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South Africa’s nTier has completed a migration of the Water Research Commission’s Compiere ERP system from Oracle to the PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB. The commission made the move from the Oracle database to EnterpriseDB because the EnterpriseDB relational database was a more affordable option, nTier said in a statement today.

Programming the Asterisk open source PBX via the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) is a fun but exasperating exercise for the telephony programmer. It is fun since it can make a telephone dance, but frustrating because errors and debugging information can be difficult to catch since status information arrives on multiple channels: audible, Asterisk console, and STDERR. You can make the process of debugging a bit easier with the assistance of PHPAGI and Festival.

And it came to pass. Asus saw the EeePC and it was good; it’s even better with a 9-inch display. Asus has officially named the 9-inch EeePC the EeePC 900 and has released some detailed specs about the low-cost laptop. The EeePC 900 will be available with either Windows XP or Xandros Linux. Instead of using flash memory, Asus will be using SSD (solid state drives) for storage this time. The Windows XP equipped model will ship with an 8GB drive with the Linux models having either 12GB or 20GB capacities.

I'm going to take a pause from my usual blog topics and discuss something very dear to everyone's heart, wifi. This weekend I stopped by wal-mart to look around. My wife and I have been wanting to move the computer upstairs for some time but have been prevented by the need to be physically connected to the router. While I was at wal-mart I saw a 802.11n wireless PCI network card made by Linksys. I bought the card, went home, installed it and fired up Ubuntu 7.04. iwconfig showed nothing. but lspci showed something that would send me into shock "02:07.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43XG (rev 01)". Yes, the infamous broadcom chip.

So you’ve got an idea for a great app and you’re thinking of making your own open source project? Here are some items to consider and some sites that will help you on your journey. We’ll also see how some well-known open source teams did it.

At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe today launched a petition to call on the EP to use open standards so that all citizens can participate in the democratic process.

Software developer Unison has launched what it claims is the world's first fully-unified communications suite based on Linux. Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, e-mail and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 81 for the weeks March 2nd - March 8th, 2008. In this issue we cover the release of Hardy Alpha 6, interesting Brainstorm stats, interview with Server developer Mathias Gug, and, as always, much, much more!

$100 for a laptop for a child in the poorest countries is still too much for Nicholas Negroponte. The founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and founder and current chairman. of the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) wants to give portable computers to all the children in developing countries. If possible, free of charge, he said to German Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. "$100 is prohibitive. Our computers should and will be zero dollar laptops. There are many ways of achieving this, and we will endeavour to do just that."

When the Intel Quad-Core "Clovertown" Xeon processors were introduced in late 2006 we had reviewed (among other motherboards) the Tyan Tempest i5000XT (S2696) motherboard. We had found this i5000X-based motherboard to work incredibly well with Linux and it ended up being awarded with our Editor's Choice Award for its impressive feature-set, Linux compatibility, and top-notch performance. It has been a while since last looking at a Tyan motherboard, but with the emergence of Intel's Wolfdale and Harpertown processors requiring new motherboards, today we are looking at the Tempest i5400XT S5396 motherboard. The Tempest i5400XT is similar to the i5000XT, but it's been upgraded to the new Intel 5400 MCH.

Expect is a venerable tool for scripting interactive command-line tools. One normally sees expect coupled with the TCL programming language -- for example, in the DejaGNU test environment. Expect-lite is a wrapper for expect designed to allow you to capture an interactive session more directly mapped into a script. The expect-lite language also includes simple conditionals and other programming language elements, and can be readily mixed with bash programming.

As the Xen open source hypervisor gains traction in many enterprises, you'll discover a need to provide fully redundant storage to the Xen environment from the host adapter all the way down to the hard drives. In this article, learn how to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 to set up Xen and multipath storage access to the IBM System Storage DS4800.

"Forgive me, Linux Community, for I have sinned. It has been forever since my last confession and I am prepared for my penance. The truth is that I have never particularly cared for the Firefox browser--not because there is anything wrong with it but just because I already have a favorite browser. No, it isn't the one you think it is..."

I wish I knew how to fix it but I don’t. What I do know however is that the ISO/IEC process is severally broken in that it is riddled with room for game play. I guess ISO/IEC managed to get away with it for a long time but things have changed now that Microsoft has shown how to use every loophole in the process to get to its end. Hopefully, justice will prevail and OOXML will rightly get voted down at the end of the month but the process shouldn’t have allowed to go that far into this sad farce in the first place.

Just about all Linux server distributions install a sendmail daemon that listens on 127.0.0.1 and relays email for the localhost. This is all fine and dandy if you have a handful of Linux servers, but can turn in to chaos once you get 30+ Linux servers.

Perl comes with a ready-made module for talking to mailservers, making it very easy to get your scripts to send out email alerts and other messages. This tutorial explains how to use the Net::SMTP module, and gives some examples of it in action

I’m not particularly fond of backing up my data. I know I should do it and I feel pretty smug when it is done, but it is a time-consuming and frustrating process. Mainly because it requires a whole lot of thinking on my part: which files do I want to back up? where should I store them? What format? And to date I haven’t really found the one tool that makes baking up truly simple.

Open sourcing Windows is more hassle than it's worth and Microsoft sees little gain in releasing code, according to the man leading Microsoft's server marketing and platform strategy. Microsoft general manager Bill Hilf has said the Windows source code is "irrelevant for what people want".

Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This week belongs to the fans of GNOME. The brand new version 2.22 of the popular desktop environment is scheduled for release on Wednesday and everything suggests that we can expect another great set of improvements that will grace the upcoming releases of all major distributions. In the news section, we'll take a quick look at the new features and applications in Mandriva Linux 2008.1, follow the development of the Xfce spin of Fedora 9, pass on a request from Theo de Raadt to test the upcoming OpenBSD 4.3, and link to the freely downloadable DVD images of Yellow Dog Linux 6.0. Finally, while we all impatiently await the first beta release of Gentoo Linux 2008.0, we take a look at some of the exciting new features in the upcoming release of the Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux 3.5. Happy reading!

Over the last few years, OpenOffice.org has started to develop a respectable number of extensions, mostly for Writer and Calc, the two most widely used applications. The OpenOffice.org Extensions site lists only a handful that are unique to Impress. The recently released eVoice, which records sounds for direct insertion into a slide, is one of them. Once configured, eVoice is straightforward to learn, and becomes even more useful when you're working with other Impress features.