such as a vastly improved system installer, ZFS 'Boot Environment' support, TrueOS (a FreeBSD-based server with additional power-user utilities), and much more. Highlights: FreeBSD 9.1; new system installer, greatly simplified for desktop and server installs; support for ZFS mirror during installation; support for SWAP on ZFS, allowing entire disk ZFS installation; support for setting additional ZFS data-set options, such as compression, noexec;

A full review of Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon, including a gallery of images.

Valve has announced that their Steam Linux client is now available to all Linux gamers. It's open beta period now and just in time for the holidays...

This is awesome, Legend of Grimrock is now available via the Ubuntu Software Centre! The game is really awesome and plays much like the old Dungeon Master game (if anyone besides me remembers that!).

Many programming languages include libraries to do more complicated math. You can do statistics, numerical analysis or handle big numbers. One topic many programming languages have difficulty with is symbolic math. If you use Python though, you have access to sympy, the symbolic math library. Sympy is under constant development, and it's aiming to be a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS). It also is written completely in Python, so you won't need to install any extra requirements. You can download a source tarball or a git repository if you want the latest and greatest. Most distributions also provide a package for sympy for those of you less concerned about being bleeding-edge. Once it is installed, you will be able to access the sympy library in two ways. You can access it like any other library with the import statement. But, sympy also provides a binary called isympy that is modeled after ipython.

Well here it is and it's a good one too! Humble Indie Bundle 7 is here!

OpenMW, the open-source game engine re-implementation for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, is out with a new release this week...

Steam has had some more updates recently to it's client!

After yesterday sharing the general feedback submitted by over a thousand GNOME users (Part 1, Part 2) from the 2012 GNOME User Survey about their views on the popular Linux desktop environment, here's all of the responses to another one of the questions. The question came down to what features of GNOME are most important from your personal use and would not like them to go away.

I recently visited a relative who is studying in the natural sciences and who, surprisingly, is even less capable in certain technical aspects of computing than I am. He was trying to create, on his Mac, a script that would run as a cron job, and asked me for some pointers. Though I know the basics about cron and was willing to pitch in, I wasn't so sure about the script: you see, calling my bash skills rudimentary would be high praise. Nonetheless I decided that, with some web searching, I might be able to assist with that, too. Sure enough, I was able to find just the sort of information that would help us create a script that would tar and compress, then encrypt, a target directory. Details--shamelessly lifted from various locales on the web--are included below.

Imagine drawing anywhere with your tablet. It's now possible! KDE and KO GmbH have released Krita Sketch, the first tablet and ultrabook version of Krita, the award-winning digital painting application. Optimized for touch screens and developed with a QML interface, Krita Sketch provides everything needed to create artwork from beginning to end.

Micron, the puzzle / rhythm game from Apparition Games, is now available on Linux! Challenge yourself to solve 51 reflection based puzzles (plus 12 bonus puzzles) in which you create music just by playing the game.

It’s been years since I’ve used Windows on my own computer. But my wife, well, that’s a different story. She’s not the kind of user who likes how “hard” is to use my machines running Debian or Arch. So I had Windows installed for her on the home PC and on her laptop. I was constantly cleaning, re-installing, fighting viruses, etc. due to Windows’ infamous weaknesses in these areas. Well, a year ago, when she needed to travel to Buenos Aires for six months, I had Ubuntu 11.10 installed on her laptop alongside Windows, and asked her to see if she could use just Ubuntu, reassuring her that this way she wouldn’t have to worry about getting it fixed because it wouldn’t be able to break. Her basic needs for the laptop were Skype (to stay in touch), Gmail, Office documents (via LibreOffice), and browsing the internet.

Dot Categories: KDE Official NewsToday KDE released the first release candidate for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. Thanks to the feedback from the betas, KDE already improved the quality noticably. Further polishing new and old functionality will lead to a rock-stable, fast and beautiful release in January, 2013. One particular change in this RC is an updated look to Plasma workspaces.

Steam for Linux may be entering open beta if the closed beta mailing list is anything to believe, will it tie in with the popular Holiday Sale?

While FreeBSD 9.1 has yet to be officially released, the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD 9.1 "Isotope" release has already been made available this month. In this article are performance benchmarks comparing the 64-bit release of PC-BSD 9.1 against DragonFlyBSD 3.0.3, Oracle Solaris Express 11.1, CentOS 6.3, Ubuntu 12.10, and a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.