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Recently, the new edition of the Humble Bundle for Android was released. While the new game compilation contains mainly the games for the Android platform, there are also Linux, Mac OS X and Windows versions of the games included. As usual it's “pay what you want”. Furthermore all the games can be redeemed in the Ubuntu Software Center and on Steam.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today released security updates for all active branches of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.1.5, 9.0.9, 8.4.13 and 8.3.20. This update patches security holes associated with libxml2 and libxslt, similar to those affecting other open source projects. All users are urged to update their installations at the first available opportunity.

It's Friday and that means 5 links for developers and IT pros. This week we look at the challenges NASA faces updating Curiosity's software from 350 million miles away, why IT might be in danger in the face of sweeping technological changes, and how feline behavior mirrors best code practices.

Linus Torvalds announced last evening, August 16th, that the second Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.6 kernel is now available for download and testing.

The episode begins with a short interview with Gabe Newell where he mentions ”we should have Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly”...

In the Big Data market, Hadoop is clearly the team to beat. What is less clear is which of the Hadoop vendors will claim the spoils of that victory. Because open source tends to be winner-take-all, we are almost certainly going to see a "Red Hat" of Hadoop, with the second place vendor left to clean up the crumbs. As ever with open source, this means the Hadoop market ultimately comes down to a race for community support because, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady argues, the biggest community wins.

Thu Aug 16 04:01:31 UTC 2012 Getting close! Hopefully we've cleared out most of the remaining issues and are nearly ready here. We'll call this release candidate 2.

Valve's Steam Linux beta will be available fairly soon. In a new video interview, Gabe Newell confirmed "we will have betas for Steam for Linux and Steam Big Play fairly soon." Newell mentioned, "If customers want to build game consoles with Steam based on Linux. That's great." Plus other interesting comments during his interview about Valve.

A cool new feature has landed in the Unity Staging PPA, for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal: previews in Dash. With the new "previews" feature, you'll be able to right click applications or files in Dash to get a preview, along with some extra information which depends on the item you've right clicked.

Nothing ever need be a mystery on Linux as it has a large number of excellent utilities for discovering hardware and monitoring hardware health. Here are a handful of good tools for spotting possible hard drive failure, displaying hardware information and monitoring temperatures, fans, voltages, email, music players and more.

Bitcasa is a new cloud service that integrates infinite storage, sync, backup and share into your desktop and across all your devices.

X10 is an open standard for controlling home electrical equipment remotely. It works across home power lines and is extremely low-bandwidth. This communications protocol can control lights, appliances, and other electrical devices, and be used to implement a custom security system. This protocol has the virtue that it is simple to set up, flexible, yet at the same time can create a very sophisticated home control system at a low cost. By using X10 components you can control one company's modules using a different company's controller.

When did Apple get so frightened of Android that it decided to try to sue the competition into the ground instead of competing with them in the marketplace?

Generally, for network storage needs, I would recommend getting a dedicated NAS server, such as the Synology DiskStation DS1511+. However, if your needs are limited to casual usage, such as sharing documents and streaming music and photos, then a router with built-in network storage capability -- one that comes with internal storage or can host an external storage device and shares that with the rest of the network -- fits the bill better.

With ubiquitous Google Maps installed as standard on smartphone OS market leader Android's devices, why anyone would need anything else? Well, the principal benefit of an app like BackCountry Navigator Pro GPS is that it provides offline access to topographic maps, which represent terrain using graphical contour lines, aiding in outdoor-activity navigation.

Linus Torvalds has been saying rude things about GNOME, and Benjamin Otte has been staring into the abyss. GNOME 3 hasn't been the easy success the GNOME developers might have hoped for, and users are said to be leaving for Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon, all of which replicate in some aspect or another the GNOME 2 user experience.

The little computer that can, the Raspberry Pi, has successfully run the imminent Firefox OS, thanks to the efforts of a Nokia employee named Oleg Romashin. Firefox OS, also and/or formerly known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), is the Mozilla foundation’s attempt at providing an HTML-5 powered OS that will free punters from the tyranny of apps tied to mobile operating systems. The foundation sees the project as not entirely dissimilar to Google’s Chrome OS efforts, but doesn’t feel it is in competition with the text ad giant as it intends Firefox OS as a phone-only play rather than a Microsoft-on-the-lap irritant.

Acquia, the business that provides enterprise support for the open source web content management system, Drupal; purchased spam-blocker Mollom this week and plans to build it out in to a full-fledge platform -- whether for Drupal or anything else.

The Free Software Foundation's "Defective By Design" campaign has introduced a new "DRM Free" label. The idea behind the label is to identify products that do not have DRM protection so that they are easier for consumers to find in stores, and give those products a competitive advantage.

When we talk about mobile operating system, the attention immediately turns to iOS or Android. If you recall, not so long ago, there is also another mobile OS in the market – WebOS, which Hewlett-Packard (HP) used on their own tables and phones and resulted in total market failure. WebOS, by itself, is a great mobile OS to start with, but in the world where iOS and Android dominates with tens of thousands of apps, it pales in comparison. After HP decided to dump their tablets at a cheap price, they have also released the WebOS as an open source project. Today, we will show you how you can run WebOS in your Linux computer, using Virtualbox.