Firefox fever is spreading like wildfire, if the active community espousing the open source browser from Mozilla is any indication. SpreadFirefox.com is a Web site created by and for fans of Firefox. It's the hub of a quickly coalescing community dedicated to marketing and supporting the new browser.

You run GNU/Linux. You play games on it, surf the Net, write documents, and edit pictures, and all for free, thanks to the multitudes around the world who contribute to the open source movement. Now it's payback time -- time to give back to the global fraternity giving you so much. Here are 10 ways you can help right now.

OpenOffice.org Writer offers a wide range of sophisticated tools for creating complex documents such as manuals and technical documentation. However, when it comes to publishing the finished results online, your options are rather limited. You can, of course, use OOo Web to convert existing files into HTML, but you might want a more powerful and flexible tool to maintain the published documents online -- a wiki, for example, and specifically DokuWiki, which is designed for documentation.

aplawrence.com is mostly a big wiki full of original content about Linux and Unix-like operating systems and related information. Who knew it was there? Evidently quite a few people, judging by the regular activity. Tony Lawrence, the guy who owns aplawrence.com, says the site gets more than 100,000 visitors a month.

Email is commonly used in business today, yet only a small percentage of users take the time to guarantee their email is sent in a secure and confidential manner. If you're not part of that elite group, read on to learn how to setup OpenPGP with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail component.

You just installed your favorite Linux distribution and all your hardware is working. Your data is ready to go and all the default applications are working perfectly. You've even changed the wallpaper, theme, and window decorations. What's next?

Thibaut Varene didn't mean to start a discussion about free software projects and community standards. But that's what he did when he posted an Intent to Package notice to the Debian-devel list for a novelty program called Hot Babe. The notice resulted in half a dozen threads and hundreds of emails, and an ongoing debate about whether a free software project like Debian should accept packages that are sexist, pornographic, or otherwise potentially offensive -- and who and who would be held to account in any resulting legal action.

Commentary: What do we do when we have a substandard free software product that we could use, but would be more productive with a proprietary competitor? What sacrifices should we make in order to use a free software program? Originally the GNU Project was intended to provide a free (as in rights) replacement for proprietary Unix -- the dominant industrial operating system at the time. This project was initiated with the understanding that proprietary software would have to be used until free alternatives were made available. Today we have many free replacements for proprietary programs, but are they truly equivalents? Because GNU Project and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman's computing needs are met with BASH, GCC, GDB, and Emacs does not mean that the rest of us can safely cast off rights-restrictive software. Suggesting that we all switch to free software-only systems seems a bit pretentious and narrow-minded, considering the average user's desktop computing needs.

Long-time Linux users know that the kernel and most of the programs are the same across distributions, but different implementations vary in their hardware detection, default choices of basic software, package management system, availability of extra packages, third-party software, and bundled management tools. I was looking for a single distribution I could rely on as both a server and a desktop OS, and one that I could install and support remotely for clients and use at home for work and play. What I found was the powerful SUSE Professional.

Attorney Paul Arne writes the Open Source Law Blog, designed to make visitors aware of developments in the law and business of open source software. Arne is a rare bird: an attorney who can actually string together a few sentences that don't induce sound sleep in the reader. In fact, Arne has taken some issues regarding the GPL, copyright, and software patents, and made these sometimes complex topics engaging, fun, and easier to understand, all while bringing out important nuances.

While the traditional relational database market has largely resisted open source databases, the database world overall is a dynamic market full of change and opportunity. Berkeley DB and MySQL are notable open source successes in the embedded market and the market for database-backed Web sites. To that mix, db4objects hopes to become the newest success story, with its object database. NewsForge sat down for a Q&A with db4objects CEO Christof Wittig and Chief Software Architect Carl Rosenberger to get an overview of their strategy.

When Sun's Scott McNealy told us that Red Hat had the Linux market, we decided it might be a good idea to find out what Novell and Mandrakesoft had to say about that. We exchanged email with Mandrakesoft CEO François Bancilhon and Novell's director of product management and marketing, Charlie Ungashick, on the subject of Solaris 10, Red Hat, and how they compete in a consolidating market.

Should KDE port its applications to Windows? A debate has flared up in parts of the KDE community, filling inboxes and blogs with arguments long and short. The question is really whether the KDE community should encourage this, since it is already happening. In the tradition of dialectic, I present the key arguments for and against this venture in style of a Platonic dialogue.

O'Reilly's OpenOffice.org Writer, by Australian technical writer and active OpenOffice.org community contributer Jean H. Weber, is an enhanced and updated version of her earlier book, Taming OpenOffice.org Writer, which was the first book ever published about OOo. This book skips basic OpenOffice.org functionality and focuses on one OOo component: Writer. It includes a copy of OpenOffice.org, and has many useful tips for technical writers and advanced OOo users.

NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports 52 system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, significant security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals. To celebrate the release, we've asked several well-known NetBSD developers to comment on some of NetBSD 2.0's new features.

In this interview, Martin Michlmayr, the Debian project leader, talks about Sarge, the next release of Debian GNU/Linux. One of the most significant improvements in Sarge over Woody, the last stable Debian release, is in the new user-friendly installer. Others include the addition of Apache 2.0.52, GNOME 2.8, KDE 3.2, and XFree86 4.3.

Firestarter is a GPL-licensed graphical firewall configuration program for iptables, the powerful firewall included in Linux kernels 2.4 and 2.6. Firestarter supports network address translation for sharing an Internet connection among multiple computers, and port forwarding for redirecting traffic to an internal workstation. Firestarter's clean and easy to use graphical user interface takes the time out of setting up a custom firewall.

At times knowing when something happened is more valuable than knowing what took place. There are two ways to get time data: by observing activity directly and by observing that activity's secondary effects on its environment. In this article, we focus on the latter.

I hear this canard over and over: that it takes constant attention to make a Linux installation work right, which means the cost of administering a Linux system is higher than maintaining one running a proprietary operating system. While it's true that you can spend almost every waking hour tweaking a Linux server, network or desktop, most Linux users don't need to do this any more than most car owners need to adjust their tire pressure to meet the demands of every road surface they encounter in the course of a day's driving.

PlaySMS, a mobile application platform, was initially released on SourceForge almost a year ago. Since then it has been downloaded more than 11,000 times and built a community of more than 200 developers. Now on version 0.8, it is on track to release version 1.0 by the first quarter of next year.