Today I’d like to talk to you about Linux Mint 8, AKA Helena. I’ve said this many times before, but the codenames still sound a little tacky to me. The distro itself is anything but tacky though and it’s been one of my firm favourites in the past. How would this release stack up?

Firefox 3.6, which had been expected by the end of the year, has been delayed with a release now expected in the "first quarter of 2010". The news comes from the Mozilla Wiki where "Ship Firefox 3.6" has now been carried over as a goal for the first three months of 2010.

Why Microsoft's "extortion" is a serious offence that mustn't be overlooked; How Free software deals with software patents at present

Packet Fence bundles many useful and powerful network protection tools into an attractive, integrated package. Such as network access control, monitoring, intrusion detection, VLAN isolation, DHCP fingerprinting, and captive portal. Eric Geier introduces us to this protective powerhouse.

The developers behind the XBMC project have released a new version of the popular open source media player. It comes with an impressive new user interface theme.

If you can't get tail command to continuously monitor a file, then read on.

NNTPGrab 0.6 Beta 1 now has support for plugins. With this it will be easy to add new functionality to the program in future releases. Right now several plugins are already available. The yEnc decoder, PAR2 repair and automatic unpack functionality have been moved to individual plugins.

Mozilla has delayed the release of Firefox 3.6 until the first quarter of 2010. The outfit had been promising to deliver the next iteration of its celebrated browser before the decade was out, but nope.