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If you're an Android user, you've no doubt seen the daunting recent reports about spikes in malware found in applications on Android Market. For example, late last year Juniper Networks reported a 472 percent increase in Android malware samples seen since July 2011.

For open-source fans, here's the first shots of Limare running, in advance of the official announcement this weekend...

Seamonkey has an interesting history, in that it is both older and younger than Firefox. Older, because originally it was built from Mozilla Suite code (for those of you that don't know, Mozilla Application Suite is the parent of Firefox, and was originally built from the code of Netscape Navigator...

The eleventh international Samba conference, the Samba eXPerience, will take place from 8 to 11 May 2012 in Göttingen, Germany and its organisers are now accepting submissions for papers, presentations and talks...

Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 12 "KDE" edition: "The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 12 KDE. Linux Mint 12 KDE comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.....

This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support...

Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

ActiveState's development environment now includes collaboration and synchronisation tools as well as code profiling features, and has been integrated with the company's Stackato Platform-as-a-Service product...

Kate Stewart has announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 12.04, code name "Precise Pangolin": "Welcome to Precise Pangolin Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 12.04. Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the....

Today, February 2, is Bill "Texstar" Reynolds' birthday, but it's the community who received the present. PCLinuxOS 2012.2 KDE was released today in a full sized version as well as a mini. This release ships with Kernel 2.6.38 and KDE 4.6.5. It comes packed with lots of your favorite apps like LibreOffice (installer), Firefox, TvTime, VLC, and the GIMP. The appearance hasn't changed since the last release, but some additional goodies have been added.

Care to rethink your desktop user experience? It may be simpler than you think. Chances are you own more than one pointing device, but for years you've never been able to take full advantage of that hardware, because whenever you plugged in a second hardware mouse, it simply shared control of the same cursor. But with X, it doesn't have to: you can have any many distinct, independent cursors on screen as you have devices to control them. So grab a spare from the parts box in the closet, and get ready for the ol' one-two punch.

The PHP 5.3.10 release is out; it contains a fix for a remote code execution bug introduced recently by another security fix. Anybody running 5.3.9 should probably upgrade as soon as possible.

The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn't make it into...

German manufacturer Golden Delicious has begun shipping a hackable open source smartphone that runs a variety of Linux software, including a newly optimized Openmoko distro. The Openmoko GTA04 is available as a finished phone or as a board that slips into earlier Openmoko Neo Freerunner GTA01 and GTA02 cases, providing...

This tutorial shows how you can install and run ownCloud3 on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). ownCloud enables universal access...

Three-year Extended Life Phase available, too.

The PHP developers are working to fix a critical security vulnerability in PHP that they introduced in a previous security patch. The full impact of the problem is not yet known...

New desktop no longer compatible with Gnome Shell themes.

Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of git.zarafa.com, which it says should help developers contribute and get real time updates...

Today, the US House of Representatives is hosting a 2-day conference about how they can be more open and transparent about what they do under the dome. They are exploring ideas and recommendations on how to create transparency...

Version 2.6.12 of the open source GIMP image editing application will be the final 2.6 stable series update as the developers shift all of their focus to completing work on version 2.8, the project's next major release...

The Linux Foundation announced this week that Greg Kroah-Hartman would be joining as a fellow. Kroah-Hartman is joining a small group of developers that work with the foundation on Linux and open source projects. We conducted a short Q&A to see what this means for Kroah-Hartman and his work on the Linux kernel.

There's now a GStreamer plug-in to utilize OpenCL within this popular Linux video framework so that an OpenCL kernel can be applied against a video stream...

Building an embedded Linux distribution can be a daunting task. From the Board Support Package (BSP) to Kernel configuration, root file system setup and the selection many additional software package there are many choices to make and taking the wrong turn can easily lead to a dead end and many hours of wasted time.

The Yocto Project greatly simplifies this process with a set of proven tools and recipes allowing you to build you own custom Linux distribution tailored to your requirements.

During The Linux Foundation's Embedded Linux Conference at the Hotel Sofitel San Francisco Bay in Redwood Shores from February 15 through 17, you have the unique opportunity to build your competence in embedded Linux and the Yocto Project.

