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Does the idea of "advocacy" make you nervous? It does sound a bit scary, doesn't it, like those annoying door-to-door religious people. But it's not that way. If you're interested in helping people learn to speak Linux, here are a few easy, non-scary tips.

Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.

Less than 24 hours since it was released, Firefox 3.5 has already been downloaded more than four million times. According to Mozilla's Worldwide Firefox Downloads page, the major update to the open source Firefox web browser is currently being downloaded approximately 77 times every second all around the globe.

FrostWire is an open-source, free Java-based peer-to-peer client with support for the BitTorrent protocol, skins and iTunes. The latest release, 4.18.0, contains many improvements, bug fixes and several changes. See the official announcement here. Debian Lenny doesn't come with FrostWire included in its repositories, but installing it is very easy if you follow the steps below.

Next week, I'm taking part in a debate with a Microsoft representative about the passage of the OOXML file format through the ISO process last year. Since said Microsoftie can draw on the not inconsiderable resources of his organisation to provide him with a little back-up, I thought I'd try to even the odds by putting out a call for help to the unmatched resource that is the Linux Journal community. Here's the background to the meeting, and the kind of info I hope people might be able to provide.

Since the torrents of IANALs have been filling the Internet tubes with passionate arguments on Mono/No Mono, it seemed a good time to weigh in with an article written by an actual lawyer on the possible risks and dangers. "Without that explicit patent license, we certainly should prefer the community-driven and Free-Software-developed languages over those developed by companies (like Microsoft) that have a history of anti-Free Software practices."

Firefox 3.5 has been released and is available for download, the new version is faster than ever and come with many new features. This how to shows you how to upgrade from firefox3.x to firefox3.5

This article continues the series of articles on Fireall Builder, a graphical firewall configuration and management tool that supports many Open Source firewall platforms as well as Cisco IOS access lists and Cisco ASA (PIX). This article demonstrates how you can work with IP Service object in Firewall Builder.

Krusader is a twin-panel file manager for KDE which has been around for around seven years and was always a good alternative to Konqueror since KDE3 days. Its interface resembles the one of the popular file manager Midnight Commander for the console. Codenamed 'Mars Pathfinder', 2.0 is the first KDE4 stable release, bringing lots of new features and coming with the entire interface ported to Qt4 libraries.

A potential Oracle-Ubuntu partnership gets a little sexier when you throw OpenOffice into the mix. Here's why according to The VAR Guy.

Last week I made a summary of the current state of the Linux netbook market. Today I will show you that Linux netbooks are at a crossroad. They can reach a bright future and a significant market presence through 3 different paths: the smartbook path, the cheap path and the power path. I will explain how each path will lead the Linux netbook to market dominance in a specific niche.

For those of you using PHP in the development of web-sites or even on the desktop (like what we do with the Phoronix Test Suite), PHP 5.3.0 has finally been released! This major update to PHP5 brings support for namespaces, late static bindings, closures, new PHP extensions, plenty of bug fixes, and much more.

Transmission is a lightweight BitTorrent client built in GTK, with a clean and simple interface. Although most people prefer more popular clients like Vuze, Deluge or KTorrent, Transmission incorporates all the major features one needs for downloading torrents and can prove a very good alternative to those, especially if you don't need all those whistles and bells.

As much as I've railed against quickie distro reviews, I find myself trying a new version of Ubuntu in live CD form and writing just such a piece. I apologize in advance for not running Ubuntu 9.04 longer, but in this evaluation that has everything to do with the hardware I'm using, I'll explain why this is a wham-bam distro evaluation

This is quietly growing the base we need to insure the future isn't presented to our kids as a shrink wrapped set of chains. I have argued and presented the case for an organized advertising effort for the concept of Linux and Free Software for almost 5 years. That didn't do so well...too many politics and egos blocked the way. But this... This is working, and it's working better than I had ever imagined.

It's easier than ever for Linux users to avoid closed, proprietary applications and drivers. But life is complex, and there are still times when a Linux user's choices are not as simple as FOSS/non-FOSS; for example, multimedia is a minefield of patented codecs, binary blobs, and DRM. So what's a freedom-loving Penguinista to do?

Conficker is one nasty Virus! It is able to spread on the LAN, infect other machines, and even auto-update itself! Learn how scan your network using the open-source nmap tool, and identify machines which are possible infected with Conficker

The Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) developers have announced the release of version 6.2 of their PowerPC distribution that runs on the Sony PlayStation 3 and other computers with Cell processors, including IBM's Cell blades. The new release upgrades the 64-bit Linux to 2.6.29 and includes components like IBM's Cell SDK version 3.1.0.1, as well as OpenOffice 3.0 and Firefox 3.06.

Red Hat has launched a cloud partner program and Amazon is the first to join. But what exactly does the move mean to Red Hat partners and Amazon Web Service users? Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Fedora is a giant among giants, in the shadow of a giant from which it was born. But every giant is born of humble beginnings. So to understand the giant, you first have to understand from where they came. So let me take you through a short history of Fedora, and show you where it all began, and some of the interesting, if not curious steps that it took to become what it is today. To start with the very deepest roots, we need to look to the kernel that makes Fedora what it is: The Linux Kernel. That was first introduced in 1991 by a then college student named Linus Torvalds.