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You could be forgiven for not knowing about the storm of activity in the database market this season. You would have to have read several dozen articles, press releases, and have followed the right bloggers to track all the strategic acquisitions, new releases, and defensive posturing . And even so you might still be wondering what it all means. But help is here in the form of a guide to open source database companies and what they've been up to.

The modern mobile phone is a powerful device that you can use to store contacts, manage calendars, check email, and even browse the Web. But that's not all: install floAt's Mobile Agent (FMA) on your laptop or PC, connect it to your handset, and you can use the combo as a versatile communication tool. This article introduces you to FMA's features and shows you how to get started with the application.

It's been a busy week in the ODF/XML neighborhood

Fujitsu and open source software company Red Hat have announced that, under their global agreement to provide Linux solutions, they will collaborate in porting applications to Fujitsu mission-critical Primequest Intel Architecture servers running Red Hat enterprise Linux.

SA-made accounting application Cubit has released version 2.6 of the suite and is extending its reach into two new international markets.

Hard drive vendor LaCie has teamed up with Mandriva on a bus-powered USB 2.0 harddrive preloaded with desktop Linux. The "GlobeTrotter" boots Mandriva Linux LE 2005, and is available in 40GB and 80GB models priced at $140 and $199, respectively.

Turbolinux, recovered and prospering in its new incarnation as an Osaka Securities Exchange-listed company, is looking to achieve success in Asian markets beyond Japan and China. The company, now a subsidiary of booming Japanese portal operator Livedoor, has announced plans to double its percentage of income from exports to neighboring countries to 20% within the next couple of years. The latest venture for Turbolinux is into the relatively untapped Vietnamese market, where it has started to conduct market research under a contract with Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Sun Microsystems is to make the designs of its new UltraSparc T1 server processors open source in an attempt to win greater support for its hardware in the developer community.

Specifications for the Sparc chip family have previously been available to those who pay a licensing fee to the company, but Sun now plans to release both the specs and the designs, written in the Verilog hardware description language, for free.

It's been talked about for years, and now there are well-endowed and well-researched organizations claiming to offer open source software some protection from patent lawsuits. The very announcement of these efforts--even before they have a chance to prove successful--are an historical watershed for open source and free software. For the first time you get back something tangible for open-sourcing. And this leads to another key change in the terrain: it now becomes critical how "open source" is defined, and who has the power to define it.

Diggable

There is a program called service which can be used on multiple UNIX systems to control Operating System services. One of the problems faced in the design of the service utility was the path to where system startup scripts (or rc scripts) resided. This series examines how using sed can easily mitigate multi-platform scripting problems. The first part will look at how the utility program works.

The companies will initially focus on using the Linux operating system for 3G (third-generation) smart phones with a particular focus on the user interface.

Open Source Solution Secures Enterprise eBusiness Communities Quickly and Cost-Effectively

Mandriva CEO Francois Bancilhon stopped by the offices of SearchOpenSource.com this week as part of an effort to get the word out about Mandriva Linux 2006.

Through a series of international partnerships, Bancilhon has taken his company out of the depths of bankruptcy and into the black. Speaking with him this week as he made the rounds in the Northeast, it was easy to see that he expected to take that same company-specific success and apply it to Linux desktops, both for personal and professional use.

Bancilhon may have his work cut out for him, but he aims to keep things simple to attain big results.

Here's an excerpt on UML from Steve Best's new book,Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques.

Webmasters looking to provide search capabilities for their site would do well to try out PhpDig, a Web spider and search engine written in PHP with a MySQL backend. There are other open source search engines, all of which have their own advantages. PhpDig just happens to suit the needs of my Information Technology for Greenhouses and Horticulture site. Here's how I got it working.

Turbocash developer Philip Copeman is looking to re-engineer a Linux version to expand its market further.

With nearly 30 000 users and ranking among the top one percent of Sourceforge projects, open source accounting software Turbocash has made its mark in the Windows SME arena. Now developer Philip Copeman is looking to re-engineer a Linux version to expand its market further.

KDE has started a series of interviews highlighting their developers. This one is about András Mantia, a developer from Romania. You can read about him or quickly go to other interviews in the series.

Give me bundling or give me death

A developer has added tabbed browsing of e-mail messages to Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client, mimicking one of the most popular features of the Firefox and Opera Web browsers.