I ordered the new Project Sputnik laptop from Dell to replace my six-year-old MacBook. It’s basically the most-tricked-out version of the XPS 13, running Ubuntu 12.04 instead of Windows 8. I won’t get into why I dislike Apple’s OS, but I run Linux on my desktop and on any server machine I login to, and I enjoy a consistent experience. The most appealing part about Project Sputnik, as opposed to installing Linux on any ol’ Windows laptop (or a MacBook, for that matter), is that it includes a Dell-managed PPA for the hardware. In theory, this means that Dell is committed to making sure that the laptop’s hardware “just works”.

Read the full thing at http://mattspitz.me/post/44202150125/a-month-with-dells-project-sputnik

At some point over a decade ago I received my first real Unix account on Northeastern CCS’s computing infrastructure. I realized that my primary method of development — editing files in BBEdit and uploading them via FTP — wouldn’t scale for college-level projects, so I decided to learn how to efficiently edit files on a remote host. I used Pico for a while but became annoyed at its lack of syntax highlighting, so I used the only other editor I remembered bumping into: Vim.

Read the full thing at http://statico.github.com/vim.html

A large legacy code base is a challenge for any team to embrace and improve. So how well does a distributed team of volunteers address the problem?

A talk at FOSDEM shed light on how the large and diverse team assembled by The Document Foundation (TDF) is approaching the huge LibreOffice code base left in the wake of Oracle's withdrawal from OpenOffice.org. The result is not only an impressive sequence of on-time releases, but also a range of development innovation. In particular, the "bi-bisect" technique they've developed could be a great approach for others faced with large, complex code bases.

Read the full thing at http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/what-you-can-learn-the-monster-libreoffice-project-212908

We are reaching the final run for Mageia 3 release: beta 2 isos are available for tests. This was a real release full of server failures and bugs . Still, the QA team did a fantastic work as usual.

Read the full thing at http://blog.mageia.org/en/2013/01/25/time-for-tests-mageia-3-beta-2-is-out/

Hairy Tales, the first game fully developed by Arges studio, is an Action/Puzzler built with Unity3D. It is already available for Win/Mac on Desura.

After many requests on Steam Greenlight for a Linux port the developers replied that it's all a matter of upgrading the game engine to version 4, but they are not sure if it's worth the cost.

Read the full thing at http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/hairy-tales-to-be-ported-to-linux-if-enough-interest-is-shown.1700

This project is focused on building up an environment to let anyone write Python apps for the PlayBook and BB10 devices. As of PlayBook OS 2.0, a full Python 3.2 interpreter is included in the system, and is currently accessible to developers. We're building a community framework on top of this runtime to allow the development of complete, "native" PlayBook and BB10 applications using Python!

Read more at http://hg.microcode.ca/blackberry-py/wiki/Home

Since we first proposed systemd for inclusion in the distributions it has been frequently discussed in many forums, mailing lists and conferences. In these discussions one can often hear certain myths about systemd, that are repeated over and over again, but certainly don't gain any truth by constant repetition. Let's take the time to debunk a few of them: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged. Often the command line can provide a more elegant and efficient solution when compared to doing a similar task with a graphical user interface.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/python-scripts-replacement-bash-utility-scripts

Ben Krasnow, Mechanical and Electrical Engineer at Valve attended a conference last Saturday on the 29th of December where he talked about their upcoming “Steambox” and new exciting hardware projects, that Valve will present in 2013.

Read the full thing at http://vglens.com/2013/01/steambox-is-linux-based-and-launching-this-year/

The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that's necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards.

Read the full thing at http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Open-source-Linux-driver-supports-3D-acceleration-with-all-GeForce-GPUs-1776089.html