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In the open source community, there are several efforts to develop robots that look and/or act like humans, performing interesting and useful tasks. They're not C3PO at this stage of their development, but they show tremendous promise, especially if more open source contributions are made to the projects.

Few recent trends in storage have had as much momentum as Network Attached Storage (NAS). A NAS device can make a network more efficient and secure by supplying file-based data storage services to networked devices, or it can be used for applications such as streaming media. FreeNAS is free, lightweight, open source network-attached storage server software, based on FreeBSD. You can find a good tutorial on how to set up a free NAS server with it here. We recently caught up with Olivier Cochard-Labbe, FreeNAS founder, and Volker Theile, project administrator.

In an interesting post on Lifehacker, the editors ask the readers "Why did you switch to Linux?" The question drew quite a lot of interesting responses, including some very offbeat reasons for why people made the switch. If you're under the impression that people switch solely for rebellious or "fight the man" reasons, here are some of the more interesting responses and trends that they point to.

Xen.org, which is behind the open source Xen virtualization project, is out with its new Xen 3.3 engine. You can download it now, and grab a PDF datasheet as well. Xen 3.3 is faster and more scalable than previous versions, and has better graphics capabilities. It targets more types of chipsets--from supercomputing to handheld chipsets. Yes that's right, handhelds. The new Xen is smaller than ever. What else is under the hood?

Intel is pushing forward with its Moblin mobile Internet and Linux project, focused on mobile and automotive Internet devices based on Atom processors. Its latest move is acquiring OpenedHand, which provides software development and consulting services, in addition to maintaining several ongoing projects focused on mobile and embedded Linux. OpenedHand's team maintains and contributes development efforts to the Matchbox window manager (on Nokia's devices), the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, Poky (an embedded Linux distro), and more. In essence, Intel gets a distributed set of open source applications and Moblin development resources in picking up OpenedHand.

There's a lot of buzz right now about Ubiquity: Mozilla's attempt to explore command-based interaction within Firefox. Users of other command-oriented interfaces like QuickSilver or Enso, will feel right at home with Ubiquity: you activate it within your browser with a simple key combination, and then start typing. Depending on what you type, stuff happens.

Adium, an open-source instant-messaging client for OS X, has released its latest version (1.3). Adium, like the Pidgin IM client, makes it possible to use a single IM program, rather than run multiple clients simultaneously for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and several other networks. Adium's latest release includes support for the Facebook IM client, providing desktop access to this otherwise Web-only communications channel.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers." Product managers, of course, drive improvements in commercial and proprietary software products, and listen carefully to what businesses need. At the end of our recent interview with Sun Microsystems' Ken Drachnik, regarding Sun's GlassFish app server, he also called for business synergy to advance open source projects. Here are three ways that open source projects can benefit from a bit of Business 101.

Firebug is popular because it solves the long-standing problem of debugging Web pages. Before Firebug, the two main methods for debugging Web applications were the server's error log (to which all error-related data was sent) and the HTML source code (making the debugging output visible to all users via the "view source" function). But with JavaScript becoming an increasingly important player in the creation of dynamic Web sites, and with CSS (cascading stylesheets) determining the formatting, the combination of error logs and "view source" was getting painfully difficult.

A major problem with the officially distributed version of Perl on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has led to a firestorm of complaints among developers. The problem, which also manifests itself on some versions of the Fedora and CentOS Linux distributions, means that some programs will take more than 100 (yes, one hundred) times longer to execute under Red Hat than other distributions. A Red Hat engineer has indicated that it will fix the problem in its next release (i.e., Red Hat Enterprise 5.3), but has not said when that update will arrive.

One of the keys to the success of Firefox, the popular open-source browser produced by the Mozilla Foundation, is its extensibility. Developers have created a variety of add-ons to Firefox, ranging in scope from alternative menuing systems to download monitors to the popular Firebug JavaScript debugger. Earlier this summer, the Mozilla Foundation sponsored a contest, dubbed "Extend Firefox 3," that offered prizes to the best add-ons that developers would submit. Last week, contest judges announced the winners.

Have you ever heard of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement - the FLA? No, it's not an alterative to other free and open source license agreements that you're probably already familiar with, like the GPL, Mozilla License, and BSD License. Rather, it's an adjunct to any copyleft license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects. With the announcement last week that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on new prominence.

GlassFish is an app server project for the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, and is based on source code donated by Sun and Oracle. Its servlet container employs a derivative of Apache Tomcat. We checked in with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun, about GlassFish and open source issues.

All of the libraries in the world can't take away from the fact that JavaScript has long been seen as something of a slowpoke. This didn't matter much when JavaScript "applications" were several dozen lines long. But when your word processor, photo editor, or photo-sharing application is written in JavaScript, you really want to be sure that the language is running at top speed.

It wasn't that long ago that it was impossible to find good, free open source tools for working with and viewing video. Now that video runs rampant on the web, though, there are a whole lot of applications worth getting, even if you're currently happy with your video and encoding tools. Here are eight good applications to try.