Microsoft will soon no longer support Windows XP so current XP users will need to migrate to a newer version of Windows or possibly Linux. If they don't migrate, they run the risk of serious security problems once Microsoft stops issuing updates for Windows XP.

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About a year ago IBM doubled down on its commitment to the open source cloud, announcing that all of its cloud offerings would be built on OpenStack and renewing its investments in KVM, the Linux-based kernel virtual machine. Since then, both projects have undergone major changes, including the move last fall of KVM and the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) to become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

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Valve boss Gabe Newell has concluded his Reddit AMA (conducted to support the fundraising effort Valve is doing for the Seattle Children's Hospital), and in the process has offered a few snippets of information on what the company is up to.

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Also: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive coming to Linux, says Newell

If you're a government worker and have been wanting to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux securely on your Amazon cloud, it's your lucky day. The popular open-source operating system is finally available on Amazon Web Services.

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• GNU/Linux Everywhere: New Stories, More Evidence

• An Android World: Limitless Expansion in Tablets, Smaller Devices, and New Hardware

• Ubuntu Rising: Desktops, Servers, Phones, and Beyond

• Linux News: 3.14 RC5, LTSI v3.10, kGraft...

• KDE News: New Releases, Qt 5.3 Preview, Indian Event, End of Nepomuk, Steam Inclusion, and Success Down Under

• GNOME News: GNOME 3.12, Wayland, Numix, GTK+...

• News About Lesser Known Desktop Environments

• This Week's News: Civil Rights, Politics and War

It took the developers nearly a year but their work on the familiar, yet ambitious, MATE desktop is finally stable and available for everyone to use. MATE is a complete desktop environment that was forked from the Gnome Project (Gnome 2 to be exact) nearly 2 years ago. The decision to fork came at a time when a significant amount of Gnome 2 users were displeased with Gnome 3, the next major iteration and core of the Gnome Project.

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This hands-on class provides experience with a variety of Linux virtualization approaches. We examine the straight forward approach of creating VM's with tools like the virt manager and virsh and then dive into qemu and KVM.

This class covers Linux virtualization from the introductory level up to a more advanced level. Not only covering “how to” but also the “how” of how things work behind the scenes. How virtualization is implemented on Linux. From the role of qemu to the role of the Intel and AMD specialized instructions.

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National Council Of Education, Research and Training (NCERT) has released a notification on their website which promotes the use of Free and Open Source software in Indian schools. This notice is released well in time, as other schools, colleges and government institutions in India are already moving to open source software to save costs and prevent vendor locking. NCERT is responsible for maintaining standards in most government and private schools and educational institutions in India.

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It sounds like Microsoft is working on a dual-boot smartphone strategy that would cover both Google Android and Windows Phone. Um... this strategy sounds a bit like the 1990s, when IBM launched a dual-boot initiative involving OS/2 and Windows. Anybody else remember how that story turned out?

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Today's news scan turned up several interesting entries. First up is Linux.com's piece highlighting three key moments in Linux history. A new Scientific Linux review is out. Two KDE release announcements were posted. OMG!Ubuntu! has a list of seven features you're going to love in Ubuntu 14.04. A new Linux bug is wreaking havoc. And finally, friends don't let friends operate Windows.

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While many developers are jumping on board with Linux, odds are that porting their old titles is not likely to occur, whether due to cost, resources or perceived lack of interest. This issue can be solved by either “going native”, only running software that is available natively for Linux, or by employing an option such as Wine to get it to run under Linux. Another option includes virtualization, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

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The bug in the GnuTLS library makes it trivial for attackers to bypass secure sockets layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protections available on websites that depend on the open source package. Initial estimates included in Internet discussions such as this one indicate that more than 200 different operating systems or applications rely on GnuTLS to implement crucial SSL and TLS operations, but it wouldn't be surprising if the actual number is much higher. Web applications, e-mail programs, and other code that use the library are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers monitoring connections to silently decode encrypted traffic passing between end users and servers.

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I think computers like Chromebooks are the way of the future, but not because of their operating system - because of their hardware. Relatively low cost laptops with SSDs for storage and an insane battery life are everything I want in a computer.

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The code, set to be released in March, doesn't patch kernel code in-place but rather uses an ftrace-like approach to replace whole functions in the Linux kernel with fixed variants, said Pavlik. SUSE then plans to submit it to the Linux kernel community for upstream integration.

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Today KDE released the second alpha of Frameworks 5, part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014. This release includes progress since the previous alpha last month.

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Early last year, I posted a piece on Mozilla radically changing its approach to plugins in the Firefox browser. Plugins and extensions are, of course, part of the reason why many of us chose to use Firefox in the first place. There is a huge ecosystem of useful ones. However, especially since Firefox moved to a rapid release cycle, extensions have cause many performance problems. For that reason, Mozilla has been steadily overhauling its process of handling extensions in Firefox, especially when it comes to extensions that are automatically enabled.

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With the open-source graphics driver stack found in the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Mesa 10.1 + Linux 3.13), the performance of the community-developed Radeon Gallium3D driver is now close to that of the official AMD Catalyst driver for recent generations of Radeon graphics cards. In several OpenGL tests the "RadeonSI" driver can even run 80% the speed of AMD's official Catalyst Linux driver.

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There are several definitions of open source. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) website contains a very useful and detailed definition, which goes beyond access to the source code and includes ten specific criteria concerning the distribution terms of open-source software. We will not enter here into the ongoing debate concerning the differences between open source and free software, as the OSI website provides a short review of the terms.

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Magiea has been one of my favorite projects and distributions since its inception, but Jesse Smith said today that the spell is broken for him. Smith had issues with his network connection upon first boot, but continued to have installation and updating of software issues. He complained of poor performance, missing packages, and a seriously annoying task switcher too. All in all, he wasn't pleased. He concluded (in part):

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For those who do not know, Nokia uses its own proprietary fork of Android, rather than stock Android, in its X-series devices. It also removes all Google services and replaces them with its own. Therefore, these devices ship with Nokia Store in lieu of Google Play. However, ports have been made in both directions, i.e., Google apps on Nokia X, and Nokia Store on other Android devices.

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