Next week's Collaboration Summit, put on by the Linux Foundation, will gather together "the brightest minds in Linux" to mull over all the great problems that plague our beloved operating system. If you can't make it to San Francisco to collaborate in person, fear not, the Summit will come to you.

One of the favorite activities of journalists, bloggers, and other putters-of-things-in-print is to declare the impending doom and/or death of this or that. We won't be engaging in the practice today, but we will happily report that the Browser Wars are alive and well, and continuing to take a toll on the market leader.

For many vendors, Linux support — if it exists at all — seems to be an afterthought. Skype, Adobe, certain video cards, and quite a few other proprietary offerings all come to mind as examples of second-class Linux support. As frustrating as those cases are, though, when the snub comes from another Open Source project, it's particularly disheartening.

Users will put Linux, or try to, on anything: toasters, toilets, even dead badgers. One popular non-PC locale for Linux deployment is on video game consoles, like Sony's PlayStation 3 — which will become a much less popular place later this week, when Sony is scheduled to slam the door.

Most of us have experienced the need to disinfect a virus-laden system — though a near-total immunity is one of the many benefits of being a Linux user. If public health officials in northern England are to be believed, though, the term "computer virus" may be in for a new meaning.

Virtualization has come to be the hot pick for consolidating and cutting hardware costs. All those machines within machines raise questions about the safety of what's inside, though, and according to a recent study, some are seriously lacking in good answers.

Each year, the Linux Foundation is responsible for putting on some of the biggest names of the conference season. LinuxCon, the Kernel and End-User Summits, the Linux Plumbers Conference — they all have the Foundation behind them. The next up on the schedule is the Collaboration Summit, and as of last week, attendees can now check the details on the Summit's who, what, where, and when.

As Phyllis Diller would attest, a face lift isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most things — legalese included — can use a good going over from time to time, and that's just what the good people at Mozilla will be doing this year.

Among the important benefits of Linux's permission hierarchy is its ability to keep untrusted users from running amok. The all-or-nothing nature of root access, however, can present headaches when users are trusted, but only so far. That is a problem the sudo utility attempts to solve, and does so fairly well — except for the occasional glitch.

The BBC's iPlayer has long been a thorn in the side of the Open Source community. Since it entered public beta in mid-2007, the BBC has consistently flip-flopped between completely ignoring FOSS users, serving them third-rate pacifier versions, and begrudgingly granting access to what Windows users have had all along. And the flipping continues.

For the past four years, the "brightest minds in Linux" have come together at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to "tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today." The opportunity to solve is coming up quickly, and those who want in on the tackling had better move fast.

Last July, the Linux Foundation hit on the bright idea of combining many geeks' favorite activities — supporting Linux and buying geek gear — with a Tux-themed Visa Card that donates back to Open Source advocacy. The Linux Fund has been offering their own card since 2007, and as of Friday, is extending the opportunity to the UK.

When it comes to distributions, many or few is an eternal debate within the Linux community. While that debate will likely continue as long as Linux does, the balance in the mobile market has swung just a bit with the announcement that the Maemo and Moblin projects will unite to become MeeGo.

The 2010 conference season is already underway — having launched auspiciously if not officially with last month's linux.conf.au — and it's safe to expect that attendees will quickly begin registering, presenters will begin proposing, and before you know it, live-from-the-floor reports will be rolling in. Though the latter will have to wait, as of last week, the registering and proposing is on for LinuxCon 2010.

The Linux Foundation is always on the move, looking for new ways to promote Linux and Open Source adoption. From Linux.com to credit cards bearing a smiling Tux, there is always something new on at Foundation HQ. At the moment, it's the return of a good idea, as last year's Linux advertising contest turns up for Round II.

When Nokia bought Symbian in 2008, nobody had any reason to believe their thoughts were anywhere near Open Source — particularly given that just weeks prior, its Open Source chief declared that when it came to FOSS, the company wasn't "ready to play by the rules." Nevertheless, Open Source was exactly what Nokia had in mind for Symbian, and as of today, the process is complete.

Bugs are a reality of software development, and a pain for both coders and users. Security bugs are a particularly nasty variety, and in an effort to kill as many as possible, Google is now coughing up cash for catching Chrome and Chromium glitches.

A little less than a year ago, the Linux Foundation launched a program to provide a variety of training opportunities for Linux professionals. Just a few months later, the Foundation moved the program online, offering web-based sessions of select courses to reach a wider audience. On Tuesday, they took it one step further, announcing the free — as in beer — Linux Training Webinar Series.

One of the great things about Linux and Open Source in general is that, despite perceptions to the contrary, we aren't going it alone. A number of corporate and institutional sponsors — Red Hat, Google, the Linux Foundation, to name a just a few of the many — back the continued development of Open Source software, contributing not just funds, but employee time to the cause.

Though the eagerly-anticipated HTML5 specification still has a ways to go before officially becoming a W3C standard, it has already seen adoption in a number of modern browsers, particularly its revised multimedia handling. Adoption by content producers, however, hasn't moved as quickly, as those running platforms light on proprietary options are well aware.