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Embedded board-maker Seco has rounded out a series of three SODIMM-like COMs (computer-on-modules) built to µQseven form-factor specifications. They’re based on three different ARM-powered system-on-chip (SoC) processors, from Nvidia, Freescale, and TI.

In a meeting of the Ubuntu Technical Board last night, the technical leadership of Canonical's Linux distribution decided to halve the support time for non-LTS releases to nine months. At the same time, the developers want to make it easier for users of the distribution to get up-to-date packages on a regular basis without the need to perform explicit upgrades of the whole distribution. Attending the meeting, Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson and Stéphane Graber unanimously agreed on these points and also clearly voted against moving Ubuntu into a rolling release model. The changes will be implemented in the maintenance schedule starting with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 ("Raring Ringtail") on 25 April.

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux. On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known for much different reasons.

A project to develop a low-cost ARM Cortex A15-based single-board computer (SBC) reportedly has been abandoned. Initially named “ARMBRIX Zero,” the $145 board got as far as its prototype debug phase when the company behind it abruptly shuttered its doors.

Digikam has released a new version of their popular photo management software. Exciting new features and plug-ins are now available for users to try. Unfortunately 3.1 has also just been released, though the changes are not as significant. I still wanted to look back to make sure nothing important was overlooked. Here I will investigate some of the most important changes offered with the Digikam 3.0 release.

A lot of the software packages I've covered in recent articles have been focused strictly on doing computations on your machine, separate from the real world. So in this article, I explore how to use your computer to design something you can build and use in the real world: your own model rocket. Let's take a look at the OpenRocket utility and see how it can help you design your own rockets. OpenRocket even can run simulations on your designs to show how they should behave in flight.

Wikimedia has activated Lua-based templating on several of its sites including English Wikipedia. Driven by a new MediaWiki extension called Scribunto which allows scripting languages to be embedded in MediaWiki, it is hoped that the Lua templating will help improve performance where editors take advantage of its capabilities.

If you've followed Google for any length of time, you already know that the company has donated many open source projects and leverages a lot of open source code internally. But did you know that Google has a dedicated video channel for information on open source topics? If you haven't explored it, it's worth visiting, found here. Here is more on what's available there, and other good open source resources from Google.

Ubuntu publicly announced its plan for the future of its Unity graphical shell on March 4, a plan that includes a new compositing window manager designed to run on the distribution's device platforms as well as on desktop systems. The plan will reimplement the Unity shell in Qt and replace Compiz with a new display stack called Mir that will incorporate a compositor, input manager, and several other pieces. Mir is not designed to use the Wayland display protocol (although the Ubuntu specification suggests it could be added later), a decision that raised the ire of developers in several other projects.

Following the GNOME developers' decision to focus on porting their desktop environment to the Wayland display server, the KDE project has also indicated that it will go ahead with a Wayland port of its own project. Currently, the developers are debating which display manager will be used in the port. KDM, the display manager the project is using currently, has apparently already been discounted in favour of LightDM or possibly the QML-based SDDM.

Hashicorp has announced Vagrant 1.1 and, as the result of adding functionality that allows it to control virtual machines other than VirtualBox, a commercial "provider" for VMware Fusion. Vagrant is a command line system for configuring and provisioning virtual machines from the command line, with created VMs being prepared with key-based SSH authentication, Ruby, RubyGems, Chef, and Puppet. The latter two packages then make it easy to deploy applications to the provisioned VM. The entire configuration is encapsulated in a single Vagrantfile making it easy for developers to replicate setups. Initially, Vagrant was designed for VirtualBox only, but the developers set out in August 2012 to allow it to work with other platforms.

The automotive industry is undergoing a major technological shift and Jaguar Land Rover is at the forefront. The UK-based JLR has embraced Linux as the operating system underlying its next generation In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. The company has also taken a leadership role in advocating for open source development within the automotive industry.

Etherpad Lite was recently security audited by Mozilla. The developers say the result of that audit was an urgent effort from them to fix "gaping loopholes" in the collaborative editor's security and, in turn, release version 1.2.9 of Etherpad Lite. Issues addressed include a major security problem where an attacker could submit content as another user and a problem with unescaped user input.

If you need evidence of the spread of interest in open source, look to the history of SXSW Interactive schedules. Just between this year and last, the number of talks tagged with "open source" grew from 17 to 26, and that doesn't include the growth in relevant book readings, meetups, sponsors, and parties. Even one of this year's keynotes was delivered by Julie Uhrman, founder and CEO of OUYA.

Compiler benchmarks at Phoronix commonly look at the performance of resulting binaries while less of a focus is the compilation time and binary sizes. However, a developer has carried out GCC benchmarks of the compilation times and binary sizes in different scenarios for GCC releases going from GCC 4.2 to the upcoming GCC 4.8.

Next month’s Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) to be held April 22-25 in San Jose, Calif. will offer embedded developers a sumptuous menu of embedded Linux, Android, and open source session topics. ESC, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, is now part of UBM’s big Design West show.

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item. This week, Kali Linux is the new BackTrack, a backdoor in TP-Link routers, VP8 could become an MPEG standard, two new official Ubuntu derivatives, open source at CeBIT, and openSUSE 12.3 reviewed.

The true potential of collaborative initiatives around the world is yet to be known. However, a sneak preview will take place on March 20, when hundreds of communities, networks, and institutions from widely diverse backgrounds and hailing from over 20 countries get together and take part in a global Wikisprint. The goal of this one-day sprint, sponsored by the P2P Foundation, is to gather as many people as possible from different backgrounds and geographic areas, to map open projects and initiatives that are related to the commons and new paradigms of organization happening all over the world. 

In this guest column, Daniel Mandell, a research associate at market analyst firm VDC Research, examines Canonical’s recent efforts to morph Ubuntu into a smartphone operating system. Given the wild success of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS, and the mixed success of Limo, Meego, OpenMoko, WebOS, and other earlier attempts, how likely is it that a Ubuntu smartphone OS can successfully gain a foothold in the smartphone market?

A kickstarter project aimed at creating a “truly open source” Linux-based video game handheld recently achieved nearly double its funding goal. Game Console Worldwide (GCW), the enterprise formed to build and market the GCW Zero game console, says its preparing to mass-produce the device.