Today in Linux news a new Fedora security team has been announced. Matt Asay says critics of Open Source Software can't see the forest for the trees. ITworld.com today published a cartoon saying when Linus curses, folks listen. That and a few more tidbits are inside to close out the month.

July 31, 2014. Today KDE released the Release Candidate of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.
With the large number of changes, the 4.14 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We're counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the 4.14 team by installing the release candidate and reporting any bugs.

Wow, I had no idea that people would care about the start of this project. There seems to be a few questions out there that I’d like to address here to clarify what we are doing and why.

The Revolv Smart Home Automation Solution is now available with an Android control app, greatly expanding its appeal beyond its core iOS user base. Until now, Android users have required an Insteon Remote in order to perform functions like assigning manual-triggered “Actions.” You can now use your Android phone to unify devices and customize automations based on four triggers, three of which are automatic: GeoSense, time of day, and device-to-device/motion sensor. The fourth is an On Demand manual trigger.

As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time. The kinds of items available include project management systems, design tools, data handling and image processing. In this article, I take a quick look at some of the cool code available.

The main Web site is at http://technology.nasa.gov. This main page is a central portal for accessing all of the technology available to be transferred to the public. This includes patents, as well as software.

Zorin OS 9 is based on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 which is the long term support release and this means you will get software updates until 2019.

The unique selling point for Zorin OS is that it is has multiple themes which make it look like the operating system that you are used to using. For instance if you are used to Windows XP then you are able to switch to an XP style interface and if you use Windows 7 you can switch to a Windows 7 interface.

In the core version which is free the available interfaces are Windows XP, Windows 7 and Gnome 2. If you upgrade to the premium version you will get the user interfaces for Unity, Mac OSX and Windows 2000.

Open source and open data solutions now should receive top consideration at the General Services Administration.

Sonny Hashmi, the GSA chief information officer, said Thursday during an online chat with Federal News Radio that he recently signed out a memo requiring agency software developers to look at open source before they consider traditional commercial solutions.

Today, Twitter acquired a password manager startup called Mitro. As part of the deal, Mitro will be releasing the source to its client and server code under the GPL.

[Updated 12:00PM] — Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 and XP SoCs, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.

Until now, datasheets and other details about the ARM-based Armada 370 and Armada XP system-on-chips have been available only under NDA to Marvell customers and partners. During the past month, however, the chipmaker released detailed datasheets on the SoCs, with no restriction or registration required. Both functional and hardware spec datasheets were released, each of which is more like a manual than a typical datasheet.

We were tipped to the Marvell Armada 370 and XP datasheet releases by embedded Linux development and training specialist Free Electrons. (The company is well known here for its regular contributions of videos and slide decks from shows like the Embedded Linux Conference, released under a Creative Commons license.)

• New Optimism in the Age of Doubt Over Software Patents
• Ruling Against ‘Abstract’ Software Patents is Already Derailing Patent Attacks on Linux and Free Software
• Microsoft-Linked Codenomicon and Bluebox in the Business of Smearing FOSS/Linux/Android
• Former Microsoft Engineer Working on Windows BitLocker Confirms Government Asks Microsoft for Back Doors
• Is Microsoft Being Raided Not Just for Anti-Competitive Reasons but for Bribes and Back Doors?
• Links 31/7/2014: Zorin OS Educational 9, Android Nearing 90% Share
• Links 30/7/2014: Chris Beard as CEO of Mozilla
• Links 28/7/2014: New Linux RC, Plasma 5 Live in Kubuntu
• Links 27/7/2014: KDE 4.14 Beta 3, KDE 4.14 Beta 3 Released

The true measure of any great gaming platform is not the number of games available. Nor is it the need to have the same games as other competing platforms (the Playstation 4 doesn't need Mario games to be considered successful). And it really isn't even about how many total games are sold, though that certainly helps.

Time was, if you had a hankering for a nice Raspberry Pi, you had but one choice: the Raspberry Pi Model B. You plunked down your $35, and like millions of other Pi-heads, you liked it. Then came the stripped-down $25 Model A, followed this year by the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Now they've got this gussied up Raspberry Pi Model B+ with four USB ports and a backward-compatible 40-pin expansion connector. What's the world coming to?

As usual, any new version of MySQL brings lots of improvements, and the current build is also quite large. Users will find that numerous changes have been made and some of them are quite interesting.

“The linked OpenSSL library for the MySQL 5.6 Commercial Server has been updated from version 1.0.1g to version 1.0.1h. Versions of OpenSSL prior to and including 1.0.1g are reported to be vulnerable to CVE-2014-0224. This change does not affect the Oracle-produced MySQL Community build of MySQL Server 5.6, which uses the yaSSL library instead,” notes the changelog.

FFmpeg 2.3.1, a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video, is now available for download.

FFmpeg 2.3.1 is the latest major release of the software, and this current build is only a maintenance version and arrives just a few days after another major release was made available.

“2.3.1 was released on 2014-07-31. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 2.3 release branch, which was cut from master on 2014-07-16. Amongst lots of other changes, it includes all changes from ffmpeg-mt, libav master of 2014-07-15, libav 10.2 as of 2014-07-15,” reads the official announcement.

Zorin OS Educational, an Ubuntu-based operating system aimed at Windows users who are switching over to Linux, is now at version 9.

There are 2600 packages installed in the main file-system and the chroot for thin clients. It even installs LDAP and xrdp, much more than a minimal installation. I fear this is bloat for a lot of schools who just need a lab running… Without a fast local mirror, this installation takes many hours and I can see teachers taking up much of a weekend to do it.

I recommend doing a minimal installation of Debian GNU/Linux and adding the LTSP parts manually to avoid the bloat. That way you can get XFCE4, turn off encryption and use a local mirror or cache of packages. That will save downloading packages twice, once for the file-system and once again for the chroot and if you need to repeat the installation, the second try will be much faster.

According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, global smartphone shipments reached 295 million units in the second quarter of 2014. The Android operating system captured a new record of 85 percent global marketshare, mainly at the expense of BlackBerry, Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows Phone.