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Cape Town-based open source software developers KnowledgeTree have just expanded their operations into the Iberian peninsula in a deal with Sybase SBS Software in Spain and Portugal. The master distributor deal will see Sybase SBS Software develop a network of new reseller partners in the region. Developed in South Africa, KnowledgeTree is an open source document management suite built on Apache, MySQL and PHP (Lamp).

I've tried OpenBSD before, and I always said I'd try it again. In the interim, I was able to try OpenBSD in a desktop configuration with the OliveBSD live CD, and that made me want to try a hard-drive installation of OpenBSD, which not coincidentally is the only one of the three major BSD projects (which include NetBSD and FreeBSD) to boot on my test machine. As was the case the last time I installed it, OpenBSD went on the box without a hitch. I created a user account, added it to the wheel group, which gave me sudo privileges, and I added the path to an FTP site for the precompiled packages to my .profile file. That enabled me to begin adding applications.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, will on Thursday begin making commercial applications available to Ubuntu users directly through the desktop, in a step designed to simplify software installation. The company is making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users via the operating system's built-in software update tool, using a feature called the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels Workstation allows users to run Windows and Linux simultaneously on a single system.

SugarCRM, one of the open source community's darlings, is taking steps towards improve interoperability between its PHP architecture and Java. The next version of SugarCRM's customer relationship management (CRM) suite, version 6.0 due in the fourth quarter of 2008 or first quarter of 2009, will feature a "Java layer" to enable PHP to talk to Java - hopefully without the tricky engineering work.

To save money, I cobbled together a computer for my mother out of cast-offs left over from my own upgrades. She doesn't need a cutting-edge computer because she's not a power user, but she does need a reliable machine to run a few basic applications and to access the Internet. I moved my mother from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and the experience was a surprisingly smooth one.

Even though I found very specific instructions for making the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter work with Linux using ndiswrapper, I've pretty much given up. In all cases, I can get the wireless adapter to light up, and I can find a wireless network. I just can't get a DHCP connection started. I don't have enough skill or patience to keep going with it. It's disappointing, but that's the breaks.

In this edition of the LQ Radio Interview series we have Orv Beach, Public Relations Committee Chair, and Gareth Greenaway, Operations Committee and Community Relations Chair, from SCALE - the Southern California Area Linux Expo. We discuss a variety of topics including the history and growth of SCALE, the rise of community/regional Linux expos, Linux and Open Source related news (including the Asus EEE PC and the Sun MySQL acquisition) and more.

JasperSoft drives operational business intelligence to new level in collaboration with SugarCRM community’s most popular project

Rack-Soft announced the successful ISO 9001:2000 certification by TUV CERT

The community surrounding Cinelerra, one of the premier non-linear video editors for Linux, has decided to strike off in its own direction and rewrite Cinelerra under a new codebase. Cinelerra has its roots in Broadcast 2000, a rewrite of Broadcast 2.1 in the late 1990s by its owner Heroine Virtual Ltd. (HV), a mysterious group that has stated its anonymity is necessary to keep the division between personal and professional projects. The Broadcast 2000 name was discontinued in September 2001, and Cinelerra 1.0.0 appeared in August 2002 using the same codebase.

Are you a new Linux user? Fantastic! Welcome to the world of freedom. Freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom from vendor lockin. You've made an excellent choice. Now that you've chosen, installed, and are using Linux there are a few things you should keep in mind as you learn the ropes of your new system.

VLC (VideoLan) is a cross-platform universial media player. It supports a variety of different inputs, including DVD, VCD, MPEG, AVI, WMV, MP4, and MOV. It has full subtitle support, as well as built-in video filters. There are skins for VLC available at the developer website.

Darkstar Linux 2008.1 is one of the first stable distro releases of the year. This distribution from Romania is based on Slackware and is available as a DVD image. For a desktop-oriented distro with its first release in 2004, Darkstar Linux has a lot of scope for improvement; its rock-solid performance and range of applications is overshadowed by its poor hardware skills

Dwayne Bailey tells us that Translate.org.za was awarded the coveted Pan South African Language Board award for its contribution to multilingualism and nation building over the past decade. The award, ‘Multilingualism and Nation Building: eBusiness Institution of the Decade’, was awarded to the non-profit organisation for its long-running and ground breaking work in the area of multilingual software.

SCO has filed its latest annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it makes grim reading. The company warns that its shareholders could end with nothing because: "A plan of reorganization could result in holders of our stock receiving no distribution on account of their interests and cancellation of their existing stock." SCO is Chapter 11 - US bankruptcy protection.

December's release of Nmap 4.50 marked the popular port-scanning tool's tenth anniversary. The 4.50 release includes Zenmap, a cross-platform GUI front end for Nmap which includes a command creation wizard, a scripting engine, and a host of other improvements. Zenmap makes it easier than ever to use Nmap. Port scanners are security auditing tools that allow you to discover hosts and the ports they have open on your LAN or across the Internet.

So vishing is not very exotic from a technical perspective, because it's just another form of social engineering, and it's been going on as long as there have been telephones. But VoIP offers some powerful tools to make vishing a more attractive endeavor over VoIP than the old-fashioned PSTN. It's a lot easier to hide your back trail over the data networks (thanks to the the World Wide Botnet), it's easy to spoof Caller ID: Automated calling tools are cheap and easy, and it's dirt cheap to call anywhere.

My (decidedly personal) conclusion:This is one cool platform. The idea of accessing files, pictures, videos and music files anywhere on any computer is appealing, especially to hardcore geeks. Just think of a combination of iPhone + eyeOS, or Archos + eyeOS , or Wii + eyeOS(provided the Opera support improves).

So, the last two days I’ve been hard at work coding on the 0.2 structure and user interface, the application layout is a lot simpler and I’ve completely decoupled the user interface from the core functionality.

Torvalds has been to Linux.conf.au and Torvalds has spoken. During a wide-ranging interview the Linux founder speculated on the future of hardware and the control that open source offers vendors. The ramifications of this are remarkable. Come hear the word of Torvalds.