Today registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2014 events. This year the campaign day is March 26th, when people who believe in fair access to communications technology and Open Standards will again present, perform, and demonstrate. Event organisers can now register on the re-launched documentfreedom.org website.

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Koushik Dutta, the famed developer of CyanogenMOD has added DLNA support to his AllCast Android app. Ever since Google opened Chromcast to 3rd party developers Koush is on roll. He has, in fact, been toying with Chromecast the day it was released and created some stir in the free software community when Google changed the preview APIs for Chromecast which broke his app.

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As usual, Mobile World Congress was packed with cool new SoCs, most of which are destined for Android phones and tablets. Some will see wider usage in the broader world of embedded Linux and Android devices.The big news was the invasion of 64-bit ARMv8 and x86 SoCs, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 and Intel's Atom Z34xx. The ARM models are built on the ARMv8 Cortex-A53 design. Eventually, we'll see the -A53 used in Big.Little hybrids along with the similarly 64-bit, server-class Cortex-A57.

Most of the 64-bit SoCs target year-end releases, which is likely the earliest Android will add 64-bit support. With the iPhone's A7 chip, Apple has beaten Android by at least a year.

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HP has added a 7.85″ unit to compliment its line-up of 7″ and 8″ tablets. The HP 8 1401 is a quad-core tablet that runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. “It’s got responsiveness that delivers entertainment where you want it. Sleek and smart with technology you can trust, the HP 8 is big on performance, slim in style, and small on price,” claims the company.

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Beast is fine. It’s old, but still kicking. It boots. It edits. It searches. It networks. Beast’s CPU is way over-sized for what I do and I do a lot. 99% of the time it idles. Every few weeks I open it up to full throttle to build the next Linux-3.10.x kernel, but what’s the rush? If it took twice or thrice as long I would still be happy.

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Canonical announced in February that it plans to release smartphones based on its widely used Ubuntu distribution of the Linux platform are back on, with the first devices expected later this year.

This triggered eager anticipation among some members of the V3 team, including yours truly, as Canonical's original vision for an Ubuntu phone sounded like a compelling prospect, as well as a novel one for those of us who have seen smartphones become ever-more generic over recent years as vendors try to copy Apple's formula for success.

First disclosed early last year, Canonical proposed a version of Ubuntu with a touch-optimised user interface that could run on high-end smartphone hardware. While some mobile platforms, notably Android, are already underpinned by the Linux kernel, Ubuntu for phones was going to be the real deal; it would be able to run full Linux applications as well as HTML5 web apps optimised for mobile devices.

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Phoronix is reporting that running Windows applications in Chrome OS via Wine seems very unlikely to happen. And it got me wondering about how many people really want to run Windows applications in Chrome OS

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ThoughtWorks has recently open sourced their Continuous Delivery (CD) tool, called Go, having its origins in CruiseControl and providing a pipeline process that covers the entire code development process: continuous integration, testing and deploying.

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With these things in mind, I very quickly focused on two desktop managers that might provide the desired desktop: Xfce and Trinity. Since I prefer to use openSUSE as the underlying operating system and Xfce is one of the desktop manager options fully supported by openSUSE installations, Xfce was an obvious first choice for consideration. This article will consider the Xfce desktop manager from the perspective of a KDE4 user and it is addressed to all those KDE4 users who feel similarly frustrated with the development direction KDE4 has taken.

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• IBM Not the Only ‘Sugar Daddy’ of GNU/Linux

• Secret Deals — Not GnuTLS — a Threat to GNU/Linux Security

• Red Hat Joins the Joke Which is Amazon’s ‘Secure’ Federal ‘Cloud’

• Fedora 21 Release Just 7 Months Away

• Debian’s Importance is Growing

• Arch Linux is Becoming More Mainstream

• MDV News: OpenMandriva Lx 2014 on Its Way, Mageia Has Issue, PCLinuxOS Has New Magazine

• Leaving Windows to Rot

• Privacy, Spying on Congress, Drones, Ukraine Intervention, and More

The four distributions obviously have a lot in common; Debian is well known as one of the oldest, best established and most respected Linux distributions, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is derived from Debian, with a lot of the goodies which have been developed for the Linux Mint 'main' distribution added, and both SolydXK and Tanglu are derived from a combination of those two plus a good bit of work in packaging, repositories, updates, appearances and such.

