When 140 characters is all you need, the command line does it better.

Looking for a new flavor of Web browser? If the mainstream favorites aren't doing the trick, or you just want to test drive something new, we take a look at several of the "alternative" Web browsers for the Linux desktop.

Turning from Metadata performance to throughput performance, we examines the impact of journal size on ext4 when the journal is disk-based. Dig into the numbers and see what you can do to improve throughput performance.

Need a performance boost for your reads from and writes to a database or other dynamic files? A RAM-based filesystem is just what the good system doctor ordered.

Last week we looked at Firefox 3.6 from the user perspective. This week we'll take a quick look at some of the under-the-hood improvements for Firefox 3.6 for developers.

It's finally here! After about six months of development, Firefox 3.6 has landed. A bit too late for the original 2009 release date, Firefox 3.6 is worth the extra bit of development time.

Android has been updated again, but the list of phones waiting for an upgrade continues to grow. There is one lesson Apple can teach Android

Is the success of Linux directly proportional to its ability to integrate with existing proprietary systems like Windows? If so, should free software developers be spending more time integrating with it instead of building better software for free platforms?

Our final videos include Appro, 10GigE, and making sense of it all

Using the EventLogger feature of the BlackBerry to record important events

The past couple of weeks we ran the numbers on metadata performance for ramdisks and hard drive-based journals for ext4. Now let's compare/contrast the two journal devices and see what trends emerge.

Are you bewildered by disk management in Linux? Don't be. Here are the nuts and bolts of adding a new disk to your system.

Canonical is looking into selling proprietary software like Adobe's Photoshop and Apple's iTunes within its distribution, Ubuntu. This would undoubtedly be helpful for certain end users wanting to switch to Linux, but is it good for free software in the long run?

Contrary to popular belief, virtual machines are no more secure than physical machines. They are also no less so.

In the quest for more performance there are two new standards for SATA and SAS focused on doubling current throughput to 6 Gbps. While the standards may sound like a nice potential boost don't expect individual hard drives to increase in performance.

Linux's history can be measured in both releases 2.0, 2.6, and so on, and in its major distributions, which brought these releases to the masses at large. Here's my list of the top five major Linux distributions that had the most impact in the operating system's brief history.

In the never-ending quest for more performance, we examine three different journaling device options for ext4 with an eye toward improving metadata performance. Who doesn't like speed?

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Opera hasn't cracked double digits in the desktop browser market, but that doesn't mean the company is giving up. A few days ago, Opera released alpha builds of Opera 10.5 and made them available for download. If the alpha release is any indication, Opera is going to give Firefox and Chrome a run for their money, speedwise.

The next twelve months will be good to Linux and Free software, but we won't capture the market just yet.

Cloud computing, virtualization and mobile devices take the 'proprietary' out of computing--at least for the consumer. Just think of the possibilities.

Break out the Champagne and get ready to celebrate the winners of the Web in 2009, and give a few shots to the losers. Looking back on 2009 on the Web, we saw some tectonic shifts in the market and major developments that are going to make 2010 very interesting indeed. Grab your tickets and we'll see if you picked the winners for 2009, but if you bet heavy on Microsoft, you might be disappointed.

Another year goes by without the "Year of the Linux Desktop" (whatever that means) but that doesn't mean that Free software is standing still. What highlights have there been over the last year and what is still holding us back?