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We have always been strong advocates of computer games. Rather than rotting the brain, computer games are interactive, teach essential life skills, and can stimulate learning. They also have been proven to enhance skills such as creativity, cooperation, teamplay, as well as encouraging innovative and strategic thinking and improving hand-eye coordination.

The holiday season is upon us, and you know what that means: relatives coming over wanting to use your WiFi. If you'd like to find a solution somewhere between "run an open, unsecured AP" and "hand out your WPA2 password to people who write things like that down on sticky notes" then setting up a captive portal is a convenient option.

Many mobile application developers are frustrated by the complexity involved in creating apps that work across all platforms. What works on an iPhone won’t necessarily cut it on a BlackBerry and apps that sing on an iPad need to be completely overhauled for an Android-based tablet. An open development ecosystem would go a long way toward getting apps to market faster, and potentially mean less wear-and-tear on developers trying to keep up with evolving technology. Kurt Daniel, COO of mobile application development platform Workllight, makes a great case for the necessity of open mobile app development and has some tips on what developers should consider before writing their first line of code.

/proc is a virtual filesystem generated at boot and updated regularly by the kernel. With /proc you can investigate exactly what hardware your Linux kernel sees, what processes it is running, boot options, and also manipulate kernel events.

Last month Oracle renominated Apache to the Java Executive Committee because we valued their active participation and perspective on Java. Earlier this week, by an overwhelming majority, the Java Executive Committee voted to move Java forward by formally initiating work on both Java SE 7 and SE 8 based on their technical merits. Apache voted against initiating technical committee work on both SE 7 and SE 8, effectively voting against moving Java forward. Now, despite supporting the technical direction, Apache have announced that they are quitting the Executive Committee. Oracle has a responsibility to move Java forward and to maintain the uniformity of the Java standard for the millions of Java developers and the majority of Executive Committee members agree. We encourage Apache to reconsider its position and remain a part of the process to move Java forward. ASF and many open source projects within it are an important part of the overall Java ecosystem.

A member of the research staff at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has created a Minority Report interface using the Kinect 3D sensor and a bunch of open source software.

Fotoxx is a simple, open source photo editing application for Linux. Fotoxx image editor is incredibly lightweight and packed with all the basic features you could expect in an image editor application. If you haven't tried Fotoxx yet, it is definitely worth your attention.

I would like to announce the immediate release of Fuduntu Linux version 14.7. This version brings minor changes to the OS defaults, and fixes a few bugs.

At this point in time, if you are the kind of person who loves your visits to Facebook, then it is reasonable to conclude that you are the kind of person who also enjoys suffering and pain. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with liking suffering and pain. There are many people who do, and they typically pay beautiful and mean women or handsome and punishing men to dole out Facebook-style sessions. They charge by the hour, in fact.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that it is resigning from the executive committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), the governance body responsible for managing standards related to the Java programming language. The move is a response to Oracle's ongoing failure to comply with the intellectual property policies established by the JCP.

Running Ubuntu 10.10? Want the latest version of digiKam with it? Philip Johnsson’s got you covered. His PPA contains the very latest version of the photo management application ready to be installed on your system.

Believe it or not, GNU/Linux is already an amazing game platform. You might find this statement entirely implausible or rather incredulous but I really mean it. I didn’t know this until last evening when I was desperately looking for an open source alternative for the popular game “Guitar Hero”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much, in fact, I was preparing myself for a total flop, or yet another monotonous copycat of GH. Oh boy… how wrong was I. Not only did I found the sort of game I was looking for, but also, I stumbled upon some other cool open source music games that totally changed my perception about open source games. But don’t take my words for it, just go and search for a very specific genre of games. I assure you that eventually you will find some quality open source alternatives. I do believe some of these games can be competent competitors to their commercial counterparts if they get more attention from the community.

Atmail Open is an open source webmail client which is available free of charge and is a great alternative to Squirrelmail. This tutorial shows how to use it (instead of SquirrelMail) with ISPConfig 3.

Mozilla Jetpack is designed to make it incredibly easy to build Firefox add-ons using a number of common web technologies like HTML and JavaScript. Join Kunal Deo as he demonstrates how to get setup ready for your creative juices to start flowing…

So will Chrome OS notebooks also have the option to dual-boot another operating system like Windows? Google says no, as "certified" Chrome OS notebooks will only be able to run the single operating system. Part of that may be due to Chrome OS's use of protected flash memory, which is great for security, but isn't so great for custom installs and for spaciousness.

In this article I will describe how to setup a rescue system that – assumed PXE boot is supported – bootable via PXE / NFS over the network. Such a rescue system is useful if a node is not accessible after an reboot (for example after a distribution update). I approve grml as rescue system, but the setup should work with other linux rescue systems too (like SystemRescueCd, Knoppix). Anymore we will setup dhcpd, atftp, nfs and syslinux.

A variety of constituencies from the West have taken it upon themselves to reach out to China to "educate" the Chinese about the existing global standards development infrastructure, and to urge them to take part in that infrastructure in the same way as do other countries.

This is strictly a matter of taste, but I think that Linux Mint 10 may be the prettiest Linux I’ve seen. Now, I know that isn’t a great reason to pick a distribution — but out of the box, it helps. Especially for those of us who want to convince Windows XP refugees to switch to Linux instead of Windows 7 or Mac OS X. If you’re going to be staring at a system for a few hours — or all day, you want it to look good. Good is relative, and what looks spiffy to an expert user who spends much time at the command line is probably going to be slightly different than what looks good to novice Linux users. Suffice it to say, they’ve done good.

I just saw the Linux Devices article about the new Google Chrome notebooks, the arrival of which I've been anticipating for about a year. I'd love to get my hands on one of these devices, and through Google's pilot program maybe it'll actually happen.

Most people think “graphical interfaces” when they think of surfing the Web. And, under X11, there are lots of great programs, like Firefox or Chrome. But, the console isn't the wasteland it might seem. Lots of utilities are available for surfing the Web and also for downloading or uploading content.