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In a move that it said is designed to “ensure computer security.” the Chinese government has banned Windows 8 from being installed on all government desktop, notebook and tablet computers. And as far as the Chinese government is concerned, any other OS will do. That, people, is a serious blow to Windows (8) in China.

The third alpha of what will become GhostBSD 4.0 was released a few days ago. To see how far the distribution has come since the 2.5 edition, I downloaded and installed it from a DVD image in a virtualenvironment. I’m still not terribly impressed, though I realize the this is only a third alpha release.

While many are still trying to figure out Cloud Computing, here comes a rival concept – Fog Computing. It’s computing that takes place at the edge of the network, closer to home. That is, computing that takes place on the devices that are nearest to you – your smartphone and other connected devices that are around you. The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), or Internet of Everything (IoE).

Fog Computing is not a new concept. Like Cloud Computing, it’s just a marketing buzzword for something that’s already taking place.

The list of new features for both desktops is impressive and I think fans of Linux Mint will love Qiana even more than previous versions. While we await the release of the stable version, which should be available in about a month, here are several screenshots from test installations I set up yesterday.

Here’s the latest from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the battle to keep DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) out of the Web. This is case of the forces of good being less powerful than the forces of evil. And knowing how this things go, I don’t see how this can be reversed.

After playing with the test ISO image that was made available, I can confirm that the “core desktop experience” of Plasma Next will indeed be no different from that of the current KDE workspace. The desktop effects will, however, be much better and smoother.

The 22-member Faculty Council voted 20 in favor, with 1 against and 1 absention. From the announcement, the award was carefully evaluated by an international honorary doctoral committee, which included Prof. Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

One of the software applications that became available on the recently-released ROSA Desktop Fresh R3 is the first beta edition of ROSA Software Center, which will replace the current graphical software management suite in the next edition of the distribution.

If you are like me and want to upgrade you copy of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, this post shows what you need to do. If you have an updated installation of Ubuntu 12.04, it should really be Ubuntu 12.04.4.

Privacy Badger is a new tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation designed to stop creepy online tracking.

It’s an extension for Firefox and Chrome that “automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them.”

On my new installation, I found four of those default settings that when modified, made using Unity, the Ubuntu desktop, a little bit more user-friendly.

The distribution uses a custom desktop environment called Deepin Desktop Environment and it’s getting a face lift for Linux Deepin 2014, which will be the next stable edition.

This post shows how to do just that - install the latest release - Wifislax 4.8 - on a hard drive.

Wifislax has a simple installer that supports running a KDE or Xfce Live desktop. For this tutorial, I'll be installing the KDE desktop, though the same process can be used to install the Xfce desktop.

When I decided to use NodeBB as the forum application for this website, I wasn't aware that Varnish and WebSocket don't play nice by default, so Varnish has to be explicitly configured to handle WebSocket traffic. But it took several frustrating days before I finally figured out that Varnish was the source of the problems and errors I was dealing with.

That claim turns out to be false, because on all my test installations of Linpus Lite 2.1 on real hardware and in a virtual environment, attempting to log into the new systems was the most difficult time I’ve ever had with any login window. I just could not log in using the password I specified for the user during the installation process.

The Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6-inch and Chromebook 2 13.3-inch models are the company’s latest additions to its line of Chromebook computers. And they are powered by the Exynos 5 Octa processor.

Prominent features of this release are support (in the installer) for computers with UEFI firmware and for GPT partitions. But the installer, as you will read in the next section, is the weakest part of this distribution, a problem it shares with most distributions that are based on Debian.

Most of the hacked routers have the following common features: Owners who didn’t know how to configure their routers, insecure default settings (factory-default passwords was not an issue), backdoors in firmware, firmware version vulnerable to a known Cross-Site Request Forgery CSRF) technique, and graphical user interfaces accessible from the Internet.

Any attempt to break open the casing of the device would trigger functions that would delete the data and software contained within the device and make the device inoperable.

A key feature that Manjaro and the other desktop distributions that are based on Arch Linux bring to the table is a point-and-click, user-friendly installation program. Another are user-friendly graphical package managers. Those are the type of programs I’m always looking for on any desktop distribution.