Professional users are always searching for an edge. Whether you work with Linux as a webmaster, programmer, system administrator, or security consultant, you know the best solution depends on finding the right tool for the job. We thought you might be interested in the following new products and updates.

Free software not only gives developers and users more freedom of choice, it can even help fight poverty: Gnusolidario supplies the Medical OpenERP solution to hospitals, and GOSM provides a free alternative to Google Earth.

The Mozilla Foundation survived 2008 fairly well despite the economic downturn, says chairman of the foundation Mitchell Baker in her blog. In it she's pretty detailed about its financial status and lays out the figures.

Defenders of the somewhat unwieldy vi editor say, "Sure vi is user-friendly; it's just peculiar about who it makes friends with." Joe Brockmeier of openSUSE fame has now come out with a beginner's guide to Vim and what it does.

The Chrome OS announcement caused speculation from many sides as to what effect the Google platform would have on other Linux distros. At least Canonical could benefit from it.

A new feature in Fedora 12 was that users could install RPM packages from signed repositories without a root password. "Not good," said many users, so the project decided to reverse the policy.

Klaus Knopper has updated his Live Linux Knoppix to 6.2 and chose LXDE as the desktop environment. Also included is ADRIANE, the talking menu system for the sight-impaired, in version 1.2

The Fedora project promoted by Red Hat has released its version 12 of the Linux distro.