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I set out to find out just how popular open-source software has become within big business. These are companies that have the money to spend on the biggest, most complex packages that IBM, Oracle, and other enterprise software makers have to offer.

The future of Linux on smartphones and "mobile terminals" in general seems bright if smartphones sales continue to grow more than 100% a year and if the growth of Linux as an OS on those phones continues to grow as it does now.

Tiny ERP is taking a small and midsized business-friendly approach to enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Even though the company only has 12 implementations under its belt, its ERP suite -- also named Tiny ERP -- is a mature entity

The Auditor security collection is a GPL-licensed live CD based on Knoppix, with more than 300 security software tools. Auditor gives you easy access to a broad range of tools in almost no time.

As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.

The City of Cape Town and the State IT Agency (Sita) plan to jointly develop an open source solution to replace the PALS system used by most of the country's municipalities to manage their libraries.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China set new regulations on Internet news content on Sunday, widening a campaign of controls it has imposed on other Web sites, such as discussion groups. "The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately.

There is a common understanding among Internet users that e-mail is one of the most trusted technologies around. Want to quit your job? E-mail your boss! Declare your flame to your boyfriend? Fire up Pine! Get information on applications for the fall semester at NYU? Hover to Mail.app! After all, it all seems so easy: type a few words, enter a generally easy to understand address and your missive is on its merry way, bouncing from MX record to MX record until it arrives in the hand of its giddy recipient. This however fails to take into account one of this century's most painful truths: e-mail, after so many years of being relied on, still doesn't work reliably — and I'm not talking about SPAM here but rather about the very structure of the network.

Switch to OpenDocument format will make state documents more accessible to the public because anyone can have the software to read the format.

Africa Source II, a week-long workshop that will bring together free software developers from across the continent, is to be held in January next year. The workshop will be held in Kalangala, Uganda, from January 