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ETC2, the new royalty-free texture compression method that's required by OpenGL ES 3.0, now has support within mainline Mesa. However, for now this ETC2 support is limited to the Intel DRI driver...

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a first Office action declaring all twenty claims of one of Apple's key multitouch patents invalid. The decision that was filed Monday isn't final, but Apple will have its work cut out for it in order to overturn the initial ruling before it's set in stone.

For those interested in Non-Unified Memory Access performance under Linux, here's an independent performance comparison that puts the mainline kernel against three other NUMA kernels...

Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman today called Ubuntu Linux "spyware" because the operating system sends data to Ubuntu maker Canonical when a user searches the desktop.

But his complaint is already falling on deaf ears—Canonical said today that it plans to increase use of the feature Stallman objects to in order to deliver expanded Internet search results in the next version of Ubuntu.

It doesn't take a patent specialist to figure out that this is basically patenting a spreadsheet for weighting countries on a few different factors. It seems to be the exact kind of thing that was disallowed by the Supreme Court under Gottschalk v. Benson. And yet, the USPTO waved it right on through.

Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle. He was chosen to lead a discussion on open governance at the Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. The open innovation concept is what got him interested in free software communities while studying organizational psychology, and it's an idea he tries to merge into growing the openSUSE community.

Alex Deucher of AMD emailed in a pull request on Friday afternoon for the Radeon graphics driver that will end up as part of the DRM pull for the Linux 3.8 kernel...

Today, we give the game developers a little break and instead I thought we should talk a little more in depth about Unity 3d. With Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical getting fully behind Unity 3D support on their platform, a more detailed look into Unity 3D seemed to fit quite nicely with the whole idea of game development and Linux support. To that end, I have contacted Unity’s David Helgason to get the answers to some of the less obvious questions.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides attendees with experience in creating Linux kernel source code within various subsystems of the Linux kernel. This course teaches attendees to acquaints developers with the fundamental subsystems, data structures, and API of the Linux kernel This class is scheduled for December 19th - 20th, 2012.

The creators of the Creative Commons licensing suite are celebrating the licences' tenth birthday. As part of the festivities, local groups are organising events all over the world from 7 to 16 December. The organisation behind Creative Commons was founded in 2001 and produced and published the first set of licences in December of the following year. The organisation was founded by, among others, law school professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig, with the goal of giving both creators and consumers of content more freedoms than are usually afforded under traditional copyright licences.

Intel has released GraphBuilder, a library for Hadoop that allows scientists and developers to create graphs from large data sets for use in their applications. The tool is usable without specific knowledge in distributed systems engineering

By the time they reach market, however, they may find that another Linux-based OS has beaten them to the punch. Android is leading the way in low-cost smartphones, and increasingly, tablets, aimed at the new, budget-conscious middle classes in BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other developing nations.

In this episode: The UN wants to control the internets. Fedora 18 adds Mate and Cinnamon. Matthew Garrett creates a way to boot Linux from UEFI Windows 8 machines. There's lots more Apple/Samsung shenanigans and a Linux-powered autonomous boat swims almost 17000 kms to Australia. We discover things, rant about things, and listen to your opinions in the Open Ballot.

As promised in this week's Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here's our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine.

This is a personal post and does not neccessarily represent the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu community.. Today Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation wrote a critical post accusing Ubuntu of shipping spyware (which is referring to the online search capabilities of the Ubuntu dash). He goes on to suggest “in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.“. This is FUD.

One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do? Proprietary software is associated with malicious treatment of the user: surveillance code, digital handcuffs (DRM or Digital Restrictions Management) to restrict users, and back doors that can do nasty things under remote control. Programs that do any of these things are malware and should be treated as such. Widely used examples include Windows, the iThings, and the Amazon "Kindle" product for virtual book burning, which do all three; Macintosh and the Playstation III which impose DRM; most portable phones, which do spying and have back doors; Adobe Flash Player, which does spying and enforces DRM; and plenty of apps for iThings and Android, which are guilty of one or more of these nasty practices.

Sony again snubs Linux users with a PS3 by refusing access to the new SEN Web Store, with a generic error message giving no rhyme or reason

At the very least I need my operating system to have a web browser and a ssh connection - the former ChromeOS provides very obviously (the whole OS is one giant web browser). Getting an SSH connection from the device was not as straight forward however.

Most distros include Btrfs, and Btrfs has been included in mainline Linux kernels since the 2.6.29 kernel. To use it just install the user-space tools. So what's the story, is it ready for prime time or not?

This week, we look at why Darth Vader would have made a darn good IT project manager (in spite of his obvious brutality and ruthlessness), if Agile is for everyone and the double-edged sword of code optimization.