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There's an interesting paradox in many social cooperations that is readily observable in open, participation-driven creative projects (for which open source software is often held up as the poster child): nobody will do it for you. In F/OSS, that assumption translates to things like "nobody will write the patch for you" or "nobody will fix that bug for you". It turns out that this is the only safe assumption to hold. But that idea flies in the face of reality: tens of thousands of bugs are fixed in Free software code bases around the world every year; huge numbers of features are added to free software code bases on a regular basis. Yet most of the people who use Free software did not perform any of the work that went into it, and those of us who do put effort into it are never responsible for more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the global result. So obviously people will and do make things for us. I have DVDs full of the stuff; I use it on all the computing devices I own every single day. You probably do as well.

PS: A little update on Vivaldi

For those of you who are chomping at the bit, biting your nails and ruthlessly washing your cars over and over again in anxious anticipation of Steam for Linux, we’ve got good news for you. Database hacker Marlamin uncovered the first evidence of a Steam for Linux build on Steam’s servers using using CDR Steam database parser. Steam’s beta carries an app id of 16549 and was uploaded just today.

With Android controlling the vast majority of smart phone marketshare, logic would dictate that developers would follow the eyeballs, but in fact, several studies suggest that developers follow the money -- and iOS has proven much more lucrative.

RapidDisk LX is a custom and minimal Linux distribution intended to provide RapidDisk (advanced Linux RAM disk modules) functionality as target block devices over iSCSI. Now on Kickstarter: RapidDisk 2.0, an x86_64 port!

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction's most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you're not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service Ustream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, "The Doctor's Wife." Where Gaiman's face had been were the words, "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement."

You may think or imagine that customizing GTK themes requires special knowledge and a lot of time, but with my new tool it just got easier than ever! Here is a gtk theme configure tool that allows users to change some basic elements of a GTK theme (both GTK2 and GTK3) using a simple interface. You can select the colors of panels, menus and background and revert the changes with the pressing of a button. The toggle switch allows to just turn off the custom widgets without loosing the saved customization.

We are proud to announce the general availability of OS4 OpenDesktop 1.0. OS4 OpenDesktop is a 32-bit offering that runs on all legacy 32-bit hardware as well as the newer ultrabooks and netbooks. With this release we focus on mobility and cloud computing. Along with this release the system comes with Audacious, Totem, and Google Chrome. Some of the web applications that come bundled with the system are: Angry Birds, Pandora, Netflix, Flixter, GMail and offline GMail, Google Drive, eBuddy, Weather Channel, Google Books, Google Music, Google Calendar, New York Times, Hotmail and WebCam toy.

After being in development for the past half-year, and at a time when much of the ongoing Linux desktop activity for the display server/stack is being focused on Wayland, X.Org Server 1.13 was released this evening. For a change, X.Org Server 1.13 does actually pack a number of promising new features...

We're entering the age of open source spectrometry, where the very chemical makeup of substances can be analyzed, compared, and improved. Is this the truest form of open source?

Today marks five years since the revolutionary AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver was announced to the world by Phoronix. While the driver still had a lot of work ahead, it was September 2007 that brought the brand new Catalyst Linux driver that shared more code with the Catalyst Windows driver and ushered in a new era for AMD with providing same-day Linux driver support, performance improvements, and new functionality to match the Windows driver...

There was another Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting this week where the state of some Fedora 18 items were brought up...

Skeltrack, the Free and Open Source Software library for tracking the human skeleton joints from depth images has made one more little step towards further evolution as today a new version was released!

This release brings some exciting improvements, as well as a new intern-developer (Iago Lopez) that will work together with Joaquim Rocha.

Automatic Extension Updates is the third proposal for 3.8 after Fallback and Videos. This feature was originally scheduled for 3.6 but it didn’t make it and they postponed it for 3.8. Till 3.8 is out, I guess we have to visit extensions.gnome.org/local and update manually. This is a big loss for 3.6, specially for the people that are heavily depended on extensions. The good news are that the infrastructure is completed and we can trigger it manually .

If I see a color on my computer screen that I'd like to use somewhere else, I want to know that color's hexadecimal code. Conversely, if I see a color's hex code, I want to know what that coded color looks like on-screen. Some time back, I wanted an application that does both those jobs simply in Linux. The best tool I found was gcolor2, described below. It's great for finding hex codes, but it doesn't display colors in a large enough 'swatch' to suit me. To do that job I wrote a simple script, also described below.

openSUSE 12.2 has been released and as a new user of openSUSE (along with Kubuntu 12.10) I was looking forward to this release due to many reasons. I am not a developer or a system admin so my requirements with an OS is similar to the requirements of an average user. In this review I am looking at openSUSE from a casual PC user's point of view.

Mozilla developer Alex Keybl has now detailed the plans for how Firefox ESR 10 users will migrate (or not) to the next ESR release. The plan is for the next ESR to be based on Firefox 17 which should be out around November 20th.

Want your site to look good, even though you're not a designer? Try a design framework. For as long as I can remember, I've known how to use a pencil. I can write with it, and I even can draw with it—although in my case, saying I can draw is something of a sad exaggeration. I might know how to use a pencil and thoroughly understand its technology, but that technical knowledge doesn't mean I can draw something aesthetically pleasing.

When looking to the future of technology, it’s helpful to take a look at existing technologies and see if patterns emerge – and if lessons from today’s ecosystem can be applied to tomorrow and beyond. To that end, we think that there’s no better model for open cloud to study than Linux and its ecosystem. Not just the kernel, of course, though the kernel holds many fine lessons for any student of open development and community practices. But also, the larger ecosystem of open source and vendors (notably distributions) that have formed around the kernel.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: September 5, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), will offer all LPIC exams at the Ohio LinuxFest 2012 (Columbus, Ohio) on Sunday, September 30, 2012 (OLF: http://ohiolinux.org/certs). LPI will also present on the subject of "Catching the Wave of Open Source Careers" during OLF's Career Track (http://ohiolinux.org/careertrack).

A quick tip for Chromium users who are using Ubuntu 12.04: the Chromium PPAs (Stable, Beta, Dev and Daily) haven't been updated since Chromium 18 but if you want to use the latest Chromium browser in Ubuntu, there are two new PPAs you can use, thanks to Alex Shkop.