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You may have noticed the odd bit of celebration around the magic billion downloads milestone for Firefox. Of course, as Mozillans themselves point out, that figure doesn't tell us very much; more useful, perhaps, are stats like 300 million users, but that too is only an estimate. And in any case, I think looking backwards is precisely the wrong thing to do at this point: what we need to ask is how do we get the *next* billion downloads – and why do we want them?

At a time when Cisco Systems has aggressively reduced its face-to-face event spending and travel budget, the networking giant will occupy center stage at Red Hat Summit this September.

A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.

Recently, five college professors spent an intense five days with Red Hat employees and other members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Red Hat called the experience POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience). The goal of the week was to show how FOSS could be used in post-secondary education, and to create a community to further the goal.

Two separate WorksWithU reader polls reveal an interesting look at competition and cooperation between Ubuntu and Google.

Microsoft is at it again: trying to redefine what "open" means. This time they want open standards to be "balanced" - for them to include patent-encumbered technologies. Which just happens to be incompatible with free software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Well, I am here to tell you, but before we launch into an explanation of what Linux is, we need to cover a few basics. First, I want to tell you a little about computer hardware, and then a little about how an operating system is structured.

In this article series by Reynante Martinez, we will learn how to go about creating really convincing still images in Blender with the help of Blender Internal Renderer.

Drizzle is a Free Software/Open Source database management system (DBMS) that was forked from version 6.0 of the MySQL DBMS. Like MySQL, Drizzle has a client/server architecture and uses SQL as its primary command language. Drizzle is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

So hats off to Red Hat, whose chairman Matthew Szulik is the subject of this week’s Global Business. Red Hat is built on the computer operating system software system Linux, devised 19 years ago by the Finnish developer Linus Torvalds, and then worked on by thousands of collaborators all over the world, to become a plausible free-to-use option instead of the big brands of proprietary software. Red Hat has found a way of making money out of selling free software, as the company puts it. It attaches paid-for support or structuring services to the Linux operating system, bringing confidence to business users of software which they would otherwise be nervous of replying on.

FlameDesktop is a place where everybody could browse in a really inovative and user-friendly way for good Linux software. FlameDesktop aims to be a good entrance door to the Linux world. Based on concept that things should be easy to learn and intuitives to everyone. Think of FlameDesktop as a kind of Synaptic build for the web. The main goal is to have all the good software for Linux and software of the Ubuntu repositories (instalation with one click - apt-url) posted on FlameDesktop. There are already good sites for browsing Linux software like http://www.gnomefiles.org, http://www.kde-apps.org and sourceforge.net, among others. But the thing is that some only post software related to a especific programming language like GTK, QT, Java etc.. and others are, in my opinion, not very user-friendly. FlameDesktop dont care about divisions of software based on their written languages, or if they are open source, proprietary, or commercial ones. If it is usefull and well designed it will be there. Sooner or later.

Arizona's Premiere Conference on Open Source Software Offers Insight on Leveraging Open Source Tools to Reduce IT Costs and Increase Flexibility in the Midst of Economic Uncertainty. ABLEconf 2009 Phoenix will be Saturday, October 24th 2009 at the University of Advancing Technology. Registration opens at 09:00 and the conference goes until 16:00.

If a lack of third-party plug-in support (i.e. Flash) kept you from trying out Chrome on your Linux system, then avoid no longer. The "early developer version" now supports many plug-ins, and they seem to work pretty well. Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome so do not mix them. Read on to find out how to enable Flash for Google Chrome

This article is based on a true story. The names have been changed to protect the individuals involved. It all occurred in a government department where an IT lady had a great idea about converting their computers to GNU/Linux. Let's call her Gillian. Gillian was assigned to research GNU/Linux...

This tutorial will explain you how to boot from a BTRFS filesystem with kernel 2.6.31-RC4 and BTRFS 0.19. BTRFS is a new filesystem with some really interesting features like online defragmenting and snapshots. BTRFS is an experimental filesystem, use at your own risk. The kernel used is also experimental.

Winesharer is my attempt to eliminate some of the file management problems inherent with Wine and the *nix filesystem hierarcy. Currently, Windows applications are installed in each user's home directory which provides security but at a cost of space - especially when the same application is installed multiple times for different users on the same system. By combining Wine with a union filesystem this problem can be eliminated. Winesharer is a collection of unfinished scripts I used to prove the feasibility of this. Now I'm passing the torch to the community so that they can burn this mess and write something that is actually usable.

CentOS is alive. Two days after a core group of developers posted an open letter to primary admin Lance Davis, threatening to fork the open source OS if he didn't discuss his apparent disappearance from the project, Davis has answered their call - and he seems to have quelled their complaints.

It is either a clever bit of strategy or a shambolic u-turn depending upon your view of the company, but Microsoft has now formally abandoned plans to sell the controversial Windows 7 E edition in Europe.

A compiler is software that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code).

Interoperability with Windows is hard. But somebody has to do it. And if you're going to do something, you might as well try and do it well (and try and have some fun at the same time)