Microsoft is running "Windows 8 Campus Tour" events at many US universities. We're inviting free software supporters, associated with the universities in question, to mount simple nondisruptive protests at these events.

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It is good to make a sign, especially a tall sign that can rest on the floor leaning against a wall, but you don't need one. Use few words, and big bold letters, so it is readable from a distance.

Protesting is more fun if two or more people protest together, but one person can do it. If several want to participate, you could divide up the time -- those two people for two hours tomorrow, those two for an hour on Monday, etc.

The dates vary from university to university (see the list below), but most of the events have already started. Many end tomorrow, but that still offers time to act. Others continue through next week or even later. Some events already ended, but we deleted them from the list below.

Activists of the Free Software Movement of India say you had better switch to free software that can easily substitute the proprietary, costly licences of Microsoft. “When you migrate, it involves a lot of cost on hardware upgrades and migration. Besides buying the OS copy of a higher version, users need to upgrade their hardware so that their systems can support the new OS,” Y Kiran Chandra, General Secretary of the Free Software Movement of India, told Business Line.

One of these new features added today is a way to control the volume of the Chrome OS media player with the Arrow keys. Chromebooks come with master volume keys built into the keyboard, but now this new basic feature allows you to push the up and down arrow keys to change the volume of the Chrome Media Player itself.

A lot of work is ongoing in Collabora to make Wayland usable on Raspberry Pi. The main bottleneck to the task is the lack of a functional Wayland shell for the Pi. Or at least it was till now. Marco Barisione announced Maynard, Raspberry Pi’s own Wayland shell, in his blog.

The foundation of the new shell is Tiago Vignatti‘s gtk-shell which is extended to implement Maynard. It’s still a work in progress but the initial looks are stunning. The current course is a tiled approach as you can see from the image below.

I chose Xubuntu because it is part of the excellent and popular Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. The 12.04 LTS (long-term support) release, codename Precise Pangolin, receives updates and security fixes until April 2017. The interim releases are supported only for 9-18 months. It's nice and lightweight for older computers, and it has a good straightforward user interface. The Ubuntu installer is the easiest and most streamlined of any distro, and Ubuntu updates and upgrades are reliable. Ubuntu is popular and has the backing of its parent company Canonical, so it's not likely to disappear anytime soon. Xubuntu doesn't look much like Windows XP, but it has the same basic layout: an applications menu, and a panel that shows notifications and open apps. You can find everything with just a little bit of poking around and clicking stuff.

I know, my fellow Linux fans, I know, what about Linux Mint? Mint is a wonderful distro. And so is Mageia, and Fedora, and PCLinuxOS, and openSUSE, and Bohdi, and so many more. Linux is a feast of riches. OSDisc.com offers many Linux distros on USB sticks, so feel free to go nuts and use whatever one you want.

Randy mentioned in a Tweet on Friday night, "It seems reddit wants a Linux port of Borderlands 2. I'll probably chat with some folks on twitter about that this weekend."

While that seems rather positive for Linux gamers, in a follow-up Tweet, Pitchford mentioned, "who said there will be a Linux port - I just want to learn more about customer interests there."

That's right folks Valve are bringing the easter cheer lighting the way for another 34 Linux games to come out on Steam!

• IBM Gearing Up for New Power8 Servers

  IBM reported its first quarter fiscal 2014 results late Wednesday, once again showing weakness in its server hardware business. Big Blue however has a plan to change its hardware business fortunes.

• IBM Throws Power8 Gauntlet At The Feet Of X86

  IBM is particularly keen on promoting Linux on Power, and Schroeter said that there are now over 800 independent software vendors whose wares are certified to run on the Power-Linux combo. Many of the hyperscale and extreme scale customers that IBM would love to sell Power-based machines to have their own variants of Linux as well as their own applications, so they can relatively easily port their code to Power should it make sense for performance reasons. This is, in fact, the bet that Big Blue is making. It may not be as bold as the bet the company made to create the System/360 mainframe 50 years ago, but the company is not walking away and remains committed to using Power machinery behind its Watson service and continuing to design processors for both Power and System z platforms into the future.

Linux server slinger Linode has doubled its RAM allocations per-server, and swapped out all its hard drives with SSDs allowing it to match upstart Digital Ocean on prices.

