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Bloomberg has become the first major corporate backer of the Ubuntu Edge, pledging $80,000 towards the project to build a crowdfunded smartphone, but this is unlikely to be enough to help Canonical reach its ambitious funding goal of $32 million (£20.8m). Canonical says the pledge is a huge boost for the company and other backers who want to get their hands on the world’s first “truly converged computing device”, but at the time of writing, the Ubuntu Edge has achieved just $8,544,097 of its target with just 14 days of fund raising left. Bloomberg has signed up for the ‘Enterprise...

In the latest Top500 supercomputer rankings, 476 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers, 95.2 percent, in the world run Linux. Linux has ruled supercomputing for years. But, it wasn't always that way.First Unix, and now Linux for the last few years, has ruled supercomputing.When the first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was just gathering steam. Indeed, in 1993, the first successful Linux distributions, Slackware and Debian were only just getting off the ground.What happened next, as reported in The Linux Foundation's forthcoming report, 20 years of Top500.org Supercomputer Data Links Linux With Advances in Computing Performance, was that...

In the wake of the recent revelations that America's National Security Agency is spying on all and sundry, is it time for the Linux community to take another good, hard look at the NSA-developed Security Enhanced Linux?The NSA's Security Enhanced Linux comprises a kernel patch to add security features, and patches to applications to allow them to determine the security domain in which to run processes.The code was initially developed by the NSA and is under the GPLv2, the same licence as the kernel. Numerous individuals and companies have made contributions to the project.Recently, Cyanogenmod, one of the more popular...

The New Zealand authorities have formally called off the search for the sailing cruiser Nina, and say its seven-person crew, which includes Evi Nemeth who for the last 30 years has written the system administration handbooks for Unix and Linux, is now presumed lost at sea. Nemeth was sailing off the western coast of New Zealand in the missing 21-metre vintage wooden schooner with its owner David Dyche, 58; his wife, Rosemary, 60, and their son David, 17; Kyle Jackson, 27; Danielle Wright, 18, and Briton Matthew Wootton, 35. The boat was last heard from on June 4, when Nemeth...

The June 2013 Top500 supercomputer list is in, and 476 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux. Whether you measure supercomputing by number of systems or overall performance, Linux rules. (Image: Top500)Is that good enough for you? While Linux fans and critics obsess about Linux's failure to sweep Windows off the desktop, they're ignoring that Linux is winning everywhere else, and that when it comes to the highest of high-end computing, Linux rules.Driving the point home, the top 10 fastest supercomputers all run Linux of one sort or the other. You have to go the way...

One of the most amazing things about Linux is how versatile it is. Let's face it - Windows and MacOS X are...boring. They look exactly how they look. When it comes to making your computer look and behave however you like, Linux is king. Let's take a stroll through some truly interesting, and beautiful, Linux Desktop Environments - the ones that many of us have never even seen.xmonad xmonad (all lower case) is a tiling window manager built in the Haskell programming language (which is interesting enough to qualify for inclusion in this list). So what is a “tiling...

"Computers aboard the International Space Station are to be switched from Windows XP to the Linux operating system in an attempt to improve stability and reliability.

Red Hat is renaming and rebuilding its open source JBoss application server. The new name is WildFly and with it will come a faster and more transparent development process. Ever since Red Hat acquired JBoss in April of 2006 for $350 million, there has been both an open source JBoss Application Server (AS) and a commercial JBoss Application Platform. After seven years of being in the market with those two technologies, Red Hat became concerned that there was some confusion about the two products and their relationship with each other. "The issue was that the JBoss AS naming was close...

Foxconn Signs License Agreement with Microsoft to Make Google Android- and Chrome-Based Devices.Microsoft and Foxconn Sign Patent Agreement For Android and Chrome DevicesMicrosoft Corp. and Hon Hai, the parent company of Foxconn, the world’s largest contract maker of electronics, signed a worldwide patent licensing agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for devices running the Android and Chrome OS, including smartphones, tablets and televisions.

Chip-company Adapteva announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, that they've built their first Parallella parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing, and that they'll be sending them to their 6,300 Kickstarter supporters and other customers by this summer. Say hi to Parallella, the $99 Linux-powered supercomputer. (Image: The Linux Foundation) Linux has long been the number one supercomputer operating system. But while you could build your own Linux supercomputer using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, it wouldn't be terribly fast. You needed hardware that could support massively parallel computing — the cornerstone of modern supercomputing. What Adapteva has...

Takeaway: Is the Linux desktop really a “mess” as some pundits call it? Jack Wallen takes issue with this claim and explains why he thinks the desktop is getting a bad rap. It seems nearly every pundit, every mouthpiece on the planet has decided that the Linux desktop is a “mess.” This “downfall” of the Linux desktop started with GNOME 3 and seemed to gain more momentum with Ubuntu Unity. I have a theory — and an idea for a fix.Linux is all about choice. It’s always been that way; from the earliest inception of the desktop, the Linux community...

Steve McIntyre and the Linaro Enterprise Group recently analyzed Ubuntu and Fedora software packages to see what software was still relying upon hand-written Assembly code. This was done to see how much real Assembly is being used, to see what the code was used for, and whether it was worth porting to 64-bit ARM / AArch64 / ARMv8. Their findings found that most software doesn't need porting for 64-bit ARM but that "most software in the typical Linux distribution does not contain any assembly." For Ubuntu 13.04, only about 6% of the packages contained any Assembly code. With packages found...

The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use. "Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL [ZFS on Linux] is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers," developer Brian Behlendorf wrote in a mailing list post on Wednesday. ZFS is a combined filesystem and volume manager for Unix-like operating systems, originally developed by Sun Microsystems for its Solaris OS in the early 2000s. The main features that set ZFS apart from many competing filesystems are...

The lawyer who has filed a complaint with the European Commission against secure boot in Windows 8 on  behalf of some 8000 Linux users in Spain says the complaint takes "an user and developer perspective, it is an unprecedented approach to the problem of monopoly in operating systems in Europe"."I think that Hispalinux is likely to show that Microsoft is engaged in additional anticompetitive acts that were not conclusively determined in the 1998 European Commission investigation," José Maria Lancho (pictured above) told iTWire.Hispalinux is the organisation on whose behalf Lancho has filed the complaint; according to him, it is a...

Have you been looking for a job, or extra work on the side, and getting ever more frustrated even though the job market is turning up? While the market is improving, it's still a tough environment out there, especially for college graduates who have little experience on their resumes. The good news is that a number of recent surveys and studies show that open source skills are in increasing demand at many organizations. In the latest example of these reports, Dice.com and The Linux Foundation surveyed more than 850 global hiring managers and 2,600 Linux professionals, finding that Linux skills,...

Gnome project cofounder and current Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza says he's done wrestling with Linux on the desktop, and that he now uses Apple kit exclusively for all of his workstation needs. De Icaza is well known in the open source community for developing a number of client-side technologies for Linux, including the Midnight Commander file shell, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Mono project. But in a blog post on Tuesday, de Icaza wrote that not only does he no longer use Linux for his day-to-day computing needs, but he hasn't actually booted his Linux workstation since October...

A rift may be forming between Piston Console maker Xi3 and Valve. A partially transparent veil of secrecy hangs over Xi3's pint-sized Piston Console. When first unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, some surmised it was the official Steam Box, though Xi3 never came out and said it. And now that Xi3 is taking pre-orders, there's still no mention of it being a Steam Box, though it's clearly intended for living room gaming using Steam's Big Picture mode. Xi3 released a statement today that adds a little insight into its relationship with Valve, and also hints...

Page 1 of 7After spending the better part of the past week running continuous open-source Linux benchmarks on the Exynos5-powered Google Nexus 10, the first extensive benchmark results for the Nexus 10 tablet running the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are now available. This performance comparison from Ubuntu on the dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 powered device is compared to numerous other ARMv7 and x86 devices. One of the interesting findings from this new round of ARM Linux testing is that the Google Nexus with its dual-core ARM SoC is competitive with AMD's first-generation Phenom Quad-Core processor for some demanding workloads.

Linaro to Deliver Initial Linux Builds for ARM Servers in 1H 2013 Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced the formation of the Linaro Networking Group (LNG) with twelve founding member companies including AppliedMicro, ARM, Enea, Freescale, LSI, MontaVista, Nokia Siemens Networks and Texas Instruments (TI) at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC).With ARM-based SoCs at the heart of the transformation occurring in cloud and mobile infrastructure applications such as switching, routing, base-stations and security, Linaro’s members are collaborating on fundamental software platforms to enable rapid deployment of new services across a range...

Valve Moves a Step Closer to Steam Box, Releases Steam for Ubuntu Valve Software, the owner of Steam video game distributing system, on Thursday announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. The launch of the Steam client for Canonical’s Ubuntu moves Valve a step closer to creation its own Linux-based low-cost personal computers for gaming. What remains to be seen is how well will titles developed with Windows in mind work under different OS."The introduction of Steam to Ubuntu demonstrates growing demand for open systems from gamers and game developers. We expect a growing number of game developers...