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Free advice is worth every penny as someone once famously said. For years, I have been guilty of replacing the word 'advice' with the word 'software' as every attempt I made to get Linux to work properly ended, if not in tears, at least in immoderate language and the dog fleeing the room in terror to avoid low-flying Mandrake CDs.

How much money can a large enterprise save by migrating to open source from proprietary? In Novell's case, it's millions of dollars. During an address at the recent Linuxworld OpenSolutions Summit here, Debra Anderson CIO of Novell, detailed how Novell has transitioned to open source from proprietary for its own operations. It's an effort that is still ongoing.

Although I concentrate mainly on development these days, in previous lives I was involved in internal control and network management in a City financial institution and I like to keep up to date with networking and network security especially as I believe that networking technology represents a long-neglected opportunity for developers.

For years, the lightweight Xfce has been a popular desktop environment for Linux distributions running on older hardware, thanks to its lower demand on resources as compared to KDE and GNOME; it's an ideal desktop for machines with less than 256MB of memory. Until recently, however, using Xfce was a little laborious, but with its latest release last month, Xfce is a much more usable desktop environment.

Usually, representatives of national bodies can go about their business without too much fear of being molested by multinationals pushing their favorite standards. But when the economic stakes are high enough, standards committee members can become the subject of more attention than they wish, and to feel like citizens of Iowa during a presidential year.

OpenLogic maintains a library of several hundred certified open source projects that it integrates into customers' computer configurations. "The pace of adoption [of open source] will pick up, not slow down," said CEO Steve Grandchamp. "We are already at the end of proprietary code. This is why we are seeing a need for complimentary business."

Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property.

Sony Ericsson has invited rival phone vendors to become shareholders in its UIQ Technology subsidiary. UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ user interface framework and application suite for use with Symbian OS. Sony Ericsson believes additional shareholders will increase UIQ's independence within the market and would also lower the operating cost of UIQ technology.

This article shows how you can convert a physical Windows system (XP, 2003, 2000, NT4 SP4+) into a VMware virtual machine with the free VMware Converter Starter. The resulting virtual machine can be run in the free VMware Player and VMware Server, and also in VMware Workstation and other VMware products. VMware Converter comes in handy if you want to switch to a Linux desktop, but feel the need to run your old Windows desktop from time to time. By converting your Windows desktop into a virtual machine, you can run it under VMware Server/Player, etc. on your Linux desktop.

When something goes wrong in an IT server farm, it can take days for system administrators to find the root cause. Splunk is an enterprise-level search tool that can index logs and IT data, including server events, network events, and application events from one or more servers or network devices. You can then search data from across all your servers from just one place with a single browser- or console-based tool. It's designed for data mining in real-time, allowing system administrators to quickly and easily find the cause of a problem on the network.

This week on Open News Ubuntu says "no for now" to proprietary drivers, Open Source is good for business, and Linus gets his game on.

"...Linux is free. Got that? Free, free, free. I'm talking about the freedom of monetary costs. The last thing linux users need is some crusader banging on their ears..."

Wind River, one of the world's top embedded software providers, has acquired a real-time Linux distribution and patented hard-real-time technology from FSMLabs Inc. The acquisition will help Wind River penetrate new and emerging markets requiring extremely tight timing constraints, including the vast, emerging market for low-cost, single-core feature phones, according to the company.

Alongside the five fully featured high frequency CST MWS solvers, the low frequency and static modules included in CST Studio Suite have been ported to Linux.

VMware virtualization software lets system builders offer more functionality without higher costs. Here's how to get it working.

Just a few days ago, Dell launched a site to solicit feedback from customers regarding what they most want to see coming from newer systems. Some of the various feature requests include stock multi-boot systems, an option to have no additional software installed aside from the OS, OpenOffice installations and – topping the list by a margin of 2 to 1 – pre-installed Linux. Whether it be with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, OpenSUSE or others, there are more than 20,000 requests for Dell to begin offering systems with Linux pre-installed by default. Clearly, demand for such systems are rising.

Wind River Systems has acquired the technology assets of FSMLabs, a small company selling a specialized variant of the Linux operating system used for devices like animatronic robots that are extremely sensitive to precise timing.

An Australia-wide chapter of LinuxChix has formed, for women living in Australia who are interested in Linux and Free Software.

More information is available on our website: http://au.linuxchix.org/

You can subscribe to our mailing list at: http://lists.au.linuxchix.org/lists/listinfo/chix

AussieChix is a replacement of and expansion of the Sydney and Melbourne chapters of LinuxChix, as many interested Australian women live outside Sydney and Melbourne, and the Sydney and Melbourne chapters were not interacting much. We welcome women living anywhere in Australia to join AussieChix and meet other women in Australia interested in Linux and Free Software.

Vote for the name of the new KDE developer and sysadmin wiki. *** Nathan Sanders reveals that KDE 4's Sonnet will turbocharge language processing at Linux.com. *** Trolltech announced the first beta release of Qt Jambi, now available for testing and feedback. *** ChainLink is a new Qt 4 integrated environment for scientific data analysis and visualisation using Matlab/Octave/Scilab compatible syntax. Version 0.5.3 was released last week and the author is looking for some talented developers. *** CSS3.info blogs that Konqueror is the most compliant browser for CSS.

Ballmer's comments came during a conference call with financial analysts in which he repeatedly hammered home the theme that sales forecasts for Windows -- Vista in particular -- have been "overly optimistic."