Firefox benefits from a vast community of add-on developers and here are a few that will supercharge your every day browsing experience. One feature that distinguished Firefox early on was its support for tabbed browsing. But the default configuration contains some awkward behaviors when switching between tabs and opening new tabs.

If you use Linux on your desktop, and you also happen to have a BlackBerry handheld device, you’re probably aware that Research in Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry platform, offers nothing in the way of support for its devices on Linux — but the intrepid geeks in the free software world do. Thanks to to the efforts of the Barry and OpenSync projects, I just finished syncing my BlackBerry 8800 with my Evolution contacts on my Ubuntu 7.10 desktop.

 The next version of the Official Ubuntu Book is coming out in time for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and we’re looking for contributions to give the book a community “touch.” As with previous releases, the book will contain a “recipes” chapter of community submitted how-tos and other content. Topics in the 2nd edition include:

Those beefeating geeks at the BBC have come up with their top-tech choices for 2007 (iPhone, Facebook, and some strange light bulb). As usual with the mass media, they completely overlooked the most significant tech happening in years, let alone for 2007. We now turn our attention to what the BBC missed.

Historians may argue whether it was Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who famously said, "Après moi, le Déluge" ("After me, the deluge"), but what cannot be argued is that, today, Deluge is the name of an efficient BitTorrent client that you would do well to try.

Who says you can't play games on Linux? Of course you can! Well... not all of them, but at least some of the nicer ones, such as Half-Life 2, Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament. Today's guide will teach you, step-by-step, how to install and play Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (all part of the grandiose Orange Box) on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon).

New versions of favorite applications are always a little tricky; you want to keep up with the times without fixing what ain't broke. With that in mind, I took a look at the newly released Firefox 3 Beta 2 to see what we can look forward to when the final version ships in 2008.

The Economist makes three technology predictions for 2008, two of which concern web surfing and the third of which concerns everyone, whether they surf the web or not. The Economist's third prediction is that the technology world will open up:

I realized the other day that the flashplugin-nonfree package appears to be broken.  It’ll act like its installing but at the end, if you pay close attention, it’ll give an error about the md5sum not matching and give up.  This applies to installing the package manually or via the browser notification itself.  I wanted to post a temporary fix while we wait for the package to be updated.

GRUB, the boot loader found in most Linux distributions, lets you choose among operating systems and kernels installed on your box. Many people, however, fear that messing with GRUB may ruin their system, because of its many esoteric options, and configuration file text that often contains no help comments. QGRUBEditor can help you view and edit the GRUB boot loader from a graphical user interface.

"You must be mad," Gary Trudeau says in a self-interview in one of his Doonesbury collections, when he raises the subject of political predictions. "I only do post-mortems." As a journalist, if a very different kind from Trudeau, I appreciate the sentiment.

How long did you think it would take for an Ubuntu-based machine to make it into Walmart, complete with Google applications scattered all over the place? Apparently it was sooner than we had expected. As I type this, I'm attempting to download a copy of the OS now so I can get a feel for just how much Google feel this Ubuntu variant is really offering.

I just post this matter after I have asking from my friend, how to install "Internet Explorer " on Linux. Sometime, web base application didn't matching the code with others browser. Thats why my friend ask me to do that. I suggest him to use IE4Linux. This is the way I install the IE4Linux on Ubuntu 7.10(Gutsy Gibbon)

Ubuntu, as we all know is a great operating system. Its built on the solid foundations of Debian, it has a vibrant and helpful community and a multimillionaire astronaut as a sugar daddy. Things are good.

I wrote about the performance of KDE 4 some time ago, and I'd like to revisit it. After a few threads about debug builds and release builds on kde-core-devel I figured I was wrong in my previous entry, KDE 4 couldn't easily be build without debugging symbols. So my build WAS a debug build. But now it's possible to have it clean and fast, and I did indeed see an increase in performance when trying it.

mt-daapd is a DAAP server that works with most POSIX compatible operating systems. It allows you to share your music collection over the local network using the same protocol iTunes uses, so real iTunes users may peruse your music.

College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. To help bridge the gap, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed an OOP language to create computer animations using 3-D models, called Alice.

Ever wondered “what the hell is that mysql server doing”? Search no longer, My top is the answer. Mytop is a clone of top, a utility every sysadmin knows about, but instead of monitoring the system, it follows MySQL threads. In a nutshell, it’s a nifty command line tool that will connect to a MySql server and periodically run the SHOW PROCESSLIST and SHOW STATUS commands. It will then provide nice summaries of the results, and let the user apply various filters.

My 71 year-old father has agreed to try Ubuntu on his home PC. He has used Windows for years, but after his XP system became so infected with viruses and other malware that I needed to wipe his system, he's willing to try Linux. I've promised I'll reload XP if this experiment fails.

Season's Greetings to one and all in the Linux community, the technology world, and Internet nation. I've just finished the big paid-work project (mere hours ago), so it will be time again soon to blow the dust off this blog and get back to posting. So, post something, something... I guess I'll make a Christmas tradition out of posting links to online game sites that I've found enjoyable this year.

Ok, this time I’ll show you how to make one of these bad boys, an animated banner logo. Like this or this: [picture]. The first one is actually a bit trickier as it involves a lot more layers than the other one, but I’ll explain that later.

Lynis is an auditing tool which tests and gathers information from Unix based systems. The audience for this tool are security and system auditors, network specialists and system maintainers.

Back in the beginning of November I wrote a post entitled, "A Merry Ubuntu Christmas". The idea of the post was to help spread the word about Ubuntu by asking people to consider giving it on CD as a Christmas gift to family, friends and colleagues.

As promised, the second part of this series presents still more commercially available music and sound software for Linux. Come see (and hear) what your money will buy...

3D computer graphics software refers to programs used to create 3D computer-generated imagery. There are typically many stages in the "pipeline" that studios use to create 3D objects for film and games, and this article only covers some of the software used.