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The sluggish economy is contributing to commercial open source sales, but customers still rank interoperability with proprietary software and vendor viability among their top concerns, according to a new survey from the Open Solutions Alliance. Most of the companies surveyed, including independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators that vary in size and business model, showed a clear increase in sales and services related to open source, with 83 percent of respondents on track for a year-on-year revenue increase this year, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) said.

A company is now selling what it calls the "world's cheapest laptop," which, at $130, is not a bad deal if you can bear some hardware limitations. The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-in. screen, a 400-MHz processor, 128MB of RAM and 1GB of flash storage -- but you need to buy 100 of them.

The other day when I was in Vancouver and using the XO while sitting in a nice café someone started asking me about the machine and the current state of OLPC. When I mentioned that Give 1 Get 1 was going to make a comeback in autumn the person asked me whether I would recommend him donating this time â??round since he missed out back in December 2007. I have to say that I scrambled for a couple of seconds before being able to give him a real answer.

Products Editor James Gray recently sat down for a virtual gab fest with Håkon Wium Lie Chief Technology Officer of Opera. They discussed Opera 9.5, Opera's history, why Linux users should choose Opera and much more.

The trial of Terry Childs, the network administrator who locked down the city of San Francisco's network when threatened with dismissal from his job, has taken another turn, with around 150 usernames and passwords for the San Francisco city government's VPN being exposed to public view. The accounts, associated with the mayor's office, the district attorney's office, the police department and other city agencies, were tendered as an exhibit in the court case.

We at InfoWorld are sorry to announce that Ed Foster, InfoWorld's venerable The Gripe Line blogger died this past Saturday. We are all saddened by Ed's passing but grateful for his 15 years of consumer advocacy in the field of technology products through The Gripe Line column and blog. Ed has contributed to InfoWorld and the technology-using community at large in many ways during his 20-year association with us, as a reporter, writer, editor, and columnist at InfoWorld. We will all miss his passion and professionalism.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta 2 is available in preparation for an official September release. Here are some quick first impressions of the Writer word-processor program. While I was hoping that Writer 3 would adopt a Word-like interface, with its tabbed menus, but this is not the case. Although the icons have been updated, the overall look and feel of OO.org is not radically different from its predecessor. Nevertheless, you can now import Word 2007 documents into OO.org 3, which is critical to its continued success and relevance.

We donâ??t normally start tracking the Ubuntu releases until they hit about the Alpha 3 stage; after all the big software updates have made it in, any theme work is mostly done and the final release is starting to take shape. Well, that happened yesterday: Ubuntu 8.10 â??Intrepid Ibexâ?? Alpha 3 was released. The first thing you notice looking at the Ubuntu desktop is the new themeâ?¦ itâ??s trendy, dark, refined and overall a pretty different look for the desktop and just desktops in general.

Email is arguably one of the most popular and useful functions of a Linux system. Fortunately, there is a wide selection of free email software available on the Linux platform which is stable, feature laden, and ideal for personal and business environments. Send and receive emails, run a mail server, filter spam, administer a mailing list are just some of the options explored in this article.

Microsoft has quietly released to manufacturing a tweaked version of Windows XP to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer. Microsoft's marketing and communications wonk James Utzschneider offered some detail about its forthcoming release in a blog post late last week.

This tutorial series will take you through some tips and tricks on migrating from MS Office to OpenOffice.org 2.4. You'll see how to replicate some of the functionality and features that are lacking in OpenOffice.org. Soon you'll be more comfortable using OpenOffice.org for just about all your desktop publishing needs.

When LinuxWorld Expo kicks off August 4 in San Francisco, The VAR Guy will be tracking four key trends related to Canonical and Ubuntu Linux. Here's a look.

Day 3 of this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium featured a number of sessions, most notably a keynote address by Ubuntu founder and space tourist Mark Shuttleworth, who called for the greater Linux community to start thinking about discussing syncronicity, his term for having major software releases synchronised. The conference wrapped up on Saturday with some final interesting sessions and statistics.

It appears as though Propeller.com has fallen victim of a bad practice most early web designers have experienced early in their careers.

When AMD had unveiled the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 last month, NVIDIA was left in an awkward position. The Radeon HD 4850 had sharply outperformed the (more expensive, at the time) GeForce 9800GTX, which led NVIDIA to immediately begin slashing prices and introducing a slightly faster GeForce 9800GTX+ that ramped up the memory and core frequencies. ATI's flagship Radeon HD 4870 also had no problems competing with the more-expensive GeForce GTX 260 / 280. Many of NVIDIA's partners as a result have slashed their prices on their earlier GeForce 8 and 9 products. One of the NVIDIA products that was previously considered a good budget graphics card was the GeForce 8800GT, but now how does it stand up against the latest from ATI and NVIDIA? In this article we are looking at the ECS GeForce 8800GT. What is particularly special about this card and some of the other newer models shipping the GeForce 8800GT GPU is a BIOS revision that should yield a performance increase.

During OSCON last week, I met with Canonical's Pete Goodall to discuss the company's strategy for Ubuntu in the mobile market. Although he could not tell me any specifics regarding plans for upcoming Ubuntu-based subnotebook products, the word is that good stuff is coming soon. He seemed very enthusiastic about emerging opportunities for Ubuntu in the mobile space. Goodall demonstrated the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Atom-based subnotebook that he had brought with him to the event.

Xataface is a framework for the LAMP stack designed to allow non-technical users to edit the contents of MySQL databases through a Web interface. While phpMyAdmin is a great tool for database administrators and those who are familiar with SQL and database design, Xataface aims at allowing less technical people to modify the database.

Canonical, the company behind the Linux distro Ubuntu, has collaborated with software distributor ValuSoft to sell a boxed version of Ubuntu 8.04 into Best Buy retail stores. Is $19.99 a better price point for Ubuntu than $0? Now, on the face of it that sounds like a good deal, and on the whole it is, but I can't help but feel that targeting the kind of people who might be looking for an OS for $20 at Best Buy might not be the best thing that Canonical could be doing.

Well, last week started out with a bang thanks to Monday's announcement of the new, Debian-powered CherryPal PC. That the low-power machine runs Linux is, of course, good news. The twist is that users won't even see it, because the entire user interface is presented through Firefox. Slashdot and LXer immediately picked up the news, and most bloggers seemed to be skeptical. Generating far more heated discussion on the blogs, meanwhile, was a recent post from ZDNet's Jeremy Allison arguing that Linux needs more "haters." In his article, Allison points to the Linux Hater's Blog, which asserts, "We hate Linux. And you should too."

Open source software and open standards were high on the agenda at the opening of the GovTech 2008 conference in Durban this morning. During her keynote address, minister of public service and administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi highlighted open source software and open standards as key components of efficient IT in government.