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The Linux community may not exactly be known for its glitzy launch events, but last week saw one the likes of which has rarely -- if ever -- been seen in these parts before. Splashier even than the blogosphere's New Year's Eve festivities, most agreed, the Ubuntu for phones announcement on Wednesday might well have been a Cupertino production, so loud were the trumpets and fanfare.

In its latest release, e(fx)clipse's version number has been bumped from 0.1.1, as released in September 2012, to 0.8.0 to reflect the IDE for JavaFX's maturity and stability. The system provides an Eclipse-based development environment, tools, and runtime for JavaFX 2.x and later as a framework for building rich client applications.

I spoke with John Nicols at MakerPlane about their passionate team of contributors from all over the world who are designing and building a full-sized two seat Light Sport Aircraft. Their mission is to "create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them."

Could one radio be all you ever need for data, cellular calls, wifi and more? Software defined radio holds that promise. Andrew Back looks at how free software is one of the enablers in helping to put the technology into the hands of consumers.

In surprising news from jolly old England, Canonical announces that Ubuntu has developed an Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. We'll be able to switch out Android for Ubuntu on many existing devices. The company also hopes that manufactures will ship devices with it pre-installed.

Charles H Schulz has announced, on behalf of the Mandriva community, that the submission to create the non-profit OpenMandriva Association as an NGO under French law (Association de loi 1901) has been approved by the relevant authorities. With this, the organisation governing the development of the Mandriva Linux distribution "is now legally independent and fully autonomous," according to Schulz.

Could one radio be all you ever need for data, cellular calls, wifi and more? Software defined radio holds that promise. Andrew Back looks at how free software is one of the enablers in helping to put the technology into the hands of consumers

“Software Wars” is an in-development documentary by Keith Curtis, based on his 2009 book of the same name. It’s a look at how free and open source software can make our world a better place, and the possibilities that are available to us by abandoning closed source proprietary systems and working together towards an open technological society:

A few months ago, Ars took a look at how cars are getting smarter, mainly in the aid of fuel efficiency and safety. All that technology stuffed under the hood creates data, and where there’s data, there are nerds eager to analyze it.

Well another holiday season has come and gone, leaving more than a few jangled nerves and expanded waistlines in its wake. Holiday pressures are bad enough by themselves, of course, but Canonical's splashy and yet profoundly confusing Wednesday announcement so soon afterward hasn't exactly helped.

Cassandra, the distributed, column-oriented NoSQL database, has been updated to version 1.2, says the Apache Software Foundation. Version 1.2 of Cassandra sees the official release of CQL3, which was introduced in beta in April 2012's Cassandra 1.1 release. CQL is the modelling and query language for Cassandra that borrows, syntactically, from SQL to offer a more familiar database environment for developers. CQL3 allows for multi-column primary keys and many other changes, which are now established.

First things first: The SCALE Team wishes everyone a happy and prosperous 2013 as we head toward the first major Linux/FOSS event of the year in North America, SCALE 11X. Without further delay, the first of many SCALE 11X announcements for 2013..

The F# Software Foundation, an organisation of independent developers and companies, was recently created to promote Microsoft's F# functional programming language. The foundation is independent of Microsoft Research, whose researchers are the main developers of the Apache-licensed language.

Subtitle Editor offers an impressive package of features. Perhaps two of the most useful for working with subtitles are the built-in video player and the ability to send the title displays to external players from the Preview menu. The built-in video player is based on GStreamer and is integrated into the main window.

If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was or if they had heard of Koha, I heard "no" a lot more than I do now. Now, people call me up and ask me to come to their libraries to speak about open source and help them find the right products for their library. Now, I hardly ever hear, "We can’t pick open source because it’s too immature." Instead people contact me to ask what they have to do to get their hands on the latest and greatest release of Koha. It’s because of these changes that I’m seeing in the library professionals I meet that I proclaim 2012 the year of open source in libraries!

KDE's photo management software, DigiKam, is preparing for the final release of version 3.0. DigiKam 3.0 introduces many changes and released this weekend was the 3.0 release candidate as a preview version...

There was supposed to be an update to Sauerbraten "Cube 2" in November, but that didn't happen in November or December. Fortunately, the major update to this long-standing open-source first person shooter is still forthcoming...

It's a new year, with new opportunities for the open source way to change and innovate life, education, government, business, health, and law. For each of us as individuals, 2013 is a chance to resolve to be more open. Check out these ways to start this New Year's resolution off right, and in the comments below tell us how you plan to practice openness.

Welcome back to 1995! Not. Although the open-source Haiku operating system is based on the older BeOS, a long-defunct operating system, the Haiku developers are keeping their project up with the times. Today I’m going to give you a screenshot tour of this unique OS.

Welcome to The H's look back at 2012. We've broken down the events of the year by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say "Meh". From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source software to the worst mis-steps in the community.