If you're curious about loading up the KDE Plasma Active desktop on your Google Nexus 7, here's the state of KDE in the mobile space...

Dot Categories: DeveloperIn this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

The ALSA SoC (ASoC) layer will see a number of new improvements and also a new sound driver within the Linux 3.9 kernel...

R provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques, including linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, and others.

As I wrote more than 2 years ago, the network tools (often referred as net-tools) ifconfig, netstat and route that should be familiar to anyone that has worked with a terminal, have been deprecated in favour of the iproute2 suite from some years. iproute2 is intended to replace this entire suite of legacy Unix networking tools that were previously used for the tasks of configuring network interfaces, routing tables, and managing the ARP table, but which have not been developed since 2001. You can find some examples of the usage of the iproute commands on my articles about:

The game engine powering Asylum went open source two days ago. It has been designed with adventure games in mind and it’s really easy to use.

The future of open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the open science community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an Introduction to Open Science. The actual build will take place during a hackathon-style "sprint" event on Open Data Day on Saturday, February 23 and will serve as a launch course for the School of Open during Open Education Week (March 11-15).

The Web is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the power of openness, alongside free software, which not coincidentally runs most of it and the rest of the Internet. At the heart of that openness lies HTML, a completely open way of sharing information. So what would be a really stupid thing you could do to try to throttle that openness and innovation? Why, yes: adding DRM to HTML so that you can lock down Web page elements:

The Python programming language has been around for more than two decades, but today it is fighting for its name in Europe. The Python Software Foundation's chairman yesterday said the Python trademark is "at risk in Europe" because a cloud server and storage company that also uses the name Python is trying to get ownership of the mark. In a blog post, Foundation Chairman Van Lindberg (who is also an IP and open source lawyer) asked community members for help, both financially and by supplying material that might help the Foundation bolster its claim to the trademark.

With Steam officially being released for Linux I took some time out this evening to run a few benchmarks on my Ubuntu 12.04 based Bodhi system to see how a few of the different modern Linux desktops compare in terms of OpenGL performance with the source engine. KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Unity and E17 are compared.

HP is reportedly working on a series of Android devices, the first of which could be a high-end tablet powered by Nvidia's Tegra 4 processor. The move is a sensitive one for HP, which tried to crack the mobile market in 2010 by purchasing Palm for $1.2 billion, but saw that investment go down the drain.

A relatively new name in the tablet-space is PengPod, made by Peacock Imports, a Florida, US-based outfit. The PengPod tablet runs Linux on ARM/Allwinner SoC hardware.

OpenShift logo The new version 1.1 of Red Hat's OpenShift Enterprise brings some updates and improvements to the Platform-as-a-Service system. The core innovation of OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 is a move from the command-line tooling of OpenShift 1.0 to a more developer- and operator-friendly "developer console" for application deployment and management. Further details of the changes in 1.1 are available in the release notes.

For anyone who works in a company that has an office in a EU Community member state, we need your help. There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark the use of the term "Python" for all software, services, servers... pretty much anything having to do with a computer. Specifically, it is the company that got a hold on the python.co.uk domain 13 years ago. At that time we weren't looking a lot at trademark issues, and so we didn't get that domain.

Aside from a lot of other exciting DRM driver happenings for the Linux 3.9 kernel, it looks like the DRM "PRIME Helpers" that were conceived by NVIDIA to help them support DMA_BUF in their binary driver will be merged...

WebRTC's video/audio chat protocol for the web covers many things, but what it doesn't cover is peer-to-peer connections, a deficiency that PeerJS is setting out to remedy

Ubuntu Linux for the smartphone is taking a big step forward. The developer preview will be available next week for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones

Anyone with an iPhone probably is familiar with the AirVideoapplication. Basically, it's the combination of a server app that runs onyour Windows or OS X machine, and it serves video over the network to anAirVideo application on your phone. It's extremely popular, and for agood reason—it works amazingly well.

With the launch of Office 2013 Microsoft has seen fit to upgrade the terms of the license agreement, and it’s not in favor of the end user. It seems installing a copy of the latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite of apps ties it to a single machine. For life.

It has a couple minor quirks, but all in all, it is an excellent distribution.