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Arduboy, a new pocket-sized 8-bit game device, has ignited a firestorm of interest on Kickstarter. With 27 days to go, the campaign already has drawn contributions of more than eight times its modest $25k goal. The rapid funding response could spark a miniature retro revolution. The handheld Arduboy...

C.H.I.P., a Linux-based mini-PC priced at just $9, is receiving an overwhelming response on Kickstarter. Launched last Thursday with a funding goal of $50,000, it has chalked up more than 16,000 backers who have shelled out upwards of $815,000. The project still has 25 days to go. The tiny open sour...

Linux GNOME desktop distros are a dime a dozen. What makes Parsix a shinier dime than many of the others is how the tweaking of the GNOME desktop makes this distro such a pleasure to use. Dubbed Nestor, Parsix 7 is wrapped around Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy 7.0. The project's goal is to provide...

Open sourcing the code for Microsoft Windows is "definitely possible," Microsoft engineer Mark Russinovich reportedly said last week during a panel discussion at ChefConf. The company isn't acknowledging any movement in that direction as yet, but Russinovich's remarks are a strong indication that th...

Turla, a Trojan that has infected hundreds of 32- and 64-bit Windows computers at government institutions, embassies, military installations, educational institutions, and research and pharmaceutical companies over the years, has been found on Linux systems, Kaspersky Lab reported. The company has d...

The volunteers who developed Tails, the open source operating system used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, this week released v1.0. This is the 36th stable release of the OS since the first public version, then called "Amnesia," was released in June 2009. Various security and bug fixes have been i...

When Saul Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals more than four decades ago, the world was a very different place than it is today. Protests and demonstrations were among the most common tactics for bringing about social change, and they were used on such a broad scale that they helped define the...

One lesson that's easy to learn if you've been through any natural disaster is that you shouldn't rely on classic means of communications like land lines, cellphones or Internet. Capacity gets challenged; infrastructure gets destroyed. Where I live, in brush-fire and earthquake-prone Southern Califo...

Ubuntu's latest desktop OS release, Ubuntu 13.10, is more of a plain-Jane release than its "Saucy Salamander" nickname might otherwise suggest. This release comes six months after the Raring Ringtail version, which was also a bit of a yawner in terms of offering any must-have-the-upgrade enthusiasm....

The trick to designing an all-purpose music player is to make it work the way you want. The Tomahawk Music Player performs that trick very well. It could well be a better listening choice than any other cross-platform music player application. It runs on a variety of Linux distros, Microsoft Windows...

In a world of mostly proprietary video platform developers, success for an open source startup requires very sharp cutting-edge technology. For Kaltura, part of the secret has been making sure that competitive edge is never dulled by settling for being just good enough. The company's management phil...

Big Data and open source software may be the next great unholy alliance in computing's current promised land, but open source is a broken business model that needs a better vehicle for supporting projects such as programming suites that build database applications. So argues Chris Wensel, founder an...

Does it make good business sense to migrate corporate database software from costly proprietary platforms to free open source solutions or low-cost commercial open source replacements? The answer is a no-brainer, said EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian. Founded in 2004, EnterpriseDB began on a quest to di...

The Linux desktop has an impressive list of good music playing apps, so choosing a favorite title is a difficult task. The decision almost always comes down to personal taste rather than feature sets or GUI. Exaile ranks high on my player list for what it does not have. It spares me having to traips...

Canonical has released Ubuntu 13.04, also known as "Raring Ringtail," on the desktop. However, the release failed to thrill many reviewers, whose complaints included the point that Canonical had left out several features, including privacy protection and the Windows-based Ubuntu Installer. "In the r...

Unless you are an atypical Linux user, you tend to accept the default apps featured in your distro of choice. After all, if what you use works just fine, why scavenge around for a replacement? If saying yes to that question means you miss out on adding the Listen audio player to your desktop tools, ...

MyNotex is a handy note-taking app that helps you rat-pack all of your scraps of information and images into a searchable database. It is easy to use and takes almost no time to learn. MyNotex is a bit different from traditional tree-form note-taking systems. It handles more than plain text notation...

Samsung has rolled out the first official Android 4.1 Jelly Bean updates for its Galaxy S III smartphone. Customers in Poland are reportedly getting the update first. Samsung will apparently roll out the update to customers in other countries later this month. A slew of Android devices that are re...

The developers of the now-notorious Flame malware used command and control servers running the 64-bit version of Debian and the OpenVz virtualization technology in their work. They wrote most of the server code in PHP, researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Symantec have found during continuing investigat...

HP brought Enyo -- the open source object-oriented JavaScript framework for webOS -- out of beta this week, six months after the ill-fated operating system was contributed to the open source community. Enyo 2.0 now has a community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform user interface widgets, ...