Fon has launched a Kickstarter project for a Linux-based “Gramofon” device that streams music from multiple mobile devices, and also acts as a WiFi hotspot.

With 26 days to go, Gramofon has yet to reach the halfway mark in funding toward its ambitious $250,000 Kickstarter goal. Fon plans to ship its first 6,500 units in July no matter what, but if the project is funded, it will expand its distribution, with later delivery dates. The Gramofon is now available for $30 (black) or $40 (white), with prices eventually rising to $50 and $60, respectively.

A major version bump between v1.x.x series and the upcoming v2.0.0
means there are a handful of backward incompatible UI improvements,
but for most people, all the tricky preparation for the transition
would have been already done for you and the upcoming release just
flips the default. Unless you were living in a cave and have stayed
with an ancient version of Git (e.g. one before 1.8.2 that was
released more than a year ago) for all these times, that is---those
of you may want to double check the backward compatibility notes
section at the beginning of the draft release notes.

The Wine development release 1.7.17 is now available. What's new in this release (see below for details): - More implementations for the Task Scheduler. - C runtime made more compatible by sharing source files. - Fixes in the Mac OS X joystick support. - Various bug fixes.

For our latest AM1 platform testing with the Athlon 5350 Kabini APU is comparing its Radeon R3 Graphics against an assortment of discrete NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards while running Ubuntu 14.04 Linux. For this comparison there's thirteen graphics processors being compared with the latest Linux GPU drivers.

Lately, Ubuntu has been getting a lot of flack from other Linux users for going its own way. For example, Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, eventually plans on using its own Mir display server instead of the more broadly supported Wayland, and that's annoyed many non-Ubuntu Linux developers.

That "inside baseball" criticism aside, I've found the latest release of Ubuntu 14.04 , Trusty Tahr, to be an outstanding Linux desktop both for new users and for professionals.

Canonical eventually wants to create a single operating system that can be installed across desktops, phones, and tablets, with a different interface presented on each device. That convergence hasn't been completed yet, so with 14.04 (codenamed "Trusty Tahr") there will be separate downloads for the mobile editions. "Full convergence means that the same code for operating systems and applications will be running on all types of devices, from phones to tablets to desktops, and even both smaller and larger devices," Ubuntu Engineering VP Rick Spencer told Ars in an e-mail. "Convergence is still a work in progress, and we will continue to move the code to the desktop as it is ready in each release."

My 19-year-old daughter bought herself a new computer without any of my input. She opted to go with an ASUS running Windows 8. The second she booted up her new machine, her first reaction was "This is not good." The Windows 8 tile interface felt like a toy (even using a touch screen). From that point on, her opinion was jaded, and she wound up returning the laptop.

Her previous laptop ran Ubuntu 13.10.

My point is that it only took her a few seconds to form an opinion about Windows 8. That opinion was based completely on how Windows 8 looked, and she couldn't get beyond it.

One glance at Ubuntu 14.04 (Figure A), and her first reaction was "Wow, that looks great!"

• Opteron X Berlin runs Fedora Linux

  Berlin is the first 28nm-based CPU and APU product from AMD for the Opteron server market and this APU is supposed to replace Opteron 3300 series based on 4 to 8 Piledriver cores. Berlin has four Steamroller cores, but its APU supports HSA and it theoretically should be able to run some parallel computing applications much faster.

• AMD Shows Off x86 APU Server Running Fedora Linux

Mozilla has been receiving positive feedback in the Latin American countries where is has launched the Firefox mobile OS given that users can access more applications on the open web than in a closed OS.

• Some Perspective on Heartbleed®
• Microsoft is Leaving Windows — Including Vista 8.1 — Vulnerable to Non-Government Crackers, Not Only to NSA
• Links 17/4/2014: Android RDP, New Ubuntu, RHEL 7 Milestone

• 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.

OpenOffice offers free and open-source document, spreadsheet, presentation, vector graphics, and database creation tools, along with a mathematical formula editor. More than 750 extensions and over 2,800 templates are available for the productivity suite at SourceForge.

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.

Yes, you can install this release on your computers and servers safely in the knowledge that you’ll be getting critical security updates and patches as and when they’re issued. Plus, every so often, a new Hardware Enablement Stack (read: Linux kernel supporting new hardware) will be issued to let you get the most our of your hardware and accessories.

The lengthy FreeBSD Q1'2014 report covers the state of various FreeBSD projects like using the LLVM/Clang compiler, FreeBSD for ARM, Intel graphics support on FreeBSD, and many other topics on various FreeBSD projects.

ownCloud, the open source platform for deploying cloud services using internal enterprise infrastructure, said it can scale just as well as traditional public cloud environments, while keeping data much more private. That's the company's conclusion based on testing results of ownCloud running on Red Hat (RHT) Storage, which are on display at this week's Red Hat Summit.

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It was in October 2013 when Motorola, for the first time, introduced us to Project Ara – an attempt at making modular smartphones. The goal was to change the future of smartphones by building a smartphone system which is customisable, upgradeable and open at the hardware level. And it just might, as Google‘s modular Gray Phone (aka Project Ara) will be made available in January 2015 for around $50. (Though Motorola was later acquired by Chinese company Lenovo, Google got to keep the patents as well as Project Ara at Mountain View.)

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Today's news search might have been a bit of a bust if not for the release of KDE 4.1.3 yesterday. This release is said to bring major updates as well as new features and bug fixes. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols posted some tips and tricks for using Linux Mint. And finally, an orphanage is using Linux to teach children about computers and programming.

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