Red Hat and Georgia Tech have published a study that measures open source activity around the world. The Open Source Index (OSI) is accompanied by an interactive map (pictured) that shows the relative rankings for 75 countries based on their open source software (OSS) activity.

Companies like Red Hat and Novell base a lot of their Linux business model on providing support to their big enterprise customers.  This model has been very successful, but no one has applied this, or any other, business model to consumer desktop Linux with great success.

Gnome Partition Editor (gparted) has really been fantastic. Using it, I have added, removed, moved, enlarged and shrunk all sorts of partitions, all without ever losing anything.

Form follows function. First make it work, make it efficient and reliable, and then make it pretty. If you make prettiness the priority, then the whole work becomes irreparably flawed.

The community is at work, I see. Not only is there a prior art search going on regarding three Microsoft patents asserted against TomTom, but now Andrew Tridgell has posted some code on LKML. You'll never guess what it does?

There are quite a few good launcher utilities out there that can make a great addition to your productivity arsenal. Gnome Do is probably the most popular, but if you are looking for something less flashy and more streamlined, try Launchy.

One of the up-and-coming features in Plasma, thanks particularly to Petri Damstén, is the geolocation DataEngine - a backend for determining where in the world the user is.

There is a new Linux file system in town, and some people see it as a menace. But the real problem may have more to do with users who ignore simple, common-sense IT practices.