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Over the past few years many different browsers have been created and become very popular for example Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, however, there are many browsers which are generally unheard of among the majority of web users. Here are 5 of them.

On April 29, the University of Colorado held a conference on patents and free software. Your editor, having spent the morning getting some significant dental work done, figured that an afternoon devoted to software patents would appropriately continue the day in the same theme - only without the anesthetic. The following is not a comprehensive report of the event; instead, it focuses on a few of the more interesting moments.

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it? A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support. It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

The final version of the important Digital Agenda for Europe has been leaked – and shows that the European Commission has betrayed open standards. Where an earlier draft had an entire section headed “Open Standards and Interoperability”, the latest version only uses the word “open” once in the corresponding section “Interoperability and standards.”

I've been avoiding video editing for years. I've seen a couple of tutorials that always made it look too complicated. But recently, at a model airplane fun fly, I shot a lot of short video clips with my digital camera. I needed a way to combine the good parts into a video I could put on the web. I tried a few of the video editing apps available for Linux looking for something that was easy for a first-timer to use, and settled on kdenlive. I was amazed how easy it was to use, even for a first-timer. Turns out there was no need to be afraid of video editing!

Whenever a service rises to popularity, an “open” alternative is usually close behind. The problem is that most of these alternatives never go anywhere, let along get close to the service they’re trying to supplant. But the rate at which Diaspora*, the open project hoping to be the new Facebook, is gaining funding is getting too big to ignore.

Having successfully bricked not one but two Linux/Unix installations in the same month (Debian Lenny-to-Squeeze and FreeBSD 7.3-release), I jumped on the Ubuntu Lucid bandwagon early — starting with one of the alpha releases. Over the course of the waning days of the alpha, through the beta and now a couple weeks into the release, I've had a few issues to deal with, needing to tweak grub2, Ubuntu One, Gwibber, Totem and various GNOME settings. But things have settled in a bit, and I'm productive and generally enjoying using the distribution and all that comes with it.

When Sony issued a recent PlayStation 3 update removing the device's ability to install alternate operating systems like Linux, it did so to protect copyrighted content—but several research projects suffered collateral damage. The Air Force is one example.

Tired of slogging through Facebook's interface? Sick of seeing the Fail Whale? Cut through the cruft and simplify your social services with Gwibber -- a microblogging client for Linux that supports Identi.ca, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Mark Sobell again delivers the answers to common Linux administration challenges, and provides thorough and step-by-step instructions to configuring many of the common Linux Internet services in A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fifth Edition.

Google Chrome extensions pool is growing and growing fast. Firefox has been the primary tool for web developers for a long time now. Tools like Firebug in Firefox has taken cult status among web developers. But things are slowly changing now and a number of good alternatives for Firefox web developer extensions can be found among Google Chrome extensions too.

Despite the massive distraction of this weekend's theatrical release of Iron Man 2, CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announces it has completed the development of CrossOver Games 9.0 for both Mac and Linux.

Novell is close to launching Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 11 on the desktop and server. Which stands to reason. With all the new server iron being injected into the market, (and more to come later this year) and an impending release of Enterprise Linux 6 from Red Hat and the just-released Ubuntu 10.04 from Canonical, commercial Linux distributor Novell has to either put out a new version of SUSE Linux or crank out a service pack to keep pace.

Speaking at the Secure360 Conference here, Marcus Ranum, CSO of Tenable Network Security, said that the country's reliance on commercial off-the-shelf software has made us more susceptible to attack, not to mention less innovative and creative. Why don't we have a government coding office? We have a government printing office," he said. "Why don't we have a strategic software reserve? Is this putting us at a greater or lesser risk? I'm not sure. But our own software is probably a greater threat to us than anything other people can do to us."

Notify OSD has been in Ubuntu for a long time yet for some odd reason, it never supported any kind of customizations so if you wanted to change it's color or position you had to compile it with the new settings. But there is an Ubuntu PPA with a patched Notify OSD for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx which supports customizations via a simple text file so you don't have to compile it and can change the Notify OSD settings on the fly.

Custom versions of Ubuntu can offer anything from ease-of-use to a multimedia studio. Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, has now been released and work has already started on version 10.10, its successor. But, if Ubuntu 10.04 isn't your ideal operating system then it's worth taking a look at some of Ubuntu's derivative versions. Chances are that one those will suit your needs.

The front-runners for replacing the expensive MS Office are openOffice.org and Google Docs, but which one is right for your business?

What is Linus Torvalds' secret to managing the Linux development community? And is it a technique that can be applied elsewhere? You might be surprised by the answer.

Ubuntu was famous for being brown, even though it was probably half-orange for most of its storied existence. Mark Shuttleworth and Co. mostly blew that notion out of the water in Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS), which is purplish and dark. I'm pretty simple about these things, so I looked at what came with the Lucid install and ditched the default Ambiance theme in favor of Radiance. I also dumped the purple wallpaper by clicking on the Background tab and selecting the Cosmos slide-show background, which not only presents a nice outer-space view but periodically changes the image (hence the "slide-show" portion of the name).

I spoke to Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of the Office Business Platform, who runs the SharePoint engineering group. I asked him to clarify something has puzzled me: the licensing for Office Web Apps. From a technical point of view, Office Web Apps is an add-on for SharePoint; it does not require the paid-for SharePoint Server (success to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), but neither is it free – you may only install it if you have a volume license for Microsoft Office.