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Cut-price virtual-server hosting biz DigitalOcean has banked a whopping $37.2m from Andreessen Horowitz and other valley investors.

The mammoth series-A funding round was announced on Thursday and will give the 50-person company the funds it needs to aggressively hire talented developers and expand globally, while keeping its Linux cloud server prices as low as $5 a month.

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Typically with new technologies like this the inventors haven’t thought much about security or they rely on a small installed base to keep the product or service under the radar of the bad guys. But pCell, for all it’s high tech loveliness, is a Software Defined Network proudly running in a data center on plain old Linux servers.

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The KDE Project has released a major new version of its Krita image editing software, with the latest version of the free and open source Photoshop replacement available for both Windows and Linux.

The latest update, version 2.8, marks a significant milestone for the software, marking the first stable version of the software released for Windows.

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TUX Machines has become an integral part of our life right here in this humble home. It's a rewarding experience but also a demanding experience. I personally write my articles in the lounge (which is no 'press room') and it requires many hours of digging and researching news. In Tux Machines, unlike in Techrights for example, it's mostly about finding news of high relevance and importance, and finding them fast! Timing counts. We don't want readers to waste their time wading/going through irrelevant, unimportant and out-of-date reports.

24/7 coverage of news is easy for us. Rianne works mostly at daytime, whereas I usually work at nights (customers are mostly government/public sector and they require 24/7 coverage). When Rianne is working I take over the responsibilities at Tux Machines and vice versa. We swap responsibilities like this when it comes to housework as well; we work out together when we are out of the house (also separately in terms of gym sections, e.g. cardiovascular/weights). This week we go to yoga classes as much as 5 times, but we usually just to Town for other facilities like pool, table tennis, sauna (men and women separately), gym, etc. This is our main escape from Tux Machines; given Wi-Fi (scarce coverage but definitely existent in Manchester City Centre), we sometimes update Tux Machines while out of the house as well.

The site forums are now open for participation and every registered member can add blog posts and push them to the front page (now that we've got the spam epidemic under control). Please do consider participating. This week, as in previous weeks, we are seeing a ~10% growth in traffic (week-to-week), perhaps owing to the slight redesign, loading speeds (Varnish cache), and very frequent updates. We check for news once in a few hours in order to keep abreast of breaking events.

Running Tux Machines will hopefully become more of a community effort over time. Anyone who is logged in can now submit stories. Unless this gets abused by spammers, we will keep it that way. █

The next Fedora Linux release is being postponed until October since if shipping in August they are left midway between GNOME 3.12 and 3.14. GNOME 3.14 will be released by late September and thus if shipping in mid-to-late October would allow time for a fresh GNOME 3.14 desktop to be incorporated into the release. October/November release targets have also been what's long been sought after by Fedora (among other distributions) for nailing close to the GNOME release time-frame and other software projects.

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I am aware of situations where Open Source companies based out of US can’t offer free software to those countries which are in US’s embargo list, but something interesting popped out today when FESCo debated the issue whether Fedora should allow ‘contribution’ from such countries. Fedora’s sponsor Red Hat is a US based company and thus has to adhere to US laws so it’s tricky whether they can use the free software contribution from embargoed countries or not.

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I’ve run Arch for a couple of years. I like its minimalism and the way you end up knowing every installed component. I’m not massively keen on having to check the Arch website before upgrades (because things break), or the way you have to start from scratch with every fresh install. Getting hold of the latest releases is one of the most important parts of my job, and the Arch User Repository is the best way I’ve found of getting hold of software that more often than not installs. I love the way it bundles the source code, and the way you can rollback packages. It’s also relatively straightforward to modify packages yourself, which I’ve occasionally found useful. At the moment, I’ve also got Mageia 4, Fedora 20 and Mint 16 installed on the same machine.

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We need to protect the freedoms in which Linux was born and grew up.

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Due to notorious Linux graphics drivers, Google developers working on Chrome/Chromium aren't looking to enable hardware video acceleration by default anytime soon. The problem ultimately comes down to poor Linux graphics drivers.

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