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Unlike commercial operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS X, Linux stands alone because of its unique nature. One of the major benefits of using this OS is that it is open source, meaning that the underlying source code may be used, modified, and distributed as its users see fit.

You've probably heard of OpenStack. It's that cloud software that's getting a lot of attention from big names in the IT industry and major users like CERN, Comcast and PayPal. However, did you know that it's more than that? It's also the fastest growing open source community in the world, and a very interesting collaboration among technology vendors and users.

Backyard haunted houses, carving pumpkins, elaborate decorations, jumping out to scare trick-or-treaters; Halloween is packed with the DIY spirit. People’s desire to be scared or scare others is primal. It’s the “fight or flight” response, the deep psychological need to survive. Halloween give many the chance to feel the fear, since back in our minds we know there is no real danger. Perhaps it is just the excitement that drives us to walk through that haunted house. Either way, it’s fun for both the builder and the viewer.

The Medibuntu repository has been unmaintained for several months, and has become more and more useless over the years. The project is now considered abandoned, and we recommend to disable the repository if you are using it.

Cinnamon 2.0 was released today.

Since 2004, I've been known first as a Linux Advocate. Everything I do on a professional and sometimes personal level, substantiates that fact. There are some that consider their friend going to work for Microsoft akin to your brother joining the Confederacy while you and your other brothers are in the Union camp.

See...that's where personal and political dogma gets questionable.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced plans to invest $1 billion (USD) in new Linux and open source technologies forIBM's Power Systemsservers. The investment aims to help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems built to handle the new wave of applications coming to the data center in the post-PC era.

Rare diseases are defined as as those afflicting populations of less than 200,000 patients, or about 1 in 1,500 people. There are about 7,000 rare diseases, the majority of which are genetically related and commonly affecting the very young (infants). At first glance, rare diseases seem to only affect a small number of people, but in reality their aggregate impacts close to 30 million patients in the US, and about 25 million in the EU alone. This impact also extends to the millions of caregivers and families, who also feel and live with the disease, just in a different way.

Pat Huff has been working in the software industry since its infancy and started his career as a "rocket engineer" working on launch systems for various companies in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Barnes and Noble, which adheres to the ePub standard enhanced the tool which ensures ePUB files adhere to industry standards

Want to get ready for the next major release of Red Hat's flagship Linux distribution? You're in luck: The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 is available for testing.

I've already looked at some GIS applications available on Linux. Programs like GRASS and qgis provide a full set of tools to do GIS. Sometimes, that's really overkill though. You may just want to display some data geographically and create a map. For those cases, there is Thuban, an interactive geographic data viewer.

“We love Raleigh, Durham and the RTP and hope to have a presence here very soon. We’ve been looking to do something here for a while. It’s a national center for IT and open source and it’s growing rapidly. In short, we’re long on the area. Having Red Hat and other prominent companies and educational institutions located here certainly helps of course.”

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC A writer, community manager, and standards pundit—John Mertic is a jack of all trades. At SugarCRM, his official title is Solutions Architect and Community Manager. He is the author of two books: The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications and Building on SugarCRM: Creating Applications the Easy Way. And, he is a frequent conference speaker. We look forward to John's expertise at the upcoming All Things Open conference on October 23 and 24!

Linus Torvalds closed the 3.12 merge window when he released 3.12-rc1. tty layer and scalability improvements received a special mention in the release announcement. The tty layer cleanups lead to per-tty locking which will result in better performance on some work-loads.

I love Dropbox. I really do. With a Google AdWords campaign, and $50 or so, I was able to max out my free storage. That means I have around 24GB of free Dropbox storage to fiddle with. Granted, that's a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, 24GB isn't very much space.

In the realm of Open Source software development the adage "good enough" is often interpreted as this software is good enough for general use. It should read "good enough for me", speaking only from the software author's perspective. Here's what I mean.

With this morning's revelation of how the NSA and GCHQ are trying to attack Tor, some of the presentations being used by the NSA to explain Tor are somewhat interesting or amusing. For example, in one presentation about the program EgotisticalGiraffe (I don't make 'em up, so don't ask), the NSA amusingly feels the need to highlight the fact that "terrorists" use Tor:

Face it, the cloud isn't going anywhere because we sure as heck aren't going back to carrying 3.5 in floppies even if our devices had such a slot. Just as Danny and the Juniors once sang about rock and roll, the cloud is here to stay. It will never die. So can we stop the cloud viability discussions once and for all, please?

Apple has released the Golden Master (GM) verion of its upcoming OS X 10.9, aka Mavericks, to its developers, along with the GM version 5.0.1 of its development environment (IDE), Xcode.

A round up of a number of events relevant to the Linux world for the past week.

After last week announcing Steam Machines as the Valve-backed Steam "living room consoles" (a.k.a. Steam Box) powered by the Linux SteamOS, today Valve has released the prototype hardware details that they will be shipping to 300 beta testers.

BitTorrent Sync by BitTorrent, Inc is a proprietary peer-to-peer file synchronization tool available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and BSD. It can sync files between devices on a local network, or between remote devices over the Internet via secure, distributed P2P technology, so in short you can setup your own cloud storage and share your files among your devices.

Maybe the biggest thing that ever happened to Linux—at least scale-wise—is virtualization. As I recall, virtualization first materialized in a big commercial way with IBM, which started by putting many Linux instances on System z mainframes.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2013 issue.

