A few Christmas gift ideas to your Linux love ones.

It probably won't slow the amazing growth of Microsoft's SQL Server database, a cornerstone of the company's earnings in recent years. However, a quirky Swedish company with a big Seattle presence may steal a bit of the limelight when Microsoft's new database is released next spring.

"If you spend a lot of time creating new shell scripts, be they plain shell or scripting languages such as perl or python, then it can be very useful to make new scripts be executable by default. Here we'll show two simple recipes for GNU Emacs and vim to do just that..."

The Horde Project provides a PHP-based Application Framework. It consists of webmail program IMP, a contact manager Turba, the calendar manager Kronolith, and many others.
It also uses a backend-independent interfaces for dealing with preferences, logfiles, MIME, hierarchical data, authentication, data formats, encryption, forms, session handling, file storage and remote procedure calls.

Many people using GNOME (either in Ubuntu or elsewhere) feel that they are missing icons to their beloved 'Computer', home folder, network servers and trash can on their desktop, but did you now they are actually included into GNOME and that you just have to enable them?

"... I am a full-time Debian user. Debian has plenty of really great sources of information and support — it’s been around a long time, it has many, many users, and no matter what problem I discover, it seems like 'they’ve seen it all before.' Debian looks great, it works great, and I couldn’t be happier. [...] However, what’s the fun in using Debian? I once installed some stuff on a Debian-server, with some help from a Howto, and everything just worked like it said in that Howto! ..."

Via thedebianuser: http://blog.thedebianuser.org/?p=282

"Firefox 3 offers a number of improvements to the Document Object Model (DOM), especially in regard to support for extensions to the DOM added by other browsers. This article provides a list of those improvements as well as links to more detailed documentation..."

"Firefox offers a great way of changing hundreds of settings by opening about:config in the address bar. The downside is that many users feel overwhelmed by this way of changing the Firefox configuration simply because it lists so many of them. I did not look through all the available settings but found ten lesser known parameters that I would like to introduce today. Lesser known means that they have not been mentioned on every “Tweak Firefox” article on the net - yet..."