The latest figures from French based Internet traffic analyst XiTiMonitor shows that the Mozilla's Firefox web browser has continued to take market share off Microsoft's Internet Explorer across the globe over the past year, with a significant spike in Firefox usage in December 2007.

Nmap, or the Network Mapper, is a powerful command-line tool for diagnosing network problems, finding security vulnerabilities, and host of other uses. Intricate knowledge of its use is crucial to systems administrators, but its many options and scanning methods can be daunting to even the most experienced of end users. nmapFE, or the nmap Front End, is a graphical interface for nmap that makes it easy to use even the most powerful aspects of the network mapper, and can be a life-saver when you run into networking problems.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 75 for the week January 20th - January 26th, 2008 is now available. In this issue we cover the upcoming Alpha 4 freeze, the release of 6.06.2 LTS, MOTU Council elections, an Ubuntu Demo Day in Swindon, UK, upcoming Hug Day, Full Circle Magazine #9, the Launchpad logo competition, and, as always, much much more!

Starting from last night, Photoshop CS2 can now be installed easily by using Wine... on any Linux distribution! "Photoshop CS/CS2 should now work, please help us testing it" - said the wonderful people behind the Wine project. Therefore, I've updated my Ubuntu 7.10 operating system to the latest version of Wine (version 0.9.54 - released on January 25, 2008) and grabbed my "dusted" Photoshop CS2 (a.k.a. version 9.0) CD.I've inserted the CD in the optical drive of my computer and installed Photoshop CS2 just like I was on a Windows PC.

Enter Audacious, a fork of the similarly-fated Beep Media Player. It works with Winamp Classic skins, satisfying my inner Microsoft fanboy. It can play back MP3 plus a slew of other formats. It's got a little bit of effects processing, some Last.FM support, and a whole lot of visualization plugins (like Paranormal!). Install this player, young grasshopper, and go terrorize ShoutCast with your listenership.

A first-person shooter (Commonly called FPS) is an action video game that involves "an avatar, one or more ranged weapons, and a varying number of enemies". FPSs render the game world from the visual perspective of the player character. FPS was one of the first genres to use key technologies such as 3D graphics, online play, and modding. Enhanced realism combined with graphic violence has also made FPS a common topic in ongoing controversies over video games.

addrepo is a simple command line interface for easily adding APT repositories to your sources.list.

gLabels is a nifty little GNOME application used to make business cards and labels. I used to do it in OpenOffice, but that was starting to become kind of a pain. To make it nice and easy, gLabels will work with a whole bunch of different labels and paper you can pick up from your local office supply store.

I have been traveling the last two weeks, and I have found how useful is wifi-radar on my Linux powered laptop. I have an IBM Thinkpad T30 with an Aironet Wifi internal card (for the records).

View Your Mind is a graphical mind mapping tool, which can be used for brainstorming, planning, drafting, gathering resources; or as a quick way to convert ideas into a web page or Open Office presentation. The UI is intuitive and takes almost no time to learn. When you open the program you are presented with a blank map with a yellow starting box already selected for your central idea.

Comix is a comic book reader that doubles as a pretty useful generic image viewer. It's written in Python and uses GTK+. It's got a nice sidebar thumbnail viewer, and the library view shown in the image above. It's also able to handle .zip and .tar files natively, which is really useful for those of us who compress our image directories.

1. Beep Media Player: MP, or Beep Media Player, is a compact media player that was originally forked from XMMS with the goal of porting XMMS to GTK2 and make use of more modern desktop standards. The original XMMS is based on GTK 1.2, which is now deprecated for roughly 4 years, and was deprecated at the time of the fork for approximately 2 years. This, and the fact that the developers were developing XMMS under a mostly cathedral-style model led M. Derezynski to fork BMP from XMMS.

Since Writely, being able to edit documents with others has gone from some fancy new technology to being the standard in most web applications. It was “the thing” to work on a document with three others at the same time, and still is. But the trend seems to stick with web editors.

One of the main reasons people move from Windows to Linux is the promise of greater security from malware on the Internet. Everyone knows you need to add extra security to try to keep a Windows desktop safe, but what do you have to do to accomplish the same thing on Linux? To answer that question, we asked a number of well-known Linux kernel hackers and a security expert for their thoughts on the matter.

Inspired by the command wheel in the Neverwinter Nights online game, Kommando is a floating command panel for KDE. Although Kommando's development is almost as slow as an official Debian release, and is only at version 0.5.2, it is already a configurable and convenient addition to the array of panels available in KDE.

The familiar GNOME applications that I have been using in KDE 4.0 since I started testing it all run without a theme. When you have GNOME installed as well as KDE 4.0, there’s a simple way to get your GNOME applications to use your current GTK theme while running in KDE.

It is quite simple to set up encrypted volumes using truecrypt. If you mount the encrypted disks at boot time, then an annoyance is having truecrypt prompt for password or path to key for each disk. You can specify these things on the command line while mounting the encrypted volumes, but for a very large reasons that is not a clever approach.

Is Linux on the enterprise desktop finally ready for prime time? IBM apparently thinks so as it prepares to deliver its next versions of Lotus Notes enterprise collaboration software and Lotus Symphony office productivity applications for the first time with full support for Ubuntu Linux 7.10 sometime in the second half of this year.

Hardy Heron Roadmap has over 130 new ideas that have been proposed thus far. I’ve examined each one of these ideas in detail, threw out the ones that weren’t interesting to me, wrote an explanation for each, and sorted the list into three categories:

Alexandria is an application for Linux allows you to sort and track your book collection. It makes it easy to manage your collection by allowing you to sort items into multiple libraries (for example, books at your office, in your home, or elsewhere), and adding books is as simple as entering its ISBN. Once you've setup your collection, you can even export it to an HTML file, to share with other users over the web.

The developers at Fluendo have been working on an open-source, cross-platform media center application called Elisa. Version 0.3.3, which was released last week, includes a complete user interface overhaul that dramatically improves usability.

No matter what operating system you use, be it Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, you're inevitably going to run into some problems. But, especially with Ubuntu Linux, there's a wealth of information to help get you through your crisis. Below are eight ways to get help when you have a problem with Ubuntu.

I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for so long that Internet Explorer looks strange to me on those odd occasions when Windows Update or some other automatic Windows setting opens it. There are lots of reasons Firefox is my browser of choice, not the least of which are the great free add-ons for the program that neither IE nor any other browser can match.

I have been using KDE 4.0 since the day ONE, and of course compared to my KDE 3.5.8 desktop (both on openSUSE 10.3) there are tonnes of features that are currently missing (or in the process of re-invention), especially when it comes to configuring everything that is about the KDE 4 desktop next to that I really dislike the current way of file management …