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Six months ago we pointed out the best Android apps to boost your mobile productivity, but since then more free applications have appeared in the Market that offer useful features you don't want to miss. Let's take a look at a few notable free apps that make getting things done with your Android handset easier and more fun.

Synchronizing two machines (such as a laptop and a desktop computer) is easier and faster when you use rsync, which boasts an efficient algorithm and options for just about everything you might need. And if a command-line operation isn't your thing, several graphic tools make using rsync easier still.

This article is an overview of 4 most popular IM clients available on Linux, and particularly in the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope. I included only graphical applications here, but I'm sure I'll make a review of several command-line clients in the near future too. I also decided not to include Sim and KMess, since currently they only offer versions for KDE3.

What the heck is going on in Boston? Apologies to any Bostonians in the audience, but something is in the water, at least in the education and law enforcement districts. Once again, the "Cradle of Liberty" is in the news as the Defenders of the Fourth are forced to rush in to defend the baby against the hand that rocks the cradle.

As with most things in OpenBSD, adding Xfce to the operating system isn't as easy as it is in Debian, Ubuntu or many other Linux distros. There is no "meta package" in OpenBSD for Xfce. I believe that with GNOME and KDE, it's possible to add one or two packages from the OpenBSD repository that call in most of what you need for the desktop environment. To install Xfce, however, you must use pkg_add to bring down more than asome three dozen individual Xfce packages.

Besides seeing 3D acceleration for their hardware in an open-source driver, one of the other leading requests from ATI Radeon customers has been to see improved power management within the ATI X.Org driver stack. There is Dynamic Clocks support and some other power management capabilities, along with some more innovative ways, but ATI's PowerPlay is not fully implemented in the open-source stack. Today though committed to the xf86-video-ati driver is support for two new power management features. The two new power options in this open-source driver are ForceLowPowerMode and DynamicPM, both of which are xorg.conf options.

Google’s Android mobile operating system is likely to see increased adoption as hardware buyers tightening their purse strings consider netbooks and other types of mininotebooks in lieu of full-size laptops. The least inexpensive netbooks tend to run Linux or Android, and HP, Dell and Acer are all expected to have Android-based netbooks in the works. Right now, Microsoft Windows XP dominates the netbook market, at least within the United States.

Google is giving developers an early look at the next build of Android, and it has released a software development kit for Android 1.5. Code-named "Cupcake," the latest version of the Linux-based operating system adds numerous features to the Google-backed OS. One of the complaints of the Android-powered T-Mobile G1 is that it lacks an on-screen keyboard, but Android 1.5 fixes that issue.

Google's decision to only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform, is a major mistake, according to Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps.

Event will take place April 25-26 in Bellinghan, WA. In addition to sponsoring and exhibiting, Zenoss Vice President of Community, Mark Hinkle, and Zenoss Community Manager, Matt Ray, will be delivering two presentations. “Sleep Soundly at Night: Network Monitoring with Zenoss Core” will cover the basics of using Zenoss Core to collect data and view networks, demonstrating how Zenoss provides a workflow to manage network events with a single view into all aspects of IT infrastructure. "Commercial Open Source, Balancing Community and Commerce” will tap into the symbiotic relationship between community and product – recognizing that building and maintaining a large community of users requires a dedication to the contributions of all users while providing a valuable product without limitations.

So-called open core software is essentially a subset of open source -- a vendor gives away a free version under traditional open license and sells a commercial version with advanced features. Some open source purists see this as undermining the purpose of open source, but open core proponents say it's the key to a new business model.

The process of software development is one with multiple layers. At the base layer is the code which developers write, which is then compiled by the build system that puts the code together so it is ready for deployment. Code analysis vendor Coverity is now expanding its analysis beyond just the static code layer to include the sometimes overlooked build system.

SugarCRM is a webbased CRM solution written in PHP. SugarCRM is available in different flavours called "Editions" ("Community" (free), "Professional", and "Enterprise"). For a detailed overview of the different editions, have a look at the SugarCRM website. In this tutorial I will describe the installation of the free Community Edition on Debian Lenny. With the modules My Portal, Calendar, Activities, Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases, Bugtracker, Documents and Email, SugarCRM Community Edition offers everything that can be expected from a CRM solution.

As a UN agency, WIPO has a mandate to serve the greater good of humankind. Adding competency on Free Software and Open Standards to WIPO would make this knowledge easily available to policy makers around the world.

Five years after it was first launched, South Africa's Impi Linux distribution no longer exists. The distribution, which began life as a Debian-derivative and later became an Ubuntu-variant when Mark Shuttleworth invested in the company, finally reached the end of its life under the ownership of Business Connection (BCX). The company says that it no longer makes sense to maintain an open source specialist division and has re-assigned open source staff to new roles in the company.

Automatic Command-line Ripper (acripper) is a free opensource tool for ripping and encoding CD tracks on the fly. It also tries to get the CD information from feeddb.org, a CDDB website and writes it to the encoded files. If no information from freedb.org is available, it then tries to read CD information (CD title, artist name, tracks names) from a text file names “titles.txt” in the working directory.

Mean spirited? No. Funny and, perhaps, cruel. Of course. Today I'm speeding around, working my arse off so that I can work all weekend (When does it end? ...oh yeah; with the worms ;) and I wrote this little shell script (in Solaris' /bin/sh) to lighten the mood a little. It's another in a string of a thousand fake error messages, but it worked pretty well for my purposes. I made sure to install it up front in the /etc/rc2.d directory (from JumpStart) so that any admin watching a new installation come up for the first time (to verify its integrity) would be guaranteed to see it. Man, it was fun until I had to fix the problem and pretend I had no idea what happened ;)

It's more than a bit ironic that the Linux Foundation, an organisation that drips with bizspeak, has chosen as the winner of its Linux promotional campaign an ad that espouses the virtues of freedom.

On Monday March 30, Intel announced the availability of their much anticipated new line of processors, the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series–nicknamed Nehalem. Red Hat, a long-time partner of the market-leading chip maker , collaborated on the chip’s debut, testing and optimizing the recently released Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3 on the new processor. Changes include a new processor architecture, platform architecture, memory subsystem, I/O subsystem, and options (including SSD and 10GbE). So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? Here’s just a few of the improvements wrought by the combination of Intel’s processing power and Red Hat advancements in performance and efficiency.

Some time ago, I introduced a package for Smolt in Mandriva Cooker. Smolt is a tool developed for Fedora which collects information about all your hardware and submits it to a central database. On the smolts.org website, people can view all hardware entries and indicate which one is working OK for them. The database is also coupled with a wiki, where extra instructions can be written to get the hardware working. Smolt is used by default already for some time in Fedora and also in OpenSUSE.