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Eric Geier reviews 10 essential Firefox add-ons that will make your cross-platform Mozilla web browser even better. He finds add-ons to help fix annoyances, save time, discover advanced functionality, and stay connected.

It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers. That is why we started the GNUmed Live project on sourceforge. This gives us the room we need to offer GNUmed in a form that allows users to try GNUmed without going through the whole installation process.

The "operating system for embedded smart objects", Contiki, has been updated to version 2.4 with new experimental platforms and improved stability. The BSD licensed operating system is designed to be small, highly portable and work in networked, but memory constrained systems, such as sensor network nodes. Typical configurations can use as little as 2KB of RAM and 40KB of ROM and Contiki has been ported to computers such as the Commodore 64 and microcontrollers such as the TI MSP430 and Atemel AVR.

For the longest time I have been less than a fan of KDE 4. From the initial release, up until about 4.3.0 I was, well, less than impressed. It was buggy; it felt unstable at all points; and what was worse, for any new user who made the mistake of using a distribution with KDE 4, it gave the Linux operating system a bad name. No one wanted to use a desktop that might crash at any given moment, suck up 100% of a system CPU, or lose data. It simply wasn’t worth the effort. But this morning I decided to give the latest iteration of KDE (4.3.5) a try and see what it had to offer. Could it make stable what had previously been so lacking in stability? And, more importantly, could it make me think KDE was once again a viable desktop for every day use. Let’s take a look and see.

Maybe you've seen your favorite extensions fall behind when new Firefox releases roll out, but you haven't known what to do about it. A new-ish Mozilla add-on not only enables technically incompatible extensions for testing, but makes reporting actual incompatibilities easy.

Eric S. Raymond wrote, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He calls this Linus’ law. The open source community uses this argument to assert that open source software is more secure than proprietary software. Advocates of proprietary software attack this argument on a variety of grounds, but here’s a little secret: Raymond was right. One cannot deny the logic. In fact, it is a tautology. If you assume that all individuals have a non-zero probability of finding and fixing a bug, then all you need is “enough” individuals. A million monkeys banging on a million keyboards will eventually produce Twelfth Night. Mathematically, the many-eyeballs argument, and the million-monkeys argument are equivalent.

The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 8x has always had the tradition of trying something new every year. This year is no different. SCALE 8x joins international Linux events like FOSDEM in Europe and linux.conf.au in Australia in providing Ipv6 capability to exhibitors at this year’s event. As part of its service to exhibitors, SCALE will provide both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to each of the exhibitors’ booths.

Intel and Nokia are teaming up to tame mobile Linux fragmentation. During a presentation today at Mobile World Congress, the companies announced that they are bringing together their respective Linux-based operating systems under a single banner. The combined platform, called MeeGo, supports multiple architectures and will be suitable for use across a wide range of mobile and embedded form factors, including netbooks and smartphones.

The LiMo Foundation added Adobe, Else Ltd., MobiTV, and SRS Labs as new members to its open source Linux mobile phone consortium. The foundation also announced the "imminent availability" of the new R3 release of the LiMo Platform, adding location-based services (LBS) and contact management features.

It's been just over two years since the last stable release, but the Gnumeric team is still going strong. The project has a new stable series 1.10.x. This release removes the 65,536 row restriction on spreadsheets and includes many new functions, better OpenDocument Format (ODF) support, new statistical analysis tools, and a new utility for searching spreadsheet files.

Last week, the KDE community officially released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, a significant update of the open source desktop environment and its associated application stack. The new version delivers some user interface improvements, enhanced usability, new features, additional software, and a number of important bug fixes.

Intel and Nokia are merging their open source Linux operating systems to create a MeeGo OS, designed for mobile devices ranging from handhelds to netbooks. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, MeeGo builds upon the core from the Intel-backed Moblin technology and adds Nokia's Maemo middleware elements, as well as Nokia's Qt application framework.

It might be a day too late for Valentine's Day, but it's never too late to show your love for Free Software. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) asked users to show their love for Free Software on Valentine's Day — but there's no reason why that can't run all year long. The foundation has come up with a couple of graphics ranging from full-on standard banner sizes to 80x15 buttons users can display on their blogs or other sites to show support for Free Software, and some ideas to spread the love.

Intel has tightened its alliance with Nokia by merging its Moblin mobile Linux platform into the Finnish phone giant's built-on-Linux Maemo OS. The combined platform will be called MeeGo - which will undoubtedly be satirised as 'MeeToo', given its clear intention to fight the rise of Android and iPhone. The two companies said MeeGo will "support multiple hardware architectures across the broadest range of device segment". So expect to see it not only in Nokia's high-end smartphones, but also netbooks, tellies, in-car entertainment systems and flavour of the month, the tablet.

From one point of view, Samba is open source high drama at its finest: an early adopter of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, and the recipient of an unprecedented release of formerly proprietary Microsoft documentation, thanks to a high-profile anti-trust case. Meanwhile, though, it's the low-profile software that implements the Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing protocol, sometimes known as CIFS. Samba powers every inexpensive NAS device in the computer store—without even a mention on the box—and comes with all the common Linux distributions and with Apple's Mac OS X Server. Today, as Samba comes closer to implementing a key Microsoft directory protocol, the two aspects are being forced together.

The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo, a merger of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo projects as a single project under the leadership of the Foundation. The news came in a posting by Linux Foundation's CEO Jim Zemlin who called MeeGo "a next generation mobile operating system designed for the next generation of mobile devices".

Adobe Systems is bringing its Flash-based AIR runtime to mobile devices, with Google's Android the first potential host. Adobe will show a preview running on Motorola's Droid and Milestone phones at the Mobile World Congress today in Barcelona, Spain, with general availability promised later this year. AIR combines Flash with components such as a local SQL database, running outside the web browser and is used by the BBC iPlayer Desktop and many Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. So far, it's not been available on smartphones.

The community outcry over the removal of OpenOffice from Ubuntu Netbook Edition has seen developers reaching for a rethink over the controversial decision. The first reversal earlier this week that saw AbiWord and GNUMeric step in as replacements. Now the decision has been fully reversed: OpenOffice WILL be installed by default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

LXer Feature: 14-Feb-2010

In honor of Valentine's Day we have Ken Starks take on nerd mating rituals, Carla Schroder actually gets emotional about Ubuntu, Juliet Kemp espouses the goodness of Xfce and Computer Bob continues his Debian adventure along with Google Buzz, Scientists releasing code and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

The organizing team of Akademy 2010 is looking for sponsors to help make the annual world summit of the KDE community a success. Akademy 2010 will take place in Tampere, Finland from July 3rd to July 10th and is organized by KDE e.V. and COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions. By joining the lineup of sponsors for the annual KDE conference, organizations benefit from meeting key contributors of the KDE community and getting first-hand information on the latest technological developments for the Free Software desktop.