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Forget the OS wars, Apple and Microsoft do not need to wield any weapons today. Linux seems to be doing a good enough job of shooting itself in the foot when it comes to appealing to your average PC user.

Firefox has a lot of special features that are written specifically for Linux users. Akkana Peck shares some of her favorites.

As the primary gateway to voice calls, Internet browsing, audio and video applications, and imaging display, demand for consumer electronics are naturally increasing. Specifically, there is a need for more choices in hardware features, software applications and innovative user interfaces (UI) packaged together in portable devices that are customized in various shapes and colors. To meet this growing demand, consumer electronics manufacturers look to open source software and hardware platforms that allow unbarred innovation. In this article, we'll examine why and how manufacturers engage with the open source community, where open source Linux is and isn't succeeding, and how Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is participating in various open source projects and organizations, including Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

The writing is on the wall. Despite a major push to sell the much-maligned Windows Vista, customers aren't buying. Nearly two years after Vista's release, Windows XP remains the standard desktop OS in business, and Microsoft has extended its availability three times (currently to August 2009) due to customer demand. Microsoft itself forecasts just 2 percent growth in Vista sales in early 2009, after lackluster sales in 2008. And that's after forcing customers to buy Vista to get XP "downgrades."

It seems as though the wide-open door for the Google Android-based T-Mobile G1 wasn't nearly wide enough. Intrepid hackers have blown the door right off the hinges and shined a big spotlight inside the smartphone software. What did they find? Full root privileges to the G1 file system.

Sun is offering on Thursday its open-source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 release. The application server, which will be supported by Sun, is geared to Web-tier production environments. It will be the basis for the planned GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, also based on OSGi and Java EE 6 and due next year. "Glassfish v3 Prelude is our OSGI microkernel application server," said Paul Hinz, director of product management for Java enterprise systems at Sun.

The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

Maps are cool; there's no end of applications which can make good use of mapping data. There is plenty of map data around, but it's almost exclusively proprietary in nature. That makes this data hard to use with free applications; it's also inherently annoying. We, as taxpayers, own those streets; why should we have to pay somebody else to know where the streets are?

The European Commission has published guidelines for the procurement of open source for public administrations in Europe following public tender processes.

A Firefox developer has revealed that pre-release versions of Firefox 3.1 have been updated with a new feature. Officially called 'Private Browsing' it will be more familiar to many as the much talked about Porn Mode that caused such controversy when Microsoft announced it was being included within the forthcoming IE8 browser.

Multimedia infotainment devices are a hot seller in today's automotive market and can be the deciding factor in which vehicle a customer ultimately chooses. The automotive infotainment market has successfully navigated the initial wave of consumer devices invading the automobile, offering basic connectivity for consumer electronics in the passenger cabin.

More and more people are asking for security and how they can protect themselves and their businesses. I thought it might be useful to take a look at Debian 4rc5 and how to install an encrypted directory.

Small laptops are becoming a big problem for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows business. A new breed of lightweight computers called netbooks are beginning to crack the company's dominance of operating systems. Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., which together account for 90 percent of the netbook market, are using the rival Linux software on about 30 percent of their low-cost notebooks.

The VAR Guy abandoned Windows for Ubuntu Linux in mid-2007 because he was fed up with poor Microsoft product quality. But the blogger and open source advocate will be willing to give Windows 7 a try when it finally arrives. Here's why.

The pam_mount project lets you unlock an encrypted filesystem automatically when you log in. The same password used to log in is used as the key to unlock the encrypted filesystem, so you only need to type it once. Using this method, you can easily share a laptop and have only a single user's home directory unlocked and mounted when he logs in. And pam_mount can mount any filesystem, not just encrypted filesystems, so you can use it, for example, with an NFS share that you are interested in but which you might not like to leave mounted when you are not logged in.

Developers of the XDA Forum found a simple hack to gain access to root privileges on the Android platform of G1 mobile phones. The result is the potential of installing and using native Linux applications on the G1 and messing things up in the process.

Open source multimedia specialist Collabora is hiring developers to work on the nonlinear video editor PiTiVi. The Cambridge, UK-based company contributes heavily to the GStreamer media framework and other GStreamer-dependent projects, so PiTiVi is a natural fit -- and it fills a sorely needed niche on the Linux desktop. PiTiVi is a GTK+ video editor written primarily in Python and available under the LGPL. It uses GStreamer for audio and video processing, and the Gnonlin editing components. PiTiVi maintainer Edward Hervey is a Collabora employee, and the company employs another PiTiVi hacker part-time to focus on user interface improvements.

Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer, but think be for you take the offer.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, November 5, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a new president for the United States of America, your tax dollars at work avoiding the benefits of FOSS, an open source election at OpenSUSE, a new legal challenge to the RIAA's anti-piracy campaign, and more good Linux news on the netbook front.

Linux Magazine is broadcasting a live stream from the UKUUG Linux Conference in Manchester, UK (November 7 through 9). It's the yearly event of the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group. The UKUUG Linux Conference will cover a variety of subjects, including kernel and desktop development, tools, applications, networking and security.