AV Linux is a very particular distribution aimed at a very specific niche of users. First of all, this is an OS geared towards the 32-bit PAE processor, which is considerably older than the current ones. In theory, the distribution is capable of turning older PCs or even Mac OS systems into an Audio / Graphics / Video workstation appliance.

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We have been having the biggest debate of the mobile world for a few years now… Android, or iOS? Each of them have their own major perks. Android has its insane amount of customization possibilities, and iOS has its ease of use (just to name a few). However, a new report from the IDC shows us some irrefutable proof: Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Over the last three years, the Android operating system market share, in percentages of global unit shipments, has increased by roughly 29.6%, while iOS has dropped 3.6%. Windows Phone has surprisingly gained 1.5%, and BlackBerry has dropped 9.4%. As of May of last year, Samsung held the title of the first place, but that is to be expected.

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Tizen has always been the presumed heavyweight among the new crop of mobile Linux operating systems, yet it has increasingly seemed more like a wispy shadow. Now, despite growing signs that Samsung’s first Tizen phones may not ship until late 2014, and doubts whether the company will put much effort behind the OS now that it has made peace with Google, the Tizen marketing push has cranked up for the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This week, the Tizen Association industry group that supports the Linux Foundation hosted Tizen project, announced 15 new members for its partner program.

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The Genode Operating System Framework has been one of the more interesting and successful open-source OS research projects of recent times. Genode OS is becoming increasingly usable to enthusiasts and is also proving to be an interesting environment for developers. A lot of headway was made for Genode OS in 2013, but there's already a list of TODO items for the community-based operating system in 2014.

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After patiently waiting for Ubuntu to officially announce their 12.04.4 update and once the number of seeders of LXLE grew to an adequate level to 'serve' it, LXLE 12.04.4 has been released.

This particular release builds on the idea that many 'at idle' processes can be replaced by 'on demand' solutions, such as weather, battery, updates, power management, etc. It also introduces microcode kernel updates for your processor and preload, a readahead daemon, by default.

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MINIX 3.2.1 can successfully power-up on the BeagleBoard-xM with a working frame-buffer and is "off to discover the world." While there is a frame-buffer, networking support doesn't yet work on MINIX. MINIX 3.2.1 has been advertised as a great fit for ARM since its small, BSD licensed, and reliable.

Besides the BeagleBoard, the BeagleBone does work with MINIX 3 on ARM but there you get no working frame-buffer but do have networking support and USB support is forthcoming. MINIX 3 developers are planning to eventually support more Texas Instruments ARM hardware and the AllWinner ARM SoCs.

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A real OS doesn’t limit what you can do with your hardware and it doesn’t charge you extra for doing what you want. GNU/Linux is a real OS. Just ask the hosting providers. On Netcraft’s list of 47, 1 uses F5-BIG-IP, 5 use *BSD, 5 have an unknown OS and only 4 use that other OS with the EULA from Hell. All the rest, 32, use GNU/Linux as they should.

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What does this mean? Well, because that other OS is usually bundled with a PC, it means ~10% of legacy PCs in China were retired. The interesting bit is that ~2.5% were replaced with */Linux devices. That’s consistent with that other OS having no traction with small cheap computers and Android/Linux thriving there. I assume a good share of the XP machines are being converted to GNU/Linux and some GNU/Linux machines are being bought retail. It’s all good.

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The smartphone is currently dominated by two big systems; Android and iOS. But there are others in the run. With Microsoft struggling to get anyone to voluntarily use Windows Phone, maybe Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch and/or Firefox OS will make a difference. It’s this last one I attended a talk about at FOSDEM. So here it goes; The current state of Firefox OS, and what we can expect for the future.

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Facebook, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and other leading IT users think the open-source movement is ready to shake up the hardware industry the way Linux did in software.

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The desktop is mostly the same as before, so I won't dwell on that for too much. The Axe Menu, which essentially brought the Linux Mint Menu to GNOME 3/Shell, is sadly gone, replaced by the slightly less nice GnoMenu. There is a Conky system monitor sitting on the top-right of the desktop background that also displays the date and time. Docky gives a dock on the bottom that has been expanded to full width, but for some reason it shows an opaque background until the desktop background changes (after which point the Docky background becomes fully transparent). On the whole, the desktop works decently well.

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How focused has Samsung become on Chromebooks--portable computers that run Google's cloud-centric Chrome OS? According to a report in DigiTimes, after cutting its targets for notebook computer sales, the company may have plans to "no longer launch conventional notebook models except Chromebooks in 2015, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers." While there is no official confirmation from Samsung, the move would represent a big shift for Samsung and one of the biggest votes of confidence yet for Chromebooks.

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The main reason for that: Fedora.next is a huge effort that seems to make everything even more complicated. It imho is also sold pretty badly right now, as you have to invest quite a lot of time to understand what Fedora.next actually is. And Fedora.next to me seems like something the core contributors push forward without having really abort those Fedora contributors who don't have Fedora as one of their top priorities in life.

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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) took place recently in Las Vegas, and Mozilla officials made headlines there as they revealed plans to take the Firefox OS mobile platform to devices other than smartphones, and a new deal between Panasonic and Mozilla to drive smart, HTML 5-fluent televisions. It's all part of Mozilla's ongoing effort to focus on mobile technology and new platforms.

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For more than a year now, sales have been downright dreary for PCs and PC equipment makers, but new-generation Chromebooks running Google's Chrome OS platform have shown signs of bucking the trend. Late last year, there were many reports that Chromebooks were not selling well at all. For example, a ZDNet column cited some IDC research that apparently showed Chromebooks struggling.

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Was Apple involved in any way with the death of Pear OS? The conspiracy-minded among us probably think that might be a real possibility, particularly if Apple acted behind the scenes via a shell company. Apple has been known to do just that in years past when it wanted to negotiate for something without having its real identity known.

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If you're looking around for 3D printers that are both inexpensive and open source friendly, the Printrbot Simple Kit will probably catch your attention.

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The SPIR 1.2 specification announced today provides non-source encoding and binary level portability for OpenCL 1.2 programs. Besides the new specification they're putting otu today, the Khronos Group is also publishing code to a modified Clang 3.2 compiler that can generate SPIR from OpenCL C 1.2 programs, a SPIR module written as an LLVM pass, and a header file with all enumerated values of the SPIR 1.2 specification.

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We are extremely sorry to inform all users of the Pear OS Linux operating system that David Tavares, the creator of Pear OS, has announced a few minutes ago on Google+ that the Pear OS distribution will no longer be available for download.

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Social networking is only going in one direction - up. The huge social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have become a necessity for businesses. They increasingly recognise the importance of incorporating social networking features with their content strategy. The benefits are broad and wide. Social networking helps to increase brand awareness, improve social signals, offers word-of-mouth advertising, and boosts audience reach and influence.

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