On Monday was the original "work in progress" patch to improve the DIO code in the Linux kernel. As Overstreet wrote then, "The end result is _vastly_ simpler - direct-io.c is now ~700 lines, vs. ~1300 previously. dio_submit is almost gone, I'm down to 4 things left in it. It relies heavily on my block layer patches for efficient bio splitting, and making generic_make_request() take arbitrary size bios...It also gets rid of the various differences between async and sync requests - previously, for async reads it marked pages dirty before submitting the io (in process context), then on completion punts to worqueue to redirty the pages if any need to be. This now happens for sync reads, too."

Chances are you know about the digital divide, but not about the Kramden Institute's work to help hardworking students in grades 3 - 12 who don't have a computer in their home cross it. You also might be shocked to learn that while information technology seems to be ubiquitous, a full 23% of U.S. households still don't have a computer.

Vadim Girlin has revived his "shader optimization" branch of Mesa that focuses upon improvements to the AMD R600 Gallium3D graphics driver...

Erin Robinson, the Information and Virtual Community Director for the Foundation for Earth Science, the management arm of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (@ESIPFed), says that earth science matters to all of us. For example, when Hurrican Sandy devastated areas of the country, responders needed information on flood zones and what hospitals were available.

Code Synthesis has released version 2.2 of their ODB C++ Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) code...

Snowlinux 4 (Cinnamon) is released. Snowlinux is a Debian-based distribution and live CD with GNOME.

Innovatio deliberately avoided targeting the actual manufacturers of Wi-Fi equipment, preferring to sue end-users. But in October, Cisco, Netgear, and Motorola teamed up to file an 81-page lawsuit [PDF] seeking to shut down Innovatio's patent-trolling project once and for all. Not only were the patents invalid, but the suit alleged Innovatio's whole campaign was a violation of the RICO anti-racketeering law. That law is more commonly used against crime families than patent holders.

The third development milestone release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.4-Forsand is now available. Incorporated into this latest development snapshot are enhancements for improving the Apple OS X benchmarking support, detection of the new Linux F2FS file-system, and other improvements...

Apple and Google have the most robust app stores, and consumers and developers alike pay attention. It will be hard for competitors to break that success cycle.

As the creator of ROS, Willow Garage, pivots into a commercial business, the open source Robot Operating System is transitioning to the foundation established for it last year, where it will continue development

The latest release of Chakra Linux brings the recently released KDE 4.10 to the users of the Arch Linux based distribution. Chakra Linux 2013.02, code-named "Benz", also includes updates to the distribution's own tools such as its installation assistant and its theme. Chakra was originally aimed at providing a live CD that allowed for easy uptake by new users but still maintained the powerful roots and extensive package selection of Arch. The distribution can be installed and provides a modern Linux desktop; although it is still based on Arch Linux, it now uses its own repositories.

These seven steps to locking down security on your Linux Desktop may be one of the smartest things you ever did. Security increasingly becomes more important as we move to global network access.

Opera has announced that it will cease development on its proprietary Presto rendering engine in favour of a switch to the open source WebKit and V8 engines. The company is also contributing to the Chromium project

Factorio is in need of help via indiegogo to build their game. The game is about building a factory on an alien planet!

The NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver has received a set of patches today that provide various enhancements to this open-source ARM SoC graphics driver...

In this edition: two competitions for open code and data, a new nginx version, Coreboot for the HP Pavilion Chromebook, a new version of the WordPress iOS app, the Dalvik VM on Xubuntu, and the NSH command line

Pidgin 2.10.7 has been released a few hours ago, Februrary 13, and it brings numerous fixes, improvements, and a few new features, especially to MSN, Gadu-Gadu, MXit, Sametime, IRC and Yahoo! protocols.

Towns brings a fresh new take on the city building/management genre by introducing many RPG features.

The ZE Rescue Disk is a very handy rescue tool to fix damaged or missing hard drive sectors that prevent a computer from booting into its operating system. It runs automatically as a boot-repair rescue tool at startup from the optical drive. ZE Rescue Disk provides what was a missing link in permanently recovering from failed boot sequences.

Opera will slowly be moving away from its own Presto rendering engine for its closed-source multi-platform web-browser in favor of using the WebKit rendering engine and is also beginning to back Google's Chromium project.