OStatic

There appears to be no stopping the success Asus is having with its Eee PC subnotebooks. The company is forecasting this week that it will nearly double shipments of the svelte, low-cost machines in the second quarter. Shipments will rise to between 1.2 million to 1.3 million units, the company says, and it expects to move a whopping 5 million units this year. To put that in perspective, Asus shipped 350,000 units in the fourth quarter. Originally all Linux-based, the company will deliver a Windows-based Eee PC in early May. Can we expect the Linux versions to stick around?

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco today, Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker gave an address on opening the mobile web, which Webware did a nice job of analyzing. Many people have been wondering if Mozilla will deliver a version of the Firefox browser to work with the many Linux-based phones currently in the works, including phones based on Google's Android platform. While Baker didn't concretely confirm those details, she did discuss an upcoming mobile browser from Mozilla, to arrive later this year, code-named Fennec. (A Fennec is a small fox--get it?)

Star Wreck Studios, based in Finland, has built an open source platform that gives anybody the chance to make a film at no cost.....The new 8.04 version of the Ubuntu Linux distibution is out. Code-named Hardy Heron, it's available with long-term support.....Bill Gates is drawing some criticism for some allegedly incorrect comments about open source licensing.....What does Microsoft's new Live Mesh mean for open source?.....Looking for free, open source disk encryption software? TrueCrypt is for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.....

Get your OSS education, people. While documentation, including tutorials, is often a weakness with open source applications--even very established ones--the good news is that there are some outstanding free tutorials on the web.

Sometimes these are delivered by the community behind particular projects, and sometimes they are from enthusiasts and other third parties. In this post, I'll round up good, free learning resources--including videos and demos--for top-notch OSS apps, including GIMP, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, SugarCRM, web development languages and more. A little time spent working on your skills at these sites will pay excellent long-term dividends.

Camino, the open source Mac browser based on the Gecko layout engine that bills itself as having Mozilla Power, Mac Style is out in a new version 1.6. The browser features feed detection, integrated search, saved sessions, and spell checks.

Well-liked for its snappy performance, Camino doesn't have the market share that Firefox does, but many Mac-based open sourcers use it. Check out Om Malik's summary on GigaOm.com.

In a photo tour I posted a few days ago, I provided some favorite Firefox tips that can save you time if you spend a lot of time in almost everyone's favorite open source browser.

There were also some efficiency boosts, and time-saving tips there. To get the most out of Firefox, though, I recommend using the best extensions. In this post, I'll round up six of my top favorite extensions.

Recently, I've done a couple of posts on Firefox efficiency boosts and extensions, plus a tips post. A few of these tips were new to readers, and sometimes it helps to be able to visualize how a tip works.

So in this post, I'm going to supply a photo tour of some top Firefox efficency boosts that you can get going with as soon as you see the screenshots. These can save you time and hassle if you, as I do, work in this open source application all day.

Did you know that according to a recent Forrester report, Mozilla's open source Firefox browser now reaches 18 percent of corporate desktops?

I use Firefox almost exclusively as my browser (sometimes Internet Explorer works better for applications with, say, lots of pop-ups), and I'm a big believer that you can get much more out of it if you investigate the excellent extensions and enhancements available for it. In this post, I'll round up some good coverage we've done on OStatic's sister site WebWorkerDaily.com, and other sources, on these enhancements. Try them--you definitely won't regret it.