Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz covers the FTC's special investigation of Patent Assertion Entities with legal analysis provided by PJ on Groklaw.net.

It is time to test the third sibling in the Ubuntu family, the one named Kubuntu. So far, we've had Ubuntu, which was somewhat bland. Then we also had Xubuntu, which worked like a charm, except for a kernel oops thingie affecting the entire range, a silly thing to coincide with the official release. The KDE version is next.However, unlike all other tests this spring, I will do something rather unusual. I am going to attempt to upgrade Kubuntu, in-vivo, from Quetzal to Ringtail, using the package manager's internal functionality. True, this kind of review will skip a lot of what I usually demonstrate in the live session and during the installation, but it will expose many other interesting little bits. In general, I always advocated against doing these upgrades, because they were buggy and often ended in a fiasco. What now, you wonder.

Some forks do better than others. In the case of the Madriva fork known as Mageia, it's doing quite well, this week releasing its third major update in less than three years.

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that. Or, what if, like Jake Epping in Stephen King's 11/22/63, you could make changes and script the past without fear, play around with some new Drupal modules, and quickly reset everything just by leaving and then walking back down the stairs of the pantry again?

Jolla Ltd. opened pre-order voucher sales for the first smartphone to run its Sailfish OS, an open source distribution based on the Linux MeeGo project. The dual-core, 4.5-inch Jolla phone features a gesture UI, Android app compatibility, and interchangeable "Other Half" back covers that switch user profiles.

Vim is one of the popular text editors of Linux. Because of its capabilities, there is a large fan base of this command line based text editor. In this article, we will discuss some impressive features of vim editor that can help you save a lot of time while working on vim.

Slackel Live 3.1 Openbox has been released. Includes the live kernel 3.8.8 and lots of updates from Slackware's 'Current' tree. Slackel Live 3.1 Openbox includes the Midori 0.4.9 web browser, Claws-Mail 3.8.1, Transmission, SpaceFM, OpenJRE 7u9, Rhino, IcedTea-Web, Pidgin, gFTP, wicd. AbiWord, Gnumeric and ePDFviewer office applications are included. Whaaw! Media Player is the default movie player, Exaile 3.3.0 is the application to use for managing your music collection, Asunder CD ripper, Bracero for writing CD/DVDs and more. In the graphics section Viewnior 1.3, GIMP 2.8.4 and Scrot the snapshot utility. It is very easy to put Slackel Live 3.1 Openbox in a USB thumb drive.

QuickLogic has released Android 4.1.2 support for its custom Parallel Camera Interface (CAM I/F) chip for TI's Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 SOC (system-on-chip). The new support, which comes in addition to earlier Linux support, adds Android compatibility to the BeagleBone's 3.1-megapixel Camera Cape.

With Linux, it is easy to customize many settings and features including appearance. Unity (one of many desktop interfaces) is no exception. Unity is the desktop interface that is maintained and developed by Canonical. Canonical uses Unity as the default interface for their popular operating system - Ubuntu. Users can easily change the theme, cursor, icons, and fonts used in Unity.

We mean, what's really advanced about an advanced distro? Firefox and Chrome are the same, whether you're in Linux or Windows, as is Thunderbird-and even grandma can usually make the jump from from Word to LibreOffice with little to no difficulty. When you get right down to it, the "advanced" part of a "not user-friendly" Linux usually has to do with either installation or configuration, and when did grandma ever do either? If your grandma's like ours, she calls you up to get you to come over even to do a simple little configuration trick with her Windows machine.