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform, is beginning to attract a training marketplace and user guides for administrators. Is that enough?

In past articles, I've explained how to set up a SOCKS proxy with SSH. I've demonstrated how to tunnel traffic with SSH. I've even shown how to circumvent a company firewall with SSH. I've never been able to use SSH completely as a VPN, however, and that's always bummed me out—until I discovered sshuttle.

LinuxCareer.com analyses the Linux job market in terms of demand for IT skills. This report aims to extend the study of the IT Skills Watch by identifying which skills are grouped together in IT job advertisements. By employing cluster analysis LinuxCareer.com identifies 10 relatively different groups of skills that can be linked to IT job categories. The winner set of IT skills is also identified, which suggests the most popular, in terms of demand, IT qualification.

Free/Libre and Open Source software versus closed and proprietary software doesn’t matter. It’s not the answer to solve all our problems. It’s not the question we need to ask anyone and everyone either. It simply doesn’t matter. Well, it might matter to you and I…but it doesn’t matter to most people out there.

I met with a special guest—Dries Buytaert, Belgian creator of the open source platform Drupal and general all-round entrepreneur, to get his views on open source, web publishing, web startups, and entrepreneurship. Drupal, the open source platform he developed 13 years ago, has grown immensely, now underpinning around 1 in 50 websites and a huge community of developers. Sites running on Drupal range from the White House and NBC, to the EU's Digital Agenda site—and indeed my own site.

This is another example of Linux moving into a sector and taking over," suggested blogger Kevin O'Brien. "The proposed new Steam Box is good, but for any dedicated gamer, PCs are where the real action is. I think this can benefit all Linux users by getting Nvidia to open their drivers. Nvidia may not care about Linux users, but they won't ignore Valve.

An Opinion Piece on how to Tackle Microsoft's Monopoly around the World!

Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up with the idea for GNU.

At OSCON this year, Regina ten Bruggencate and Kim Spiritus gave a talk called How To Get More Kids To Code. I got in late (I was waiting in line to get a free signed copy of The Art of Community by Jono Bacon) so I missed the beginning of this session, but came in as they were demoing Scratch.

Wine 1.7.3 is now out as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine. This time around it does some preparation work on the Direct3D command stream support.

Forging fresh frontiers in fanboi fragility, some members of the iDevice community have taken to Apple's discussion forum to complain that iOS 7 makes them want to puke. Rather, the source of their irritation is iOS 7's many zoom animations along with the slight parallax effect that iOS 7 uses to create the illusion of 3D display layers

My daughters love the movie Pitch Perfect. I suspect our XBMC has played it more than 100 times, and I'm not exaggerating. Whether or not you enjoy young-adult movies about singing competitions and cartoon-like projectile vomiting, I'll admit it's a pretty fun movie.

Dot Categories: DeveloperA recent Dot article explained changes in the KDE release cycle that will be happening with the upcoming introduction of Frameworks 5. The changes to KDE's libraries are enough to warrant a name change from 'Platform' to 'Frameworks'. This article provides some background, an overview of the changes, and the benefits and improvements that can be expected from KDE Frameworks 5 for the entire Qt community. A later article will address Frameworks 5 benefits for KDE developers.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC

Being a bra

Of course, as you might expect, there's something of a "split" within the tech sector over whether or not there's support for Goodlatte's latest bill. On the one hand, you've got over 200 startups asking for that accelerated review process for questionable patents. At the same time, you've got a coalition of about 100 more stodgy old line businesses (some of whom are in the tech world) arguing that such a review would "undermine many valid patents." Frankly, that's hogwash, as we'll discuss in a bit.

Your open source project is one of thousands, so how do you help its community grow? Start with project management, great documentation, and a road map.

Today in Open Source: The decline and fall of Ubuntu? Plus: Fun Fedora facts, and Fedora 20 Alpha download

It was inevitable. Back when the Raspberry Pi was announced, I knew I eventually would use one to power a beer fridge.

Which idea led you to a career in open source? I want to stand on the shoulders of giants I want to try something beyond conventional wisdom I want to change the world I want to be a part of a community Why not change the world? I have always been interested in science, technology and (most of all) computers. These are things that I always loved, even though they were sometimes difficult. I loved math and science class in school; I read science-fiction and fantasy novels in all of my spare time. I was the nerdy kid at school that was bullied and mocked. It would have been so easy to just give in and be "like everyone else." I could have stopped reading. I could have played more sports.

More than two years after unknown hackers gained unfettered access over multiple computers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel, officials still haven't released a promised autopsy about what happened.

Emmabuntüs is more than a Linux distribution. It is a collective which does not accept the consumer society as it now exists: it is not long-term reliable for our planet, and it is not for us.

On September 4 - 6 the open source electronic health records community came together at the 2nd annual OSEHRA Summit and workshop, in Bethesda, Maryland. Day 1: tutorials on a variety of topics Day 2: high-level presentations from members of the community with unique vantage points in the community

"The average Internet user only needs stuff ready for individual online activities. The percloud is the first member of this NEW CLASS of Gnu/Linux distributions."

Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers' good side. Yesterday, Nvidia's Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that "NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able."

Today in Apple: Should Apple merge OS X and iOS or would it be a disaster like Windows 8?