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Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all. You can also force the browser to use Gmail for mailto: links, discover a hidden "Easter egg" and more. So fire up your browser and get ready to teach it some new tricks.

Due to some issues with the PlayOnLinux's IRC server, the integrated IRC client now connects you directly at irc.freenode.com, on the #playonlinux channel other new thing, independent from the POL's version: there is one channel per language. So you can now join one of the following channels, depending on the language you want to speak.

In math, two negatives make a positive. In the fledgling world of desktop Linux, unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the case. According to reports from OStatic and others, Xandros is buying Linspire. Who cares, you ask?

Freedom has many facets. I wanted to capture many of these in this song I composed and uploaded to YouTube.

One of India's 28 states plans to distribute 100,000 Linux laptops to students there. It sounds like Tamil Nadu's volume purchasing agent decided to use Linux exclusively after being put off by Microsoft's bundling tactics for academic users. The laptops will be purchased in volume by Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (ELCOT), which works as a volume purchaser for students in the state. Tamil Nadu is the Southern-most of India's 28 states, and home to the technology center of Chennai (formerly known as "Madras"). ELCOT says it will purchase more than 100,000 laptops this year, selling them to Indian students for about $800, a considerable mark-down compared to retail value, it says.

Big Buck Bunny is the colorful product of the Peach open movie project: an animated short released online and on DVD. But in addition to the 'toon itself, Peach has produced an altogether different yield: improvements to the Blender 3-D modeling application. Like its predecessor Project Orange, Peach pushed the open source tool forward with the demands of a real-world media production, in a way that hobbyist usage cannot. Could other free software projects use the same model?

NetGear has announced an 802.11g WiFi router and access point made to be hacked. Seemingly created in homage to LinkSys's hacker-friendly "WRT54GL," the WGR614L offers fairly generous complements of CPU power, RAM, and Flash, and supports several commercial and community-supported alternative Linux-based router distributions.

In what seems like a battle of ants in a case full of lions, Practical Technology has learned that Xandros has bought Linspire. "In an announcement that was sent out today, June 30, to Linspire stockholders, CEO Larry Kettler wrote that the stockholders had decided to sell all of Linspire's assets. This deal specifically includes Linspire, Freespire, and the company's distribution agnostic CNR (Click 'N Run) desktop installation platform." Not everyone is very happy with this one, though.

According to Microsoft, Windows XP died on June 30th when it stopped sending it to the likes of Dell and HP, as well as ceasing shrink-wrapped distribution. According to Dell, new buyers can take a 'Windows Vista Bonus' machine: a PC with a copy of Windows XP pre-installed instead...

One of Firefox's key promotional advantages is that it runs on Windows. Ubuntu, too, can make itself run "on" Windows, at least for trying it out.

SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source MPlayer. The version I decided to test in this review is 0.6.1 from SVN. SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. You can also play mounted images of DVDs by pointing to the directory which contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. It can also play videos from a given URL location. One of the great features SMPlayer has is the ability to resume a movie after you closed it and restarted the application.

Here is a step-by-step guide that should save you a few hours.

The following article is about using a HP-530 laptop with Slackware-12.1 and Lantech wireless router with WEP encryption. It can be used as a general tutorial for configuring your WiFi manually in Linux.

There is no dearth of software that can help you run that indispensable Windows app over Linux. Win4Lin has managed to survive through the years as an inexpensive tool for people who like to pay for support. The recently released Win4Lin 5, available for $30 a pop, has shrugged off the shortcomings of its predecessor and delivers on its "near native-performance" promise. When I reviewed Win4Lin 4 last year, the software wasn't easy to work with, thanks to its half-baked graphical user interface and over-reliance on the command line. It was on the edge of usability, with poor hardware support. Win4Lin 5 promises improvements on all these fronts, along with special pricing for desktop users, especially those running Ubuntu.

Last.fm is an open-source application licensed under the GPL, allowing you to listen to Last.fm radio stations and submit the songs in the same time. For those of you unfamiliar with Last.fm, it's a great social music community, allowing you to submit songs you currently listen to, statistics, forums for bands or music styles (or even more: Amarok has a group, most major distributions also, and you can start your own group about anything, match people and discuss), together with information for each artist, open for anyone to edit, just like the Wikipedia style.

There is an extensive amount of free audio software available on the Linux platform which is both mature and sophisticated. In fact, Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world.

A few days ago I reviewed BasKet, the wonderful KDE application for taking notes, so today I decided upon Tomboy, which is an application for GNOME. Tomboy does not provide as many features as BasKet, but it might be the right choice for those using GNOME. It provides global hotkeys, spell-checking while typing, and several options for formatting the text, like highlighting. It can be embedded in the system tray and it uses a low amount of resources.

A free and simple piece of open source software is helping manage the spread of disease in developing countries. The Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) is providing countries, such as South Africa, with an online patient medical record system.

Super Micro, are you familiar with them? Chances are that unless your focus is on the workstation and server markets, you probably haven't heard of them. However, this company has been around since 1993 and they have been producing a variety of different motherboards, servers, computer enclosures, and other products to fit the needs of their customers. Super Micro manufacturers a variety of different Intel server motherboards -- and they are one of the few that offers quad-socket Xeon motherboards -- but they also have a growing selection of Core 2 desktop motherboards. The C2SBX+ is one of their newest motherboards and with our first Super Micro review at Phoronix we are looking at this product. This Intel X48 motherboard is designed for digital entertainment, gaming enthusiasts, and other high-end applications.

The new, record breaking, Firefox 3 web browser is the fastest version of Firefox yet. But are you really getting the biggest bang for your buck (metaphorically speaking, because, of course, Firefox is free?) You can eke out a better disk and memory footprint and higher speeds by building it yourself from the original source code. I'll show you how, with genuine metrics to prove it.