poMMo, the "post modern mass mailer" with the not-quite-right acronym, is a powerful Web server-based mass mailing program firmly rooted on a Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP (LAMP) base. poMMo has been developed with the end user in mind, which shows in its quick Web-based installation, in its powerful yet simple way of creating and sending mailings, and in its intuitive usage.

Try to describe Hotwire, and you’ll eventually wind up saying something that sounds like an oxymoron, like "command-line GUI," "graphical shell" or "GUI xterm." Well, that’s pretty much what Hotwire is: something halfway between a text-based shell and a modern graphical user interface.

Compellent has been shipping its SAN appliances to small to medium-sized companies for three years, growing from $4 million in annual sales to more than $23 million last year. Part of the reason for that growth, says cofounder John Guider, is that Compellent executives have recognized the value of making an open source operating system one of the building blocks of the company’s SAN offerings.

Legend has it that a Moleskine notebook and a pen were the tools of choice for Chatwin and Hemingway — but that’s because they didn’t have Writer’s Café. Designed specifically for writing professionals, this application suite includes a few clever features that make it a must-have tool, whether you write for a living or for fun. Although the Writer’s Café developers state that it’s most suited for writing fiction, novels, and short stories, you can easily use it for all kinds of writing activities.

In theory, GDB, the GNU debugger, can ease the chore of debugging applications running on a Linux-based embedded system. In practice, setting up GDB for this task is a bit of a challenge; it takes some work, and there are some technical hurdles to overcome. However, the benefits of having a way to methodically debug a program instead of guessing what’s wrong with it far outweigh the effort involved. Here are some tips for easing the difficulties.

I have used X10 modules on assorted lights and devices for home automation for several years, and although the remote control facet has always worked well, tying the system into my Linux boxes has never been easy. Numerous small, typically one-person X10 controller projects have come and gone. But one application has survived: Heyu. It runs on desktop Linux machines without requiring the overhead of a Web or database server, and it enables direct X10 control, event scheduling, and more.

Linux is an excellent platform for network administration. If you want to monitor your network traffic, you can find many tools — some accessible from a Web interface, others using a graphical interface — but nothing beats the speed of the command line. Command-line tools are also useful in shell scripts, where they can help you perform complex tasks. Here’s a handful of my favorites for monitoring network traffic.

One of the biggest complaints a Firefox evangelist encounters is "it doesn’t act or feel like browser X." Internet Explorer users complain that Firefox doesn’t look like what they’re used to. Opera, Safari, and Netscape users complain that it’s missing many of their favorite features. And the social networking gurus point to the powerful social networking features Flock boasts and Firefox lacks. However, all these users overlook one of the most powerful features of Firefox: support for third-party add-ons, which can make emulating the features of other browsers extremely simple.

Urbis.com, written completely in Ruby using the open source framework Ruby on Rails, is yet another social networking site, but with a twist: it was created by a writer, for writers. Urbis.com founder Steve Spurgat is not a developer, but he knew right from the start he wanted his Web site to run on open source software. "I’m drawn to the community around it."

openSUSE is one of the most popular free-software-only distributions, and it’s jointly developed by Novell and members of the community. In the first week of November the openSUSE developers released installable live versions of the distro’s latest 10.3 release, one each for KDE and GNOME desktop environments. The live versions are replicas of their install-only cousins in terms of software, and apart from a few quirks, they seem set to replace the older versions soon.