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Mozilla has confirmed that the release of Firefox 3.0.15 and 3.5.4 have both been delayed until Tuesday the 27th of October. The minor security and performance updates were originally scheduled to be released on the 21st of October, but are being delayed for further beta testing. Details of the planned changes in each update, however, have yet to be confirmed.

What if you didn't need the Internet or a telephone system to communicate electronically with your friends? Imagine you could independently share electronic information with friends through wireless devices without external hardware or software. Think of how excited people get about checking in with friends using Twitter and Facebook. Now, with the right software and your current hardware, people could do those same kinds of activities in their local community--without any need for the Internet or the restrictions of Internet service providers. People could use their wireless devices for personal communications where there is no Internet or when there is no Internet, such as in a disaster situation, or when public networks are banned, such as in places like Iran. We believe that having independent control of our communications networks can be a valuable resource that opens new possibilities for communities.

If you are a Facebook fan then you must have used the official Facebook desktop application.The app is good but it’s not detailed and offers only limited features. You can’t see live notifications of new stories, can’t post a comment and if you need to upload a photo you have to open Facebook in the browser all the way. If you are not quite satisfied with the official Facebook desktop application or other desktop clients have a look at Facebook –Photo uploader. It is a new desktop client for Facebook, released by Adobe with really useful features.

After a few months of development, AWN (Avant Window Navigator) 0.4 is available for beta testing. In case you don't know, Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (or at least it used to, read on!). It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets. Version 0.4 brings a lot of new features and improvements, such as 3 new styles, extended mode, you are now able to place it on any side of the screen, new auto-hide modes and lots more.

Gimplabels is a set of scripts for the Gimp image editor that make creating labels and business cards a snap. It works part of its magic by depending on the GUI label designer gLabels

If personal computing is moving to the web, then where are all the lightweight Cloud focused distributions? Meet xPUD, a brilliant little distro that boots straight to a fullscreen browser. It uses a simple, unique interface, and includes everyday software such as a media player and more! We talk with the lead developer about what makes this operating system unique.

Today I installed digiKam and the 62 other KDE packages that go with it in a GNOME-based Ubuntu box. I never like to add 63 packages for a single app. But I did it. Thus far digiKam is most unlike any image editor I've ever used before. Mostly because it's not really an image editor but can do most of the tasks one would associate with just such an application.

This episode includes interviews from Ohio Linuxfest 2009: "40 Years of Unix". Shawn Powers, Doug McIlroy and many more.

In the first two parts of this series we learned how to build a custom Linux kernel. But there are so many options it's easy to get lost. Today we'll clarify some of the more important places where it's easy to go wrong.

Canada's big Internet carriers have scored a major victory, as the telecommunication regulator ruled it is okay for them to slow down some of the Web traffic travelling to customers' personal computers – as long as the companies explain ahead of time what they are doing.

[In typical Canadian fashion, a middle ground was struck here. Disclosure and privacy rules were imposed on the ISPs, which is good. - Barbara]

One of the reasons I haven't done almost any video editing is due to the relative lack of "mature" software for the job in Linux/Unix. Sure there are a half-dozen projects out there, and there is always the video-editing capability of 3D-animation app Blender (which gets a whole lot of developer attention), but when it comes to dedicated video-editing apps, there is the basic Kino and a bunch of others that don't seem ready for real, soup-to-nuts production work.

Sure, IBM partnered up with Canonical this week to promote Ubuntu Linux and open source desktops against Windows 7. But Big Blue’s other big open source move — a growing relationship with Digium — has caught The VAR Guy’s attention. Here’s why. Fact is, desktops no longer sit at the center of the IT universe. VARs are looking for higher margin recurring revenue opportunities — many of which involve network-enabled applications. That’s where the IBM-Digium relationship enters the picture. Digium promotes Asterisk, the open source IP PBX that is turning heads in many IT departments.

One of the interesting features of Mac OS X is its "universal binaries" feature that allows a single binary file to run natively on both PowerPC and Intel x86 platforms. While this comes at a cost of a larger binary file, it's convenient on the end-user and on software vendors for distributing their applications. While Linux has lacked such support for fat binaries, Ryan Gordon has decided this should be changed. This professional game porter has created the FatELF project, which basically brings the universal binaries feature to Linux. The FatELF file format allows multiple binaries for different architectures to be embedded into a single file. Ryan may take this even further by introducing the ability for Solaris and FreeBSD binaries to be embedded into a FatELF as well.

How can users protect themselves from the loss of important data when a computer goes missing? Well, the latest release of Ubuntu makes this not only possible, but frighteningly easy!

Appcelerator Titanium - the open source platform that lets you build desktop and mobile apps with web-happy development tools, including JavaScript, Python, and Ruby on Rails - has now embraced PHP. The three-year-old Appcelerator will officially reveal its PHP love tomorrow at the Zend PHP conference in its home town of Mountain View, California. Essentially, the platform offers a laundry list of desktop and mobile APIs accessible from common web languages. Tagged with an Apache 2 license, Titanium is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

A few days ago we found a nice blog post on the usability approach taken by the KDE community for the KDE 4 series. We have contacted the author to see if he was interested in doing a guest article for the dot expanding on his blog post. So without further ado, I present a writing by Daniel Memenode, web publisher and designer.

Last weekend a few Phoronix benchmarks were underway of the Linux 2.6.32-rc5 kernel when a very significant performance regression was spotted. This regression caused the PostgreSQL server to run at about 18% of the performance found in earlier kernel releases. Long story short, in tracking down this performance regression we have finally devised a way to autonomously locate performance regressions within the Linux kernel and potentially any Git-based project for that matter. Here are a few details.

To follow up on the big success of CeBIT Open Source 2009, the theme focus will get an especially attractive location at the trade show site in Hanover, Germany in 2010. The conference organization and Linux Magazine Online are now calling for open source projects to apply for free exhibit space at CeBIT Open Source 2010.

Teradata reckons its Linux-based Extreme Performance Appliance 4555 will deliver blinding-fast answers to business questions. To be available in the first quarter of 2010, the Extreme Performance Appliance uses enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs) for rapid analytic processing of huge data sets. The Appliance will run a 64-bit version of Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Cloud computing: you may have heard of it. It seems to be everywhere these days, and if you believe the hype, there's a near-unanimous consensus that it's the future. Actually, a few of us have our doubts, but leaving that aside, I think it's important to ask where does open source stand if the cloud computing vision *does* come to fruition? Would that be a good or bad thing for free software?