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Version 2.16 of glibc, the GNU C Library, was released on Saturday afternoon. This update to the de facto C library for GNU/Linux systems brings many new features. There's x32 and ISO C11 support along with performance optimizations...

In Linux Mint Cinnamon, if you are idle for a while, you computer screen will blank out and the lock screen feature will be activated and you will have to enter your password to re-access your computer. If you dont want to enter the password all the time, you can disable the lock screen feature easily.

"Under the guise of security, a computer afflicted with Restricted Boot refuses to boot any operating systems other than the ones the computer distributor has approved in advance. Restricted Boot takes control of the computer away from the user and puts it in the hands of someone else. To respect user freedom and truly protect user security, computer makers must either provide users a way of disabling such boot restrictions, or provide a sure-fire way that allows the computer user to install a free software operating system of her choice."

The Free Software Foundation says it strongly rejects any approach to computer security that involves placing trust in Microsoft or any other proprietary software company.

Another digital game platform GOG.com (former Good Old Games) is becoming increasingly popular. Although there have been very successful, mainly older, titles like Wing Commander or Carmageddon distributed on this game platform thus far (often bundled with DOSBox or ScummVM), today there are more newer AAA titles such as The Witcher 2 being included in the game catalog of GOG.com.

In the last seven days: Google announced Android 4.1, problems with Windows Update, Firefox for Android refreshed. Also, Richard Hillesley on why companies give away their code, and the Kernel Log on the networking changes coming in Linux 3.5

For those that missed it, the Green500 list was updated for June 2012. IBM's BlueGene/Q super-computer hardware dominates but there's a few surprises besides that...

The trouble is, too many big publicly held companies have invested tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder money buying up patents. Eliminating software patents, then, would wipe out billions of dollars in wealth being held not only by the trolls but by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Google, Apple and Microsoft. In other words, it isn’t going to happen. Too many of these guys employ people on K Street.

Software patents are costing us even more than we realize, however. We got an inkling this week from the BBC of how much that cost might be. It seems that the trolls alone are costing the U.S. $29 billion dollars yearly, according to James Bessen and Michael Meurer who took part in a study conducted by Boston University:

For any independent developers that have been wanting to explore ways to contribute to the open-source Radeon driver but have been intimidated by the lack of documentation within the code, the situation is beginning to improve...

If you happen to have about six projectors laying around, there's a new open-source project available that comes out of academia for panoramic multi-projector image rendering to have a panoramic visualization system for things like flight simulators and Google Earth...

Another trade-injunction run-around as a bludgeon against competition. Another Judge who apparently doesn't get technology. And so the inanity/insanity continues...

Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, June 29th, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 Xfce Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

Nautilus is a core application of the GNOME desktop environment, and is the one and only choice for many users that feel comfortable with it. I imagine that many people have never even tried to use another file manager, or don’t know about any worthy alternatives.

Calise (Camera Light Sensor) is an application that uses your computer's camera as a light sensor for obtaining the ambient brightness and then calculates and sets the correct backlight according to an user defined scale.

The most commonly used command in Ubuntu is “apt-get“. You can use it to install software, updatethe repository and upgrade the software. Without a doubt, “Apt-get” is a pretty handy tool and is very useful and good for what it supposed to do, but “good” can always be enhanced into “better” and this can be easily achieved with “apt-fast”.

This article identifies 6 modelers that stand out from the others. They offer a wide range of modeling tools, mesh editing, group editing, Boolean modeling operations, isosurface modeling, and much more. The software featured here are all versatile and powerful tools for artists.

Mathbuntu brings a nice batch of math and science software, textbooks, and other goodies to Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Let's try it out and see if it makes us smarter.

With new major releases of Ubuntu and Fedora out the door in the past quarter, the developers at these and other community distributions are now hard at work on future versions of their respective Linux-based operating systems. Smaller, more specialised distributions have also been publishing new versions at a rapid pace.

Canonical announced earlier today, June 29th, in a security notice, that new Linux kernel updates for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) operating systems is now available, fixing three important security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers.

One of the first things that newcomers to GNU/Linux learn to do is to bypass big Start menus and blank screens (like Fluxbox) and use ALT+F2 to launch an application by simply typing in its name. Every desktop ecosystem has its own way of implementing this feature and I was pleasantly surprised, after a long absense from the KDE desktop, to see how it could be used to do some really clever things.