The new gear was announced by the company in a blog post on Thursday. It contains new Ivy Bridge E5-2680 v2 processors, greater networking bandwidth, and larger memory allocations, as well as SSDs for storage.

Free software projects need licenses. But choosing a license is such a pain that most github projects don’t even bother (resulting in an initiative by Github to rectify this). And when taking a closed source project and making it free software, the topic of license choice will take a huge amount of time and effort.

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“This is an advance notice that regular security support for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name ‘squeeze’) will be terminated on the 31st of May. However, we're happy to announce that security support for squeeze is going to be extended until February 2016, i.e. five years after the initial release. This effort is driven by various interested parties / companies which require longer security support,” reads the official announcement.

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It would appear that the Bluefin-21 now searching the Indian Ocean offers a similar, but perhaps more powerful computing system. Bluefin lists a 4GB flash drive, plus additional payload storage. The craft also incorporates GPS, RF, Iridium, and strobe communications, and can connect via Ethernet at short range for downloading data at shipside. Other features include a dead-reckoning drift that is typically less than 0.1 percent of distance traveled.

Linux has figured in a variety of autonomous aquatic craft, including the Liquid Robotics' solar-powered Wave Glider SV3, designed in part by Java creator James Gosling. On the low-end, you can go underwater (with a tether) with the BeagleBone Black based OpenROV UUV.

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SystemRescueCd is a very famous Linux distribution that has been developed with a single purpose in mind, to be a system rescue disk that is able to run from bootable CD-ROM or USB stick. As the name implies, this OS is only useful after your computer has already crashed and you really need the data.

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In the past months we presented the Arduino Yun and Arduino Galileo boards. Today we present you a new board, quite more powerful, but still Arduino compatible and powered with GNU/Linux. It’s an all Italian board called UDOO.
Indeed, now almost every month we see the birth of a new platform that integrates processors capable of hosting GNU/Linux with the Arduino architecture, in emulated form, or with a dedicated microcontroller. Now is the time to UDOO but we already see looming on the horizon the availability of Arduino Three, and who knows what other boards in the meantime.
UDOO project comes from the idea of the founders to provide a tool for digital learning: high computing power combined with the world of microcontrollers with maximum ease of use, will form a new generation of designers, makers and developers with the knowledge necessary to develop projects in the fields of digital / physical computing.

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Things are moving forward for the Fedora Workstation project. For those of you who don’t know about it, it is part of a broader plan to refocus Fedora around 3 core products with clear and distinctive usecase for each. The goal here is to be able to have a clear definition of what Fedora is and have something that for instance ISVs can clearly identify and target with their products. At the same time it is trying to move away from the traditional distribution model, a model where you primarily take whatever comes your way from upstream, apply a little duct tape to try to keep things together and ship it. That model was good in the early years of Linux existence, but it does not seem a great fit for what people want from an operating system today.

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For years I've heard that year X is the year of the Linux desktop and I've always scoffed at it. I scoffed because it's ridiculous to think that Linux or Mac OS X or anything could supplant Windows on the desktop. That is until now. And don't get me wrong, it won't happen for at least another year in businesses but for personal computing and BYOD, it's already happening. The Linux that's taking over the desktop is called the Chrome OS and it will happen on the Chromebook device.

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For many years, GNU/Linux on the desktop has been progressing well in government and education. Now that Dell and Canonical have teamed up to sell GNU/Linux widely to consumers, we can really see progress in the web stats.
In the last two years, according to StatCounter, GNU/Linux has progressed from ~1.1% to nearly 1.65%.

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When we spoke to clem last year about the future of Linux Mint, he revealed to us that Cinnamon 2.0 would be released with Linux Mint 16 and not use a GNOME backend. The plan was to get the initial release out the door so the team could work on any bugs over the next six months before Ubuntu’s big LTS release and Linux Mint 17.

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Cinnamon 2.2 was released today, bringing various improvements to the System Settings, HiDPI/Retina Display support, client side decorations support along with other interesting refinements.

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A wealth of other programs, many free, is available to augment the Ubuntu experience. If a user would like to edit some of the photos organized within Shotwell, for example, Krita and GIMP are two free image-manipulation programs that rival the functionality of Adobe Photoshop. In fact, Ubuntu presents users with a one-click option to download Krita when opening a Photoshop file for the first time.

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