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With iOS and Android dominating the mobile space, it’s sometimes hard to remember that it’s actually a congested and cluttered market. They are quite a few operating systems that are either in an incubating period, or already in your local Verizon store vying for your attention.

How successful is the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal? Well, in a recent interview, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert noted that nearly 790,000 people in 228 countries contribute to the platform, and it powers more than a million online sites. The White House, NASA and Twitter use it, and OStatic is also built on Drupal. In an interview we did with Buytaert, he described the core contributors to the project as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel." Getting started with Drupal can be daunting at first, but there are a lot of free resources for it. Here several good ways to get going with this powerful CMS.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers. MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

In the latest study by the Linux Foundation, Microsoft only just misses out on a spot among the top 20 groups and companies contributing to the Linux kernel. It has, however, achieved this only by dint of delivering bad code and then slowly improving it.

In a blow to diversity and independence in book publishing and distribution, Google announced yesterday that it will discontinue its partnering portal with independent bookstores next January (reproduced in full at the end of this blog entry).

There has been more than one time where I have needed to allow more than a user or group access to some files. Also there are times when the group/user that has ownership is just too powerful for the purpose of access. That is where ACLs come into play. Allowing a finer grained control over access to files and directories.

When it comes to OpenStack and open source cloud computing, here’s the key question I keep asking: Are any companies or customers actually profiting from OpenStack? Perhaps Mirantis can offer the answer. Here's why.

This week we look at cloud risks you might not have considered, writing a good BYOD acceptable use policy and 5 reasons for switching to HTML5.

After a bit more testing, unless I can basically fully replicate my old desktop with Linux Mint & MATE, I think I'll go with Linux Mint & KDE when Linux Mint 13 LTS "M[...]a" comes out.

Kickstarter is doing lots of good to Linux gaming as more and more developers are adding Linux support. We already had Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2 and now Shadowrun Returns, which has been fully funded in 28 hours ($400k) will most likely come to Linux as well. Jordan Weisman has kickstarted Shadowrun Returns, a graphically rich 2D turn-based single player game with deep story interaction, meaningful character development, and highly-contextual tactical combat. The game is sequel to popular cyberpunk RPG 'Shadowrun' created by Weisman and released way back in 1989. Shadowrun Returns has generated over $500k so far with 11K+ backers.

This is the short linux and open-source news overview for week 13 of 2012. It features small articles bundeling (important) open source related news in one page. This week includes bunch of news, april fools day jokes, systemd & udev, OS/2, KDE, Minecraft and a game called Linux Tycoon.

Run! Run as fast as you can to GOG.com! If you hadn’t already heard, today is the last day to get your free copy of Fallout from Good Old Games. This is great news for gamers who are fans of this style RPG and want to relive a classic, but for some reason they only distribute the Windows version.

While we have seen that Intel's Sandy Bridge is doing well on the new GCC 4.7 compiler, has AMD's Bulldozer CPU architecture advanced at all for this leading multi-platform compiler? Up today are benchmarks of GCC 4.7.0 -- with comparative benchmarks going back to GCC 4.4 -- from an AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core Bulldozer setup.

Memory errors, files flung - how did Redmond win? Yes it crashed a lot. It crashed less than its predecessor though, and kept Microsoft on the path to desktop domination. This was Windows 3.1, released on 6 April 1992, nearly two years after Windows 3.0 was pushed out in May 1990.…

I am not sure how this happened, and the last thing I want to do is criticize an over-worked single developer, but the Linux version was DOA on the download page. They were introducing a Linux-specific version of their product that didn't work. To make it worse, they didn't seem to have a clue that their Linux version did not work.

You will find one of those new features in System Settings, the hub for most graphical administrative tools in Ubuntu and GNOME 3 desktops in general. The tool or application is called Privacy. What it does is not new per se, but new in the manner it executes them.

This story is special, as it was created in an open source manner. The story was written in collaborative fashion by 2-3 dozen people working on it simultaneously. The story is a shining example of the collaborative power of Google Docs. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this story.

For publisher and thinker Tim O'Reilly, the future of technology will not be based in software algorithms as it is today, but on the biggest databases, and the guys who control the most important data on the web are the ones he believes will be the most successful.

Another noteworthy session from this year's Linux Foundation Summit was two Oracle engineers talking about DTrace on Linux. Kris Van Hees and Elena Zannoni of Oracle were at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to promote DTrace on Linux. Last year was when it was reported Oracle was bringing DTrace to Linux. In particular, they wanted to bring this Solaris technology from their Sun Microsystems acquisition over to their RHEL-derived Oracle Enterprise Linux.

The first BSD I was able to get to boot on that old Maxspeed Maxterm's VIA C3 processor was OpenBSD (it had to be version 4.2). While following the extensive OpenBSD FAQ is a very good idea now, back then you couldn't get the disk layout right without a strict FAQ-tual reading.