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Still skeptical about open source ERP and POS (point of sale) software? Openbravo says it has exceeded 1 million downloads and has nearly 100 channel partners. Is the channel shifting to open source business applications? The VAR Guy takes a look.

The last two articles that I wrote for Linuxjournal.com were about the steps that GCC goes through during the compilation process and were based on a software development class I taught a few years ago. I hadn't intended for this to be a three part series, but it's been pointed out that I didn't cover the make utility and I think it's almost negligent to discuss software development and not discuss make. Since I don't like to think of myself as negligent, I decided to extend the series to one more article.

Last month, the open source community was buzzing over a report released by the Linux Foundation that placed the value of the Linux ecosystem at around $25 billion. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, we caught up with Amanda McPherson, the foundation's VP of marketing & developer programs, to get her thoughts on the study, what the results mean for the community, and what the take-away message ought to be.

With inexpensive storage and lot's of features will Open Storage be a game changer for Sun? And does the fact that it is built on open source software make a difference?

Longtime LWN readers will be aware of your editor's tendency toward the publishing of wild predictions at the beginning of each year. The 2007 predictions irritated some Debian developers and users by suggesting that, after getting the Etch release out the door, the project would go back to arguing about firmware issues. At the end of the year, it became necessary to acknowledge that this prediction, like so many others, had failed to come to pass. In retrospect, the error in this prediction was obvious: the Debian Project traditionally saves the firmware argument for the end of the release process. After all, they need to find some way to delay a release once it's looking close to ready.

At the 6th Annual OpenOffice.org Convention in Peking November 5-7, the project could celebrate a new milestone in their 3.0 release: downloads of their office package have reached 10 million.

Last week, during Ubuntu's OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.

Proprietary virtualization player VMWare has just announced its VMWare Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) designed to bring virtualization to mobile phones. It's due to ship in 2009, and is a lightweight software layer that can run even on memory-constrained phones. For several reasons, this virtualization platform could have an impact on mobile phones running open source operating systems, and on application development for mobile open source operating systems.

Red Hat has found a way to link open source with Star Wars. Sci-Fi Geeks across the galaxy must be celebrating as Red Hat seeks to conquer the digital entertainment universe. Here’s the scoop.

I've been nonplussed the last few weeks as ordinarily sane compu-journalists opine that Windows 7 will somehow kill Linux on netbooks. This weekend, I had a chance to actually see XP running on an EEE 900, and I can tell you, Linux has nothing to fear from Redmond.

The European Journal of ePractice has just published a research report showing that the achievement of wide-scale implementation depends not only on the openness of the process, but also on the willingness to negotiate and achieve a compromise.

LinuxPlanet classics: The folks who run NTP servers are generally providing a free service, so it's rather crass to repay their kindness with thoughtlessness when you're setting up your own NTP clients. Carla Schroder shows how you can be smarter than famous big commercial vendors and set up your timeservers the right way.

Dave Whiting, the principal at Red Newt Cellars winery in upstate New York, was tired of chasing vendors to try to get them to support clunky custom content management systems on his site at RedNewt.com. The independent winemaker decided to branch out and teach himself site development skills, with the help of some popular open source applications. The happy result is a full-featured interactive ecommerce site that Whiting says is flexible, scalable, and secure.

Over on TechRepublic, Jack Wallen shares what he feels was KDE's major transgression with KDE 4: Using Dolphin in lieu of Konqueror for file management. KDE has gotten its share of criticism for its delivery and handling of the 4.0 version since the initial release last January. The new desktop rolled out massive changes -- some good, some incomplete, and some that were just puzzling. The past eleven months have seen the KDE project build on the good and make impressive progress on the incomplete. As Wallen points out, however, there are still some aspects that people find puzzling.

When you return from a trip and copy your digital pictures over to your file server, you might like to rename the image files or (losslessly) rotate them to their correct orientation to make finding and viewing them simpler. You might even want to embed comments right into the image files in such a way that all image viewing tools should be able to harvest and share this metadata. In this article we'll take a look at some command-line tools to help you with these tasks.

GNU/Linux has come a long way since XXMS, the Winamp wannabe. The number of free media players has bloomed: Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Kaffeine, Kplayer and JuK. They have enough features to cater for every need a dedicated music lover could wish for. So Songbird, which is not even at version 1.0, would have its work cut out to rival those media players especially the ability to play video as well as music. But Songbird has one unique feature. It has a built-in browser, Mozilla, which allows it to extract maximum mileage from your music collection. Web integration leverages your music and allows you to do some really great stuff. This article will look at the features of Songbird that make it an essential addition to any installation. Read the complete article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Open source companies from A to Z (Alfresco to Zmanda) have lined up to endorse Sun's new Amber Road storage solutions. Is Sun finally starting to gain some momentum with open source advocates and the open source channel? Analysis from The VAR Guy.

Late last month we published system benchmarks of Ubuntu 7.04 through 8.10 and had found -- at least with the Intel notebook we were using -- that the performance had degraded with time. This article had then resulted in benchmarks of Fedora 7 through 10 and most recently were Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks. In our original article we hadn't focused much upon the graphics tests and we were just using ATI's binary driver, but per a request from Canonical's Bryce Harrington, we have carried out some open-source graphics tests on Ubuntu 7.04 through 8.10 and we started with the ATI performance.

I've been doing some thinking since writing about kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman's statement that Linux supports more devices than any other operating system. Readers made some good comments, and after some time spent wrestling with my (yes, supported) webcam, I can venture an additional suggestion as to why it doesn't always seem that way, beyond Kroah-Hartman's theory of a non-supported device becoming "personal."

Outsourcing and open-source development may at first appear to be about as far apart as baseball and football. Both use a ball in a game, but that's about it. Yet a closer look from open-source software developers and industry analysts reveals that enterprises using outsourcing for their programming needs could stand to learn some management and process techniques from the open-source community.