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On December 16, 2004, the appearance of a donor-sponsored ad for Firefox in The New York Times became a landmark in the history of free and open source software. The first of its kind, the campaign received widespread attention, while the ad itself was seen as a sign that FOSS had entered the mainstream consciousness. Since then, similar campaigns have been organized both in the FOSS communities and in online social actions groups.

Who's the Ajax king? With applications like Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Spreadsheets, Google has taken a decisive lead in creative Ajax-based applications. But is Google still the Ajax king?

Mike Melanson, the lead engineer on Adobe's Flash Player team, and one of the talented people behind the Linux Flash Player agreed to do an e-mail interview with me about Linux and Flash.

I will turn down free beer software in favor of freedom software when both exist. If you don't know the difference, that's OK. You cannot see the source code for the video drivers from ATI, for example. You can get them for free but they are not freed. The same with Adobe Acrobat Reader and plugins for the Firefox web browser.

When Carsten Niehaus began studying chemistry and biology in late 2000, the lack of Linux-compatible reference materials frustrated him. When his search for an interactive Periodic Table of Chemical Elements came up empty, he decided to write his own. Now Kalzium has become a part of the KDE edutainment package and is used by students, teachers, and researchers worldwide.

YouTube clips are everywhere these days, and I must admit I'm addicted to the site. Nevertheless, I've had a couple of small annoyances with YouTube videos. I wanted to be able to play my favorite ones on standalone DVD/DivX players. I also found I couldn't go backwards or forwards when playing the site's Flash videos with MPlayer. For those reasons, I decided to convert my favorite YouTube videos to DivX or XviD formats. Here's how you can do the same.

The Telecoms Action Group launched its national consumer advocacy campaign today, calling on South African businesses and private individuals to take out a full page advert in a national newspaper protesting the lack of alternatives in the SA telecommunications sector.

This guide shows how to configure internet access through GPRS/EDGE, using bluetooth connection with your GSM phone. The article is using gentoo and Nokia 6310i phone, but this will work with any distribution and any bluetooth capable phone.

If you are the kind of person who believes in the phrase "More is Good," then get ready to be bogged down by the impressive new set of features that Linux kernel 2.6 boasts. Since the very beginning, Linux is known for its stability, and kernel version 2.6 continues the saga.

I have to confess, I was looking forward to reviewing this book for a personal reason...I recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. I took a rather secret thrill in deleting Windows XP Professional and replacing it with Ubuntu.

Nokia is to add the open source Sourcefire intrusion prevention system (IPS) to its range of IP security appliances. Sourcefire's IPS includes the widely used Snort system. Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system that uses a rule-driven language.

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income.

Zend develops products for PHP development, and the company just hauled in $20 million in Series D Funding; a "strong candidate" for the open CEO job may be named in the coming weeks.

This article is from a new book published by No Starch Press:Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook by Rickford Grant. This excerpt covers using your iPod with Ubuntu and it is full of tips, tricks, and helpful pointers. Reprinted with permission from No Starch Press, all rights reserved. More information about the book and its author is at the end of the article.

Eric Raymond advocates pragmatism and compromise with respect to our dealings with the owners of proprietary multimedia codecs. According to him, we need to ask Apple and others to license their technology so we can hook up iPods to our machines running Linux. That will entice others to start using Linux, or so goes his reasoning. But this reasoning is flawed. First and most importantly, it's flawed because we're so close to the gold, so to speak.

The results of DesktopLinux.com's 2006 Desktop Linux Market survey are in, and the votes are all tallied. This first article of a series offers a perspective on how the various desktop Linux distributions fared, and why.

In the first two parts of this series we took a tour of the Soekris 4521 single-board computer and installed the Pyramid Linux operating system. Now it's time to build a good stout iptables firewall.

About a year ago, I was introduced to Linux by a technosavvy friend at work. I was, to say the least, a somewhat unwilling participant in the journey into Linuxland. But, I was really forced into it by our friends at Microsoft. Here's what happened to me... it may be a familiar story.

Internet Initiative Japan, an internet access and network solutions provider in Japan, has begun free distribution of the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client with an XML-based policy control mechanism. The service is being made available to individual users of IIJ's internet access services IIJ4U and IIJmio.