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The scrappy, passionate computer programmers of Mozilla.org say they can feel the momentum that comes from having their new Firefox browser downloaded 5 million times in one month.

Plenty of good news this week, ranging from the release of Portage 2.0.51 via the web contest winner and documentation updates to a reminder of the Gentoo presence at the upcoming German LWE. This week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter also contains a request for help from the Haskell team, an announcement of the first Gentoo user meeting in Cambridge, UK, and the regular services with community and press coverage, tips and tricks centered around the new Portage release, bugzilla statistics, and three new developers to welcome on the Gentoo team.

Thirteen months after taking the "first step" of a stategic shift toward Linux, the world's largest embedded software company is set to ship its inaugural Linux product. "Linux Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition" targets makers of telecommunications equipment who use Linux on the control plane along with Wind River's proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) on the data plane, and it includes middleware that lets Linux and VxWorks processes intercommunicate. Additionally, the company has updated its Eclipse-based Workbench development suite to work with 2.6-series kernels and has upgraded the tool to Eclipse 3.0, among other advances.

New Linspire Internet Suite Allows Searching for Every Word in Browser and Email

Unicode, or the Universal Character Set (UCS), was developed to end once and for all the problems associated with the abundance of character sets used for writing text in different languages. It is a single character set whose goal is to be a superset of all others used before, and to contain every character used in writing any language (including many dead languages) as well as other symbols used in mathematics and engineering. Any charset can be losslessly converted to Unicode, as we'll see.

Zack Smith announced that he has been working on an in-kernel 2D GUI for the 2.6 Linux kernel called FBUI. Based on the framebuffer, the project page explains, "FBUI is a small, in-kernel graphical user interface for Linux. It permits you to put windows in each framebuffer-based virtual console, to read keyboard input and track the mouse pointer." The core software measures in at a mere 26k, adding an additional 17k for a graphical library, 30k for a window manager, and 38k for a terminal emulator.

Spread Firefox has announced that at the conclusion of their New York Times advertisement donation drive they have raised $250,000, with roughly 10,000 names to be placed in the ad. The team expects to use roughly $50,000 on the actual ad itself, and the remainder will go towards the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox 1.0 launch activities. More info is available in the FAQ.

Mike Owens credits a little penguin for reviving his moribund interest in technology. A chemical engineer by degree, programmer by choice, the 33-year-old resident of North Richland Hills, Texas, said he was close to turning his back on computers as a profession five years ago. At the time, he was working and playing exclusively on Microsoft Windows machines.

Marketing maverick Rob Davis hit pay dirt with his idea of a consumer-sponsored ad for the open-source browser. Call it Mozilla’s October Revolution.

Before the dot-com crash, Eric Raymond became a millionaire instantly when open-source provider VA Linux Systems did an IPO. As a member of the board of directors and a major shareholder, Raymond made $41 million when VA went out on Nasdaq. When the crash came, he lost it all.

What kind of E-mail is landing in Martin Taylor’s in-box right about now? It’s probably not unlike some of the messages I’ve been getting in response to a story I wrote about Steve Ballmer’s Oct. 27 treatise comparing Windows to Linux (and, to a lesser extent, Unix). Microsoft’s CEO ended his note by inviting readers to respond directly to Taylor, the guy in charge of Microsoft’s anti-Linux strategy. Don’t you love it when the boss fires off a salvo, then puts you out in front to absorb the return fire? Then again, Taylor is the same guy who once showed up at a Linux trade show wearing a flak jacket. Maybe it’s time for him to break out the protective gear again.

To build the To-Do List application we will use to explore the myriad Java Web development technologies that are available, we'll begin with the backbone of the application: a set of classes that connect to a MySQL database to retrieve, model, and update a to-do list.

Webmail.us, which provides hosted e-mail service for small and medium-size businesses, will announce next week a raft of improvements to its service, including a major migration of its core e-mail platform from Microsoft Windows to an open-source platform.

A few issues back, in talking about client services for Linux desktops, I mentioned the two major graphical user interfaces for Linux: GNOME and KDE. A few of you wrote in to say that you'd heard Novell was creating a new GUI for its Novell Linux Desktop package which would be a blend, a mélange, a combination of these two. So I looked into it.

Many Linux newbies -- or wanna-be newbies -- get hung up over the choice of their initial distribution. We here at NewsForge have put a lot of thought into this, and have decided to share our best thinking on the subject in order to help ease you newbies out of the monopoly spread into the Linux world. The most important thing for newbies to consider is this: what does your choice of distributions say about you?

Continuing his quest for the perfect Linux desktop, Michael C. Barnes gives DesktopLinux.com readers an in-depth analysis of the technologies that make open source a great alternative to proprietary operating systems. Examining the various components that constitute a complete system, Barnes provides practical advice and instruction on how to improve your desktop experience and productivity with freely available software. He reviews desktop environments, communications using voice-over-IP, common applications, and more.

The German subsidiaries of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Novell Inc. are teaming to offer Linux-based products to the country's huge public sector.

After launching two of the world's first Linux smart phones, China's E28 Ltd. is now offering handset manufacturers the opportunity to license its software and hardware designs based on the increasingly popular open-source operating system.

Research: Businesses are going open source, but OS may still be too technical for most users.

MPlayer, a popular movie player application, has been in the 1.0 release candidate stage since September 2003. We caught up with some of the developers of this huge project for an update.