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As you may have noticed, Firefox 3 is released today. Excited by this prospect, the first thing I did when I got up was to rush to my computer to download it (yes, pathetic, I know). And what do I find? That only Firefox 2 is on offer. I go to the main Download Day 2008 site, and for all its flash/Flash zoomable graphics, I can't find any information about exactly when Firefox 3 will be publicly available, which seems crazy: the one thing this site should be doing is making it easy for as many people as possible to download Firefox 3.

Mozilla Mac developer Josh Aas has written a weblog post discussing some of the under-the-hood improvements specific to the Mac OS X version of Mozilla Firefox 3. Josh describes how Firefox 3 has largely switched from Apple's legacy Carbon API (initially created to make it easier for developers to migrate OS 9 applications to OS X) to the more modern Cocoa. He also details how Firefox 3 delivers native-looking Aqua-style form controls in Web pages and explains how this actually has very little to do with the change to Cocoa.

The trash project allows you to interact with your desktop trashcan from the command line. It lets users "undo" deletions made with the trash command in a similar manner to restoring files from the trashcan in a desktop environment. For experienced Linux users, the trash command comes in handy when you want to put a file into the trashcan from the command line. Because trash implements the FreeDesktop.org Trash Specification, it plays nicely with the trashcan offered by the KDE desktop environment. That means you can trash a directory from the command line and see it in your trashcan from Konqueror. Unfortunately, the trash implementation in GNOME 2.20 did not communicate with either KDE 3.5.8 or the trash command.

Novell Monday released updates to its Suse Linux kernel designed to make the operating system more efficient when running on top of VMware environments. The upgrade to the Suse Linux Enterprise kernel lets it take advantage of paravirtualization techniques so it runs more efficiently as a guest operating system. Specifically, Novell has built in support for VMware's Virtual Machine Interface (VMI)."The patch to the kernel provides increased performance and better interoperability," says Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for open platform solutions at Novell.

You have no idea what it takes to get an advanced copy of a book...particularly a book on a popular subject. I hope you'll all still be interested in my review of 'The Official Ubuntu Book, Third Edition'. Let me explain. A few months ago, I could hardly swing a cat (no, not literally) without hitting someone talking about Ubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron. All of the Linux news sites were just 'abuzz' with Hardy Heron this and Hardy Heron that. It was as if the entire Linux world (and sometimes beyond) really couldn't get enough of this long-awaited, latest version of Ubuntu. I figured that any book published about Hardy Heron within a month or so if its official release would be able to name its own price.

This tutorial shows how to configure a MySQL 5.1 cluster with five nodes: 1 x management, 2 x storage nodes and 2 x balancer nodes. This cluster is load-balanced by an Ultra Monkey package which provides heartbeat (for checking if the other node is still alive) and ldirectord (to split up the requests to the nodes of the MySQL cluster).

One of the arguments I often hear from people who are trying to use linux for the first time is that they are not sure if they can switch back to their original choice of OS (usually windows), if they are not satisfied with their experience with linux. These are usually the people who are not as tech savy or previously had bad experience while trying to install linux which resulted in destroying their windows installation. With each iteration of windows OS Microsoft has made it less friendlier for linux to be installed along with windows.

Untangle -- an open source security specialist -- has inked a partnership with N-able, a managed services platform provider. The deal further accelerates the use of open source in the fast-growing managed services market. Here's why, according to MSPmentor.

Quick reference guide for the most commonly used LVM commands.

This article shows you how to develop a composite application in Lotus Notes 8.0 that integrates the calendars in Google and Lotus Notes in one view.

While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's U.K. director of information management software. "We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."

Wide take-up of the new version would further boost the market share of the browser which is currently used by about 15% of net users. With the release, Firefox developer Mozilla is attempting to set a record for the most downloads over 24 hours. "It's a global effort to make history," said Paul Kim, head of marketing at Mozilla.

Zmanda CEO, Chander Kant, to discuss why an open source backup and recovery software solution is a key element of a comprehensive data protection strategy.

This is an interesting interview with Mark Shuttleworth covering his views on everything from Hardy Heron to hardware to the Microsoft-Novel deal.

HTB-Tools is one handy bandwidth management set of applications for Linux. Now, with WebHTB you can apply rules and do trafic shaping as you please, through a cool-looking AJAX-based web interface. Adding and deleting clients can be done in just a few clicks. Trafic shaping can be done with both public and private IP addresses.

"I regularly run and post various benchmarks comparing POHMELFS, NFS, XFS and Ext4, [the] main goal of POHMELFS at this stage is to be essentially as fast as [the] underlying local filesystem. And it is..." explained Evgeniy Polyakov, suggesting that the POHMELFS networking filesystem performs 10% to 300% faster than NFS, depending on the file operation. In particular, he noted that it still suffers from random reads, an area that he's currently focused on fixing.

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 assembled by the CentOS team from the source code of RHEL — is just about ready for release. Among the big changes: Firefox 3, which hasn't even had its final release yet, and Open Office 2.3. While the people at Red Hat may be downplaying any aspirations they have on the desktop, this new release, even though it's 5.2 and not 6, shows that they aren't relying on Fedora 100 percent for desktop users, many of whom are not anxious to do a major upgrade every six months.

As free software projects balloon in size, many struggle to create and maintain a sense of community. One of the projects that has been most successful in its community-building efforts is the content management system Joomla! In the last couple of years, its Joomla!Days have been held around the world. A particular case in point is this past weekend's Vancouver Joomla!Day, whose organization and use of social networking to expand the scope of the event make it a case study in modern community-building.

Here's what I like about Slackware: In the default installation, just about everything works ... easy-to-use console utilities ... a bunch of window managers ... long-term support ... slapt-get ... three major Web browsers ... great projects derived from Slackware ... default fonts that look better than the default fonts in Debian ... and an extremely fast way to run KDE.

Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it's the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable. When you mix a virtual machine with real software you get a virtual appliance. Some complete Linux distributions as well as specialized apps are available as virtual appliances. Thanks to the ease in packaging one, there's no shortage of virtual appliances around, if you know where to look.