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Around a year ago, a school in the southeast of England, Westcliff High School for Girls Academy (WHSG), began switching its student-facing computers to Linux, with KDE providing the desktop software. The school's Network Manager, Malcolm Moore, contacted us at the time. Now, a year on, he got in touch again to let us know how he and the students find life in a world without Windows.

Support for newer hardware input devices should be better with the in-development Linux 3.11 kernel.

Beyond the exciting x86 architecture changes that are always under the microscope for the Linux kernel, and lately the great ARM work, IBM has an interesting set of POWER architecture changes for Linux 3.11.

AMD has joined The Document Foundation's Advisory Board to take on a supporting role of accelerating LibreOffice in new ways.

Mozilla, the mission-based organization dedicated to keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands, today announced that the regional launches of Firefox OS smartphones will begin soon. Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica will release the first Firefox OS devices, the ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire and the ZTE Open, soon. Individual partners will announce specifics about launches in each market soon.

Everyone has data. It's always growing, and you should have ownership of everything that touches your data. You need to have the ability to see and make changes to the code managing your storage system. Having ownership of your data gives you control of your own destiny.

"Ten years ago, open source—notably Linux—was often labelled a ‘fad’ or destined for the ‘hobbyist’ market,” said Mark Bohannon, Vice President for Corporate Affairs & Global Public Policy at Red Hat. "Fast forward to today. Owing not only to the benefits of the technology, but also to the benefits of the collaborative innovation model, open source software has by any measure become mainstream and vital to enterprise and government IT architecture."

Chinese Android development firm Borqs announced an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system based on Android 4.1. The Borqs Smart Vehicle Mounted Terminal incorporates navigation technology from Beidou and a wireless data cloud from TD-LTE, and supports applications including navigation, multimedia, and video calling.

E-con Systems has launched a 5-megapixel 1080p autofocus camera board, designed to integrate with a Linux- and Android-friendly $199 Boundary Devices development board for Freescale’s quad-core i.MX6 system-on-chip. E-con’s camera board connects to Boundary’s i.MX6 single-board computer via a CSI-2 MIPI interface, and is supplied with a V4L2-compliant Linux driver and source.

Internet security is almost an oxymoron, as a computer connected to the Internet is the least secure of machines. However, many organizations have found ways to protect the internal network from Internet attacks as well as ensure that employees are not violating the Internet use policy. One of those solutions is a proxy server, which sits between the client computer and the Internet, intercepting packets and ensuring a higher level of security for the network than is otherwise possible.

While we have known the VIA DRM/KMS driver would likely not be merged for Linux 3.11, the Armada DRM ARM driver also isn't going to be merged for this next kernel release. The VIA DRM driver isn't yet ready with the patches going through review and needing to make some adjustments, which James Simmons still appears committed to seeing through and having his Direct Rendering Manager driver make it into the mainline tree.

When our house was built a few years ago (after our house fire), one of the things I wanted was a house wired for Ethernet connectivity. Unfortunately, the contractor must not have realized that running CAT5e isn't the same as running power lines. Although my house did in fact have RJ-45 jacks in a few rooms, opening the wall panel exposed approximately three inches of untwisted wire crammed into the wall jack. Even worse, they stapled, yes stapled, the CAT3 cable to the wall studs.

In the past few days I delivered X.Org vs. XMir Ubuntu Unity benchmarks on Intel hardware and Nouveau / NVIDIA. The benchmarking also found that 2D was also slower with XMir than simply running an X.Org Server. Benchmarks now carried out of X.Org vs. XWayland show that the Wayland-based equivalent is generally faster, at least for 2D operations.

KDE Commit-Digest: the latest updates and changes.

Our latest Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" Linux benchmarks come in the form of comparing the performance of Ubuntu 13.04, an Ubuntu 13.10 development snapshot, and Fedora 19.

Manjaro Linux is a distribution that makes it very easy to play with Arch. Manjaro is to Arch as Sabayon or Calculate Linux is to Gentoo. Manjaro makes it very easy to deploy an Arch-based desktop using Xfce and other lightweight components, a theme that's continuing with their upcoming 0.8.7 release.

Citrix has announced this week that XenServer 6.2 is now fully open-source software. Citrix has made XenServer 6.2 available to all users as a free open-source virtualization platform, beyond just the Xen hypervisor that has been apart of the Linux kernel and one of the leading Linux virtualization systems aside from Linux KVM.

One of the shining lights of the world of Unix, retired CU professor Evi Nemeth, is among a group of sailors missing at sea near New Zealand. The author of system administration tomes covering both Unix and Linux – and, incidentally a mathematician of sufficient quality to identify problems with Diffie-Helman encryption – has spent much of her retirement sailing.

When you think about it, the idea behind “view source” is incredible. Not only can you, with the click of a button, instantly reveal a site’s code; you can copy, paste, tweak and make that code into something all your own. In many ways, it’s this concept that helped make the Internet such a revolutionary tool in the first place. And it’s this idea that lives at the heart of an open source web culture.

On Friday I delivered the first benchmarks of Ubuntu's Unity desktop running on XMir -- the X.Org Server compatibility layer for talking to the Mir Display Server. Those benchmarks showered there was noticeable performance overhead to running XMir with Intel's graphics driver. Later benchmarks showed XMir 2D performance was also negatively affected. In this article are benchmarks looking at the XMir performance with the Nouveau driver.