Well, this is starting to look sort of like "Jamie's Mostly Raspberry Pi Stuff", but that's not intentional. There are just a lot of interesting things going on with the RPi at the moment, so that's where I seem to be spending a lot of my time right now.

The big news, of course, was the announcement and immediate availability of the Raspberry Pi 2 hardware two weeks ago. The new hardware needs updated software to really make the most of its capabilities, so there was also a new Raspbian and NOOBS release (1.3.12) made at the same time.

With all the noise surrounding the Io.js variant of Node.js, it's easy to forget about another Node fork that's been quietly percolating: JXcore. Last year it added multithreading (sort of) and the ability to turn Node apps into stand-alone executables -- but at the cost of JXcore being a closed source project.

Release 7.9 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous
FTP. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C,
Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs
running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB
itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows
variants.

With so many devices already based on Linux -- Android devices and Chromebooks, to name a few -- it makes sense for some companies to consider virtual and cloud-hosted Linux desktops. Windows applications are a hurdle, however.

The demand for Linux developers has jumped seven percent in comparison to last year, a study has shown.

The 2014 Linux Jobs Report shows that hiring managers at tech-powered companies are focusing more attention on Linux talent, and that’s reverberating in the market, with stronger than average salary increases to those working with the OS.

Dice and The Linux Foundation surveyed both hiring managers and Linux talent to gain a 360-degree view of the thriving jobs landscape, and here’s what they found.

While the Tamil driver is moving along for open-source ARM Mali T-Series graphics support, it could be a while before seeing the actual source code.

Luc Verhaegen presented at FOSDEM a few weeks back about his work on Tamil, the Lima driver project's work on supporting the newer ARM Mali T-Series GPUs found on various SoCs. While Luc showed off some demos and is working towards a Tamil Mesa driver, the code hasn't yet been opened up.

Wine 1.7.37 has just been released today, February 20, and it brings interface change notifications, support for the UTF-7 character encoding, various graphical fixes for themed controls, support for multi-channel audio, a new implementation of Wininet on top of the Win32 sockets, as well as several bugfixes.

The news that broke at the Node Summit last week -- that Joyent and others are proposing to create a Node.js Foundation -- came as no surprise to anyone who has been watching the controversy around everyone's favorite server-side JavaScript platform. It’s been clear for a while that Node.js has outgrown its roots and become an important structural tool for the software industry.

Node.js's hosts at Joyent didn’t plan for this -- the code had been an employee project rather than a strategic investment. While Node.js is an important part of Joyent's operations, it’s not a key product for the company, which has certainly spent far more to host it than it has received in business value as a pioneer of container-based cloud deployment. Joyent deserves credit for acting responsibly and maintaining its commitment as steward, despite the intense interest -- and fierce political intrigue -- in which it found itself.

A decade ago now, I was recruited by ZDNet to launch a blog about open source software.

At the time, the concept was controversial. Proprietary giants like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and IBM (NYSE:IBM) argued that open source was insecure, that the business model would not work, that it would destroy the enterprise software space, that they couldn't make money with it.

One decade on and it's clear what has happened. Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Android dominates the consumer space, and those who advocate proprietary models would claim it proves their point. Android OEMs don't make money, while Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), with its proprietary model, is making a fortune.

The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3.6, which is a new maintenance version in this branch of the famous office suite.

This just got in: Mozilla Firefox 36.0 will bring support for the brand-new HTTP/2 protocol, according to the official release notes from the last Beta version of the web browser. HTTP/2 will enable a faster, more responsive, and more scalable Web.

After several emails between Xfce developers and numerous delays, it appears that the highly anticipated Xfce 4.12 desktop environment will finally be released at the end of February 2015, in the last weekend, most probably on March 1, if nothing goes wrong.

Bodhi GNU/Linux is a Ubuntu-based distribution designed especially for Desktop computing and is best known for its elegant and lightweight nature. The Distribution philosophy is to provide a minimal base system that can be populated with the applications as per user’s choice. The base System only include those applications which are essentially required viz., ‘Etecad‘ File Manager, ‘Midori‘ web browser, ‘Terminology‘ terminal emulator, ePhoto and ePad. Apt or AppCenter can be used to download and install lightweight applications in one go.

The LibreOffice suite of tools includes a very powerful database application ─ one that happens to be incredibly user-friendly. These databases can be managed/edited by any user and data can be entered by anyone using a LibreOffice-generated form. These forms are very simple to create and can be attached to existing databases or you can create both a database and a form in one fell swoop.

There are two ways to create LibreOffice Base forms:

Form Wizard

Design View.

There are many memorable quotes attributed to Tim O’Reilly. Which isn’t surprising. He’s been talking for decades about open data, the internet and the direction technology is taking us. Like Arthur C Clarke, much of what he’s predicted, talked about and written has proven incredibly judicious. He popularised the ideas behind ‘Web 2.0’, as well as the incoming wave and impact of social media. He believes in an open government and that the internet will become a global brain of networks and things.

I wrote a post last summer about preventing Chrome from stealing the media buttons (like play, pause, previous track and next track) from OS X. Now that I’m using Linux regularly and I fell in love with Google Play Music All Access, I found that GNOME was stealing the media keys from Chrome.

The fix is quite simple. Press the SUPER key (Windows key or Mac Command key), type settings, and press enter. Click on Keyboard and then on the Shortcuts tab. You should now see something like this.

Many businesses routinely employ "ethical" hackers as a means of testing whether their systems are secure, paying the tech-savvy to break into their computers in what is known as penetration testing, or pen testing.