On the day before the conference, February 14, the first-ever Yocto Project Developer Day you will have the opportunity to meet the Yocto Project's supporting organizations and many experts who will be presenting sessions and labs.

Stay a little longer and right after the conference on Saturday/Sunday February 18/19, you can deepen your Yocto Project knowledge with a 2-day crash course offered by The Linux Foundation.

Join me for two days of hands-on learning fun, building Linux system images to boot in an emulator and on a Beagleboard. First you will get an introduction into the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded and how they relate. Then we will dive into the Poky Build Process, the core of the Yocto Project, and the Bitbake build orchestrator. You will learn about metadata layers, recipes and classes and how to use them to customize your distribution built by the Yocto Project.

What will you need? You know your way around on a Linux system and are not afraid of a commnad shell. You can use any of the standard text editors such as vi or emacs. You understand the basics of compiling and linking programs and constructing Makefile.

What to bring? Tag along your laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32-bit installed on it. Or alternatively, have VirtualBox 4.1.8 installed on your system. We can provide you with an appliance ready to be imported in VirtualBox.

I am looking forward to seeing you soon in Redwood Shores!

I met Jaisen Mathai at SCALE10x after seeing his UpSCALE talk in which he introduced the OpenPhoto project with 20 slides in five-minutes. In this interview, Mathai explains what inspired the ambitious project and his vision for where it will be by the end of the year.

Mozilla has released version 10 of its Firefox browser as part of its accelerated six-week build cycle, and has also included a pack of developer tools aimed at simplifying life for website operators.…...

The Linux Foundation has named Greg Kroah-Hartman as a fellow of the organization where he joins a small group that includes Linux creator Linus Torvalds. - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced that Greg Kroah-Hartman is joining the organization as a...

Pat Riehecky has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Scientific Linux 6.2, a distribution built from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 and enhanced with extra applications useful in academic environments: "Scientific Linux 6.2 Release Candidate 1 i386/x86_64 is now available for testing.....

The openSUSE artwork team has dream and needs your help. A new initiative seeks to collect information on how users customize and use their desktops. Then this data will be used to help design future openSUSE releases. Andres Silva explained, "It is not a matter of "I like KDE or Gnome better than others," but rather it is a way for our team to understand how much we tweak and change our...

Red Hat announced that it has extended the lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 from seven to 10 years to give users more flexibility in long-term operating system deployments. - Red Hat announced it has extended the production life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5...

Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel's stable branch and the Linux driver project, is leaving his position with SUSE to join the Linux Foundation in a full-time fellowship role. Kroah-Hartman will now have more time to oversee kernel development and work with the Linux community, while leaving aside the...

Stefano Fratepietro has announced the release of DEFT Linux 7, an Ubuntu-based distribution and live DVD containing a collection of tools for penetration testing and forensic analysis: "The DEFT team is pleased to announce the release of the stable version of DEFT Linux 7, a toolkit able to....

While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven't abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet...

The Mandriva saga continues as an external bid fails. But the company's COO says that financial circumstances mean the company still has some weeks to find a new solution...

Endian Firewall 2.5.1, an updated version of the Red Hat-based firewall distribution, has been released: "An update for Endian Firewall Community to version 2.5.1 is now available. This release introduces a number of new features. Connectivity - support for most modern UMTS/3G USB dongles. By adding new drivers....

Data centers are power-hungry, and Facebook's Oregon center in Crook County is no exception, using 28MW. While that's fairly standard, it has doubled the power use of the county.

When Mozilla adopted its six-week rapid development cycle in early 2011, backlash came from a number of angles — but the heaviest was from enterprise IT departments. In October, the browser maker formed a working group in order to sit down with corporate users and hash out a suitable support plan. The result is the Mozilla Extended Support Release (ESR) program, which is now up and running for Firefox, and is due to debut shortly for Thunderbird a well.

At this week's Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, another round of features were approved for the Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) release...

EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Cloud Database will cost the same as using the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)...

Color management has historically been a weak area for the Linux desktop, but the situation is rapidly improving. Support for desktop-wide color management is being facilitated by projects like KDE's Oyranos and the GNOME Color Manager.

Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year. "As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010.

The Debian project has put together new CD and DVD images that have all updates since the last release, in order to decrease the number of updates needed after a new installation...

Last year during my Open Government Data Camp keynote speech on The State of Open Data 2011 I mentioned how I thought the central challenge for open data was shifting from getting data open (still a big issue, but a battle that is starting to be won) to getting all...

The world of digital music is now dominated by lots of useful proprietary tools--with Apple's ruling the roost--but there are also many free open source tools and applications worth looking into. Of these, Rockbox, an open source firmware replacement for MP3 players from manufacturers ranging from Archos to iRiver to Apple, is easily one of the most popular. Lisa originally covered Rockbox in this post, and we covered it again here. Now, in an interview, several of Rockbox's developers are weighing in on its benefits, its user base and its future.  Rockbox has been around for over a decade, and especially if you have an older MP3 player that you would like to add functionality to, it can greatly improve your digital music experience. It's essentially like having...

If you don't like change, working in IT has to be a harrowing experience. That's particularly true in open source, where few stand on tradition and things move at breakneck pace. The latest change that has a few folks excited? Fedora's proposal to "move all to /usr." On the face, this might seem like a shocking departure from standards – but look a bit deeper and it seems to make sense.

After delivering benchmarks last week that were comparing the Intel Sandy Bridge performance of Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" vs. Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" when it came to the Sandy Bridge OpenGL graphics performance, here's a comparative look at the performance of Ubuntu 11.10 against Mac OS X 10.7.2 from...

Version 3 of the ownCloud personal cloud system has been announced. New features include a browser-based text editor, an integrated PDF viewer, a photo gallery application, an improved calendar application, and, inevitably, an application store. "The browser based text editor supports 35 programming languages for syntax highlighting, keyboard shortcuts, drag...

Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-10, a new stable version of the project's utility live CD designed for disk cloning tasks: "This release of Clonezilla Live (1.2.12-10) includes major enhancements and major bug fixes: the underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded, this release is....

Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn't like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you'll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects.

Post-PC era? Here we come: According to new data from NPD, tablet PC shipments are expected to grow from 72.7 million units in 2011 to 383.3 million units by 2017. For comparison purposes, worldwide PC shipments for 2011 were 352.8 million, after seeing a 6% decline in Q4. While those numbers are remarkable enough on their own, what’s really interesting is where much of the growth will come from: the emerging market. Emerging markets are expected to account for up to 46% of worldwide shipments by 2017, up from the 36% share in 2011. “The emerging market opportunity for tablets has been flying under the radar mainly because the device brands aren’t household names and there are concerns regarding the sustainability of the market,” says NPD Senior Analyst Richard Shim. But the...

With Amazon reporting fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow, the main attractions will be tablet figures and the effect on sales of e-books, music, video, and apps.

We've seen the Nook Tablet rooted before, but this has to be the easiest process out there. All you need is a 2GB SD card, a computer that runs Windows, and a Nook Tablet with tablet software version 1.4.1 or earlier.

BI vendor Pentaho is open sourcing a number of tools related to "big data" in its Kettle data-integration platform and has moved the project overall to the Apache 2.0 license, the company announced Tuesday.

Vim's syntax highlighting and color schemes can be a blessing, or a curse, depending on how they're configured. If you're a Vim user, let's take a little time to explore how you can make the most of Vim's color schemes.

All files previously stored in the Linux distribution's /bin/, /sbin/, /lib/ and /lib64/ directories will shortly be moved to equivalent sub-directories in /usr/...

Red Hat has established a GlusterFS Advisory Board to promote the technical development of the distributed file system.

There's still one week until the work will be officially announced, but the open-source "Lima" open-source graphics driver project has surfaced...

Version 0.10 of FFmpeg adds several new encoders and decoders, as well as new filters and tools. The latest stable release also closes 15 security holes...

The more I use AutoKey, the more I believe it to be an essential piece of software for the Linux desktop. If you happened to miss my last article about it, AutoKey is a system-wide service that allows you to easily set scripts to run when certain key combinations are pressed. AutoKey also lets you set text shortcuts for longer words or phrases.

With JSR 355, Oracle and the Java Community Process plan to create a central executive committee that will combine the current committees for Java SE/Java EE and Java ME development...

Linaro developers are nearly done with their milestone of upstream support for OpenGL ES 2.0 with Compiz, Nux, and Unity. This will allow for the Unity 3D desktop to work on more mobile devices and other cases where only GLES support is available...

Timothee Bessett, the id Software developer that was responsible for porting many of id Software's popular games like Doom 3 and Quake 4 to Linux, has resigned from the popular game company...

Use of Linux in the mobile/embedded space is exploding, and we find many companies are adopting the open source Yocto project to build custom embedded Linux systems. The project is hosting a free day of training on Yocto on Feb 14th as part of the Embedded Linux Conference. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn Yocto if you're a beginner or get more advanced if you are already familiar with the tool. Find out more about Yocto Developer Day. Yocto includes the BitBake build tool, a large set of customizable build metadata, the EGLIBC library, Eclipse-based graphical user interfaces for both the build system and an accompanying Application Development Toolkit that is automatically generated, and several other tools that bring some...

Systemd, Lennart Poettering's new init system that is taking the Linux world by storm, is all full of little tricks and treats. Today we will play the slow-boot blame game, and learn to how stop services so completely the poor things will never ever run again.

This morning I was reading a site that regularly covers free and open source software. To protect the guilty party (because I suspect the error was one of rushed writing rather than ignorance), I'll leave out the publication and author. However, I do want to surface the error. The author wrote about making sure that "copyrighted code" doesn't get into the Linux kernel. What?

Btrfs, the quite promising next-generation Linux file-system that's been in-development for years by Chris Mason and others, is about to take on a big role within Oracle's Enterprise Linux distribution...

A beta of Neo4J in the Heroku cloud is now available alongside the new 1.6 release of the NoSQL graph database. An enhanced query language and unique key-value support are among its improvements...

Version 7.4 of the GNU Debugger introduces new debugging commands, adds a new target and simulator, and brings various improvements to Python scripting...

Now that Mesa is beginning to catch-up with support for newer versions of OpenGL and the OpenGL performance is slowly improving, with more games and applications beginning to work on this open-source graphics driver stack as a result, the need for application workarounds is becoming more prevalent...

The Ubuntu Developer Week for the 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" cycle will take place from 31 January to 2 February 2012, and will include a number of online workshops with tutorials and hands-on sessions...

By September, Open webOS 1.0 will arrive with a standard Linux kernel, LevelDB database and an Apache 2.0 licence. HP has already released the core of the Enyo JavaScript framework...

The widespread internet blackout yesterday in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as...

If you could open one of the following data sets tomorrow, which one would you open and why?

Toorox 01.2012 GNOME was released on January 20. Toorox is a Gentoo-based binary distribution that installs additional software and updates from source. It ships with an easy and fast installer that results in a complete out-of-the-box system. According to the changelog, Toorox 01.2012 ships with Linux 3.1.6-gentoo, GNOME 3.2.1, GCC 4.5.3, Xorg-Server 1.11.3, and Firefox 9.0.1. Some other applications include GIMP, Envince, Deluge, Liferea, Empathy, LibreOffice 3.4.3, Cinelerra, and Audacity.

Sure, Linux is great for big organizations like Google, Facebook, and others, but what about small business? Take a look at PrintedArt. Founded in 2010, PrintedArt is an online shop that sells limited-editions of fine art photography. It now has three full-time and three part-time employees and eight sales representatives. According to President and CEO Klaus Sonnenleiter, Linux and open source play a number of roles in the company's success.

Canonical and the Ubuntu folks have taken a lot of risks in the Unity interface that ships with Ubuntu Linux. One of the things that the company has been leading towards is the Head-Up Display (HUD), a new tool for controlling applications that moves away from the traditional menu interface that debuted decades ago with the Xerox PARC GUI.

Version 4.8 of the KDE Software Compilation has been released and includes major changes to the platform and applications and includes new adaptive power management...

Texas Instruments announced a Linux-based evaluation module featuring the digital light processing technology from its DLP Pico Projectors. The DLP LightCrafter combines an ARM9-based, 300MHz DaVinci TMS320DM365 processor, a 20-lumen RGB LED light engine and projector, as well as TI's 0.3-inch, WVGA DLP chipset, enabling up to 4000 binary patterns...

Fragmentation allows variety among device makers, but can cause frustration for developers and lower satisfaction among end users.

Linux installation in 2012 is pretty simple – answer a few questions, then click Start and wait. But what if you could eliminate a lot of the waiting? That’s the promise of Clonezilla Server Edition, which can help you install servers with less effort, and the same, or better, results.

Portability is a huge advantage that Linux enjoys over most other desktop operating systems as most major distros work very well when installed to a flash drive. However, there are still machines in service that just won't play ball when it comes to USB booting. Fortunately, I found a nice...

Version 2.5 of GhostBSD is based on the recent 9.0 release of FreeBSD and, for the first time, is available with the lightweight LXDE desktop in addition to the standard GNOME version...

A NVIDIA Linux engineer is trying to work on code that could lead to official Optimus support under Linux, but there's a catch... And it falls outside of NVIDIA Corp as the fate of this multi-GPU notebook feature could now fall with the Linux kernel developers...

Google is betting that slow and steady will prove a winning strategy for its ChromeOS platform, and is reporting some successes for the system in the education sector.…...

ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, last saw a major update in February of 2011. That changed this morning when ALSA 1.0.25 was released, which is a big feature release...

A lot of things change in 10 years. Many of the Linux conferences we were going to in 2002 are no longer around, but the Southern California Linux Expo has not only survived – it's grown into a major event for anybody interested in Linux. Whether you're brand-new to Linux or using Linux to power cloud solutions, SCALE 10x had something for everybody.

HyperShop has begun selling a pocket-size, battery-powered adapter that turns a USB storage device into a wireless file server, sharing files with Wi-Fi-enabled devices including the Apple iPad and iPhone. The $100 CloudFTP runs Linux on a Texas Instruments ARM9-based processor, features a 132 x 32-pixel LCD display and powered...

If you haven't tried language translation technology in a few years, it's worth revisiting it. As we covered here, it's become much easier to automate multilingual websites, there are very useful translation programs for mobile phones that you can use to communicate in foreign languages on the fly, and open source machine translation tools are flourishing.

Version 7.4 of the GDB debugger is out. New features include a Renesas RL78 simulator, a number of Python scripting improvements, several new debugging commands and options, and more.

The agendas may be inchoate and the uprisings chaotic, but the message is clear: the established way of leading, ruling, governing, and managing is not working anymore.

I am a pretty terrible programmer. Anyone who has read my code can see that. Unfortunately, I tend to have lots of ideas about how we can use technology in different ways, hence why I write some code. Examples of this have included Lernid, Acire, RaccoonShow, and Jokosher.

The Stable channel update addresses a total of four vulnerabilities, all of which are rated as "high severity". The developers also note that a critical hole was fixed in the previous release but was not documented...

Thanks to recent advancements by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, the open-source Linux graphics driver not only supports more OpenGL 3.0 functionality than Apple's Intel graphics driver for Mac OS X, but the performance is more competitive. In some cases, the OpenGL performance is now superior under Linux with the open-source...

The new version of NTFS-3G + Ntfsprogs, the NTFS driver and tool collection accompanying many Linux distributions, includes a number of small improvements...

Mandriva's decision on whether to accept an acquisition offer or go into bankruptcy is deferred again...

Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Linux Mint project's fork of the GNOME Shell, has been released and the APIs and desktop interface have been declared fully stable...

The release notes for Hugin's latest update begin with the words "Hugin is more than just a panorama stitcher." That's been true for years, but only recently has the project made a concerted effort to emphasize the other photo magic that the application is capable of working. Better still, Hugin is making more and more of the process automatic, so aligning your images has never been easier.

A road-map has been published for openSUSE 12.2, which puts this next release out for official availability in July...

Desura, the Steam-like game distribution service that came natively to Linux last year, is now open-source...