The BackBox Team is pleased to announce the updated release of BackBox Linux, the version 4.1!

This release includes features such as Linux Kernel 3.13, EFI mode, Anonymous mode, LVM + Disk encryption installer, privacy additions and armhf Debian packages.

MEN Micro unveiled the “CC10S,” a Linux-ready i.MX6 based multi-display controller board for touchscreens deployed in harsh, -40 to 85° C environments.

Imagine a humongous earth-moving rig prepping an oil shale site in North Dakota in the middle of January. You’re going to want a touchscreen with that, and it better be tough. The MEN Micro CC10S single board computer is designed for controlling 7- to 15-inch LCD touchscreens that must deal with the rough, tough stuff on a daily basis.

This is the second Libreboot laptop from Gluglug (a project of Minifree, Ltd.) to achieve RYF certification, the first being the Libreboot X60 in December 2013. The Libreboot X200 offers many improvements over the Libreboot X60, including a faster CPU, faster graphics, 64-bit GNU/Linux support (on all models), support for more RAM, higher screen resolution, and more. The Libreboot X200 can be purchased from Gluglug at http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/.

A new Linux kernel has been made available for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) and the developers are also tracking the current 3.19 branch of the kernel, which will eventually be adopted after it reaches a stable state.

Canonical, the company behind the open source cross-platform operating system Ubuntu, released its annual cloud and server survey this week that seeks to cast more light on the makeup of cloud infrastructure, how it is managed, and what is driving cloud adoption.

Canonical said it surveyed 3,100 customers, most of whom are Ubuntu server and cloud users, about the makeup of their cloud infrastructure and how it is being used.

Papyros is a new Linux distribution in the making that will use the Material Design style from Google. There is nothing to test so far, but the progress made by the developers is impressive and it's very likely that this will become one of the most interesting distros available.

Variety is an application that manages your wallpapers and is open source. You might ask, what's so special about that? Well, the truth is that you don't know you want one until you've actually tried it.

With the upcoming Fedora 22 release due out in May, DNF is positioned to replace Yum as the default package manager.

While there's been many DNF articles on Phoronix in past months, one of the aspects not covered much to this point is the dnf-plugins-extra package that's in its very early stages. Version 0.0.3 of dnf-plugins-extras was released today as a collection of DNF plugins done by the community.

Hyperscale Linux operating system specialist CoreOS said it is releasing its latest open source component for sharing and managing configuration data and other functions used in distributed systems.

San Francisco-based CoreOS announced its first stable release of etcd, or “etc distributed,” an open-source distributed key value store that provides the backbone of CoreOS clusters and the etcd clients that run on each machine in a cluster. “Our goal with etcd has been to make building and using distributed systems easier,” CoreOS CTO Brandon Philips said Wednesday (January 28) in announcing the release.

Windows users have Outlook; Mac users have Mail. What options are there for Linux users? As it turns out, Linux land is rich with email clients. I have chosen five of the best, fully open source email clients (with two exceptions) for Linux users.

Each has its pros and cons, and which email client is best for you is heavily dependent upon your needs.

A new version of open-source office suite LibreOffice is now available for download and the hands behind it are calling it ‘the most beautiful’ release ever.

Jan Holesovsky, leader of the LibreOffice design team, says “LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever.”

The productivity suite, which was spun out of the slow moving OpenOffice project back in 2010, has certainly upped its game in the design department over the past few years, with each release of the 4.x series adding finesse.

Google's Android mobile operating system has reached a major milestone.

For the first time ever, worldwide shipments of smartphones packing Android exceeded 1 billion units in 2014, a significant gain from the 780.8 million units that shipped around the world in 2013, researcher Strategy Analytics announced Thursday. Android dwarfed its second-place competitor, Apple's iOS, which mustered 192.7 million worldwide shipments in 2014.

GParted Live is a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution that has a lot of features and that can be used in operations like creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions on a variety of filesystems. A new stable update has been made available and the operating system is now at version 0.21.0.

Read at LinuxAndUbuntu

When we laid out our featured article on things you need to do after installing Ubuntu 14.10, we shared a few little issues we have had with the latest Ubuntu release. Well things got worse, and I decided to try something else for a change. I've been using elementary OS Freya as my daily driver since then. And I have to say, I'm mighty impressed so far. And the fact that Freya is still very much in beta makes the whole affair all the more interesting. A list of reasons why I prefer elementary OS Freya over Ubuntu 14.10 at the moment.

The top story today continued to be the GHOST vulnerability covered last night, probably because the name lends itself to cute headlines - most with a twist on "Ghost in the Machine." But elsewhere, the How-To-Geek said today that new users should stick to Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. He's not the only one, Tech Drive-in today listed seven reasons he prefers elementary OS over Ubuntu. Despite all that, Michael Larabel today reported on the improved performance of Ubuntu 15.04 on newer machines.