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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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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The OS is the core of your computing experience. There's no point trying to run a fully legal setup if the base of it is illegal. Windows and Mac OS are the most known operating systems, however they aren't free.

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The sleeper desktop environment – which I didn’t even considered years ago – has been XFCE. I've found that XFCE offers more robustness than say, LXDE, which lacks much of XFCE's polish in its default configuration. XFCE provides all the benefits one may have enjoyed in GNOME 2, but with a lightweight experience that makes it a hit on older computers.

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If you were hoping to eventually be able to run Windows applications within Google's Chrome OS environment via Wine, the possibilities of that working out well are very slim.

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The only shocking thing is the amount of press coverage this received. PGP/GPG, OpenSSH, OpenSSL etc. were previously named here for flaws that had been found (in the context of Red Hat and the NSA [1, 2, 3]). These are not so uncommon. One just needs to keep up to date (patched) — one that which Apple’s customers cannot do. They can’t even write their own patches.

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Originally reported by Ars Technica, the fix was available by the time the general public was made aware of it. It’s actually fairly similar to a certain security hole that lived for a year and could have allowed for exploits to be used in the wild.

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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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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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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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Friday evening can be a very busy time in Citibank’s Changi Business Park office in Singapore. Hundreds of mission-critical applications hit the production servers, security patches are applied, hundreds of professionals including developers, systems engineers, Linux gurus, and management professionals spend the whole night on the conference calls ensuring the smooth functioning of servers at this financial giant. The applications that get life over the weekend have monetary value and therefore require robust servers to host them. These servers need to maximize the utilization of the applications and should have the stability to run for a longer period of time without a reboot. These servers should also have the capability to be scaled up as the infrastructure grows. The bottom line: these enterprise level boxes need to be tough.

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While you may not recognize the name Canonical, chances are you've heard of its Debian-based Linux OS called Ubuntu. We spoke to Jane Silber, CEO of the privately held UK-based company, about her transition to CEO, the company's past, and its plans for spreading Ubuntu everywhere from the cloud to tablets to smartphones.

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A former Romanian secretary of state, Constantin Teodorescu, is calling on the country's public administrations to switch to Linux and other open source solutions. "The Romanian government should contact the budgetary heads at all public administrations and explain that they can switch everything to free software", he writes on his blog on Friday. "Let's get this straight, and end this tragedy".

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As promised I've put together our first Bodhi Linux disc that is built on top of the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 release. Keep in mind this is a very early image not intended for production machines. There will be issues.

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She was on her computer at home doing something or the other when suddenly things went bad for her. The menu bar and the task bar disappeared, including the “Start” button and she couldn’t close or change anything on her screen. In a panic, she called friends to try to see if she could get guidance to fix it. One friend told her that the same thing had happened to her and it turned out to be a virus. Olivia was told to turn her computer off immediately and reinstall Windows. That was the only way to proceed.

All of her family pictures and all of her files…gone. She and her friend reinstalled Windows and spent the next two days getting her computer back into shape.

When I was giving the keyboard shortcut portion of the class, I noticed Olivia holding her hands over her mouth as her eyes grew wide. I thought she was going to cry. It turns out that Olivia had accidentally hit the F11 key while she was typing. She had no controls, no cues or hints as to how to get her computer screen back to normal. She had no idea she had accidentally hit the F11 key or that hitting it again would return things to normal. When she discovered how easy this was to fix she was both relieved and angry. She even left her seat to come forward and give me a hug as she recounted the story.

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