The Spark tablet is a 7 inch tablet that will ship with Linux and the KDE Plasma Active user interface. It’s expected to ship in May for about $265, and it should go up for pre-order soon. KDE developer Aaron Seigo has posted a first video of  Plasma Active running on the tablet. It seems to respond well to touch,…

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The company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux software have decided to end funding for the Kubuntu variation of the operating system. Kubuntu is basically what you get when you take Ubuntu’s core software and tack on a custom version of the KDE desktop environment in place of the Unity user interface that the main branch of Ubuntu has used for…

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Chinese tablet maker Zenithink is making Google Android 4.0 available for most of the company’s recent 7 and 10 inch tablets. That includes the Zenithink C71 which gained a bit of attention recently when developer Aaron Seigo announced that it would be the basis of the new Spark tablet with KDE Plasma Active Linux software. While the Spark will come…

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Once upon a time operating systems shipped on a stack of 1.4MP floppy disks. These days most come on DVDs because the installer files can’t fit on 640MB CDs. And then there’s Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a light-weight Linux distribution focused on providing a fast, small, but usable operating system. TinyCore uses just 12MB of disk space and…

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A new tablet called the Spark is on the way. At first glance it looks like most of the cheap Chinese tablets we’ve seen in the past few years, but the Spark won’t run Google Android. Instead it will run an open source Linux-based operating system with the KDE Plasma Active interface running on top. KDE Plasma Active team member…

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For about as long as computers have had graphical user interfaces, apps have had menus. You know those things at the top of the window that say things like File, Edit, and Preferences. Now the folks behind Ubuntu Linux want to get rid of menus… or at least supplement them with something that may be easier to use and take…

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Before hackers figured out how to install Google Android on the HP TouchPad, people were using the 9.7 inch tablet to run Ubuntu Linux… sort of. The discontinued tablet actually shipped with HP’s webOS software preloaded and early attempts to run Linux didn’t boot Linux instead of webOS. They basically let you run Ubuntu alongside Android and run Ubuntu apps without…

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The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet has a locked bootloader, which has prevented hackers from figuring out how to replace the version of Android that comes on the tablet with custom software such as CyanogenMod. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to run an alternate operating system on the NOOK Tablet. In fact, you can now install and run Ubuntu…

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Popular Linux distribution Ubuntu is known for a lot of things — but long battery life is not one of them. Users that have installed Ubuntu on notebook computers that had previously run Windows or another operating system have been complaining for years that their battery life drops after installing Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu engineer Colin King says he’s taking a…

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It’s easy to root a Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet if you have a Windows PC. Xda-developers forum member Indirect released an easy-to-use script a few weeks ago that lets you gain access to hidden files and settings on the tablet. Once you’ve done that you can install the Android Market or make all sorts of other changes to the…

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While the web struggles over the importance (or non-importance) of Linux Mint surpassing Ubuntu on the DistroWatch leaderboard, it’s business as usual for the crew at Canonical. And with a new release deadline looming on the horizon, it’s time to start releasing milestone builds of Ubuntu 12.04. On December 1, the first alpha Ubuntu 12.04 was made available from Canonical’s…

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Ubuntu may grab more headlines than most Linux-based operating systems (unless you count Android, which uses a Linux kernel), but over the past few years Linux Mint has been nipping at Ubuntu’s heels. Today the Mint team released Linux Mint 12, which packs a number of software improvements and new artwork. For the past few weeks Mint has been ahead…

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