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A what-if piece over at Rock Paper Shotgun suggested the idea of Valve making a SteamOS. While a nice idea, I’m going to go with no. Some words from Gabe Newell in an interview with GT.TV lead me to think that my earlier speculation is closer to the truth, but not quite right either. Valve is not making a SteamOS, nor is it making a SteamBox. All they’re doing is enabling hardware manufacturers to build Steam-enabled custom hardware, whether it be “Steam Certified” desktop PCs or settop boxes.

Gabe Newell has talked in an interview to the website GameTrailers.com about the scheduled release of Steam for TV (known as "STEAM'S BIG PICTURE" mode) and Steam for Linux. He has confirmed that the BETA versions of both products are going to be released "fairly quickly."

In the past I’ve published articles on how to do a benchmark with namebench to see what’s the fastest DNS server for you and how to crypt your DNS traffic if you use Opendns but I’ve never done a comprehensive guide of the command dig, probably the best command you can have on the command line to query a DNS server, so today I want to show you the basic usage of this command and some trick, using examples that you can re-use for your goals.

In a virtual world, you control some people called Darwinians, and the aim of the game is to destroy some viruses created by the evil Dr. Sepulveda.

The Wine development release 1.5.11 is now available.

While Ubuntu Linux has embraced the Unity desktop in recent iterations, there have long been derivatives based on KDE, Xfce, and LXDE, for example. Now, it looks like fans of GNOME may soon get a community flavor of their very own. “At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in May, several of us that work with GNOME in Ubuntu discussed the need for a Ubuntu community derivative similar to Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others but which will try to ship a relatively pure GNOME experience,” explained Ubuntu developer Jeremy Bicha in a recent post on the GNOME mailing list.

Ikey Doherty proudly announced yesterday, August 17th, the immediate availability for download of the SolusOS 1.2 Linux distribution.

Ay fellas! After a little parenthesis about music, the Humble Bundle team goes on to another REAL bundle with videogames!

According to Gabe Newell, the distribution services' couch-ready UI is almost upon us. "We should have both Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly," he told Geoff Keighley in the latest episode of GTTV, noting that the interface would be available on both the current iteration of Steam and the upcoming Linux version. Newell said that Valve has been showing the interface to hardware manufacturers, but ultimately feels that the community will decide its fate.

Kicking off the Linux benchmarks this weekend are some early numbers from the GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 development compilers when running on Intel's latest-generation Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor. GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 are still months away from being formally released, but this article provides a glimpse at how the open-source compiler battle is panning out.

Now, take a look at this screen shot. Notice the tooltip. That is a welcome feature, and that is how it should be.

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.