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Kuali, an open source ERP system, is catching on in multiple colleges and universities. And a savvy integrator called rSmart is leading the push.

As so many wise persons say, migrating from Windows on your computer desktop to Linux is all about having the right applications. Eric Geier introduces KompoZer as a good option for users wanting to find a Microsoft FrontPage replacement.

Last week John "Maddog" Hall visited the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco. It made him wonder... He writes in his blog: "One of the few examples of people talking about developing nations was Nokia, who talked about some of their services that they are rolling out for people. The reason why I found this ironic was that if the number of mobile devices that were going to roll out reached their promise, then most of that expansion will have to come from "developing nations", yet very little of the conference focused on that, or how FOSS could help those nations."

An online web directory that tracks pages about installing Linux on specific laptops and notebooks says the Internet now has over 8,000 such pages. And, according to Werner Heuser's TuxMobil.org site, the number of online Linux guides has been "rapidly increasing" during the current year.

Standards-based technologies are rapidly being adopted by the telecommunications industry, and for good reason. Using standards-based solutions allows telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software systems across multiple network elements - speeding time-to-market, saving money, and freeing up key resources to focus on competitive differentiation. Equally important, the adoption of standards-based elements enables new and emerging hardware to plug into an existing network infrastructure without extensive retooling and associated costs. It also encourages use of best-of-breed technologies without imposing vendor lock-in.

The Bash Debugger Project (bashdb) lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, perform a backtrace, and step through a bash script line by line. In other words, it provides the features you expect in a C/C++ debugger to anyone programming a bash script. To see if your standard bash executable has bashdb support, execute the command shown below; if you are not taken to a bashdb prompt then you'll have to install bashdb yourself.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. believes that its new partnership with Japanese computer manufacturer Fujitsu Ld. could accelerate migration from Unix to Linux for mission-critical applications in Japan and ultimately in the U.S. But industry analysts said this is nothing new for the industry and expressed doubt that the move will have a global impact. Red Hat and Fujitsu have extended Long Term Support from seven to 10 years and committed to faster support response times. Under this program, the two vendors will extend the bug fix support periods for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and offer emergency assistance within 24 hours, Tier 1 aid within a half-hour and Tier 4 help for less severe problems within four hours. The program specifically applies to environments running RHEL on Fujitsu Primequest and Primergy servers.

The computer user and the operating system are melded into one, once he or she sits down at the machine. It is the user that makes an operating system successful or not. If you care to disagree, let's take a look at general public opinion concerning Vista. As unkind as it may seem to many of you, there are some stark realities we must face in going forward.

Over the past few weeks we have been providing several in-depth articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux. We had begun by providing Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks and had found the performance of this popular Linux distribution to become slower with time and that article was followed up with Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks and other articles looking at the state of Ubuntu's performance. In this article, we are now comparing the 64-bit performance of Ubuntu 8.10 against the latest test releases of OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1.

In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your network and servers are doing at every second of the day, you're flying blind. Sooner or later, you're going to meet with disaster. Fortunately, there are a plethora of good tools, both commercial and open source, that can shine much-needed light into your environment. Because good and free always beats good and costly, I've compiled a list of my favorite open source tools that prove their worth day in and day out in networks of any size. From network and server monitoring to trending, graphing, and even switch and router configuration backups, these utilities will see you through.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 on a headless CentOS 5.2 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there is no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

The practice of law is a knowledge, information, and document-intensive profession. In many respects, lawyers ply their trade in the same way independent programmers do: we sell our expertise, experience and technical skill in using what is, essentially, the aboriginal “open” source code — the code of laws and courtroom procedure. In 2004, after practicing law for 23 years in a mid-sized downtown Seattle law firm, I opened my own boutique law practice and I decided to make GNU/Linux the centerpiece of a completely free/open software law firm environment.

Droopy is a simple Web server which does only one thing: it allows users to upload files to your computer. Useless, right? Wrong.

According to a recent TechCrunch article, Microsoft is planning to rename its Live Search product, Kumar, which means cloud or spider in Japanese. What Microsoft needs to learn, and what the Get a Mac ads have captured so well, is that it's not about PR or branding or the name of the products, it's about the products behind the brand. Until they learn that, they are just going to wallow in corporate mediocrity and be subjected to well-deserved ridicule.

If you manage to freeze your system in such a way that even Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn’t work anymore, the mouse is stuck on the screen any none of the key combinations will work, don’t think of the reset button just yet.

Just a month after the release of Ubuntu 8.10, the first alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 has become available. The next distro version should boot more quickly, require less power, integrate more web services and include a backup solution. The Ubuntu developers decided to move from Intrepid Ibex to Jaunty Jackalope, the fabled "killer rabbit" of North America.

The biggest news of the week was the final decision in the case of SCO vs. Novell in a Utah court. LXer.com summed it up this way: "Novell Wins, SCO Loses." In other news, big box retailers across the United States stocked their shelves with netbooks preloaded with Linux in time for Black Friday, the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday and traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Target and Best Buy stores displayed the ASUS Eee PC 900a for US$299 this week. Other netbooks with prices as low as US$199 are expected on shelves by Friday. In the news section, Paul Frields challenges the often-made claims that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution; openSUSE announces Zypper 1.0 and plans for Zypper 2, Gentoo Linux summarises the Gentoo Council functions and activities, sidux celebrates its second birthday, and Shift Linux announces a major shift in the direction of its Ubuntu-based distribution. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the new editor of DistroWatch Weekly is Chris Smart of the Kororaa and MakeTheMove.net fame.

I recognized I was mistaken when I thought my multiple, parallel div columns matched heights. I knew too well it was the background color of my base div hid the failure as the columns changed heights. However, it was more than simple inertia delayed efforts my correcting this too visible flaw in the menu pages. A myriad of other perplexing issues monopolized my attention. Moreover, I thought I had simple solutions stored on my system utilizing seemingly very straight forward javascript code. Furthermore, the problem of matching column heights seemed to be a well understood problem with its solution documented. Or so I thought, until my browser crashed losing all the code samples, irretrievably. I soon learned the solution was not so simple. I ended up developing my own code. Oh yes, welcome to the strange world of Javascript.

Hi All, Here's my 9th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to edit data in your directory server, but only have command line access":

Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they're more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding spreadsheet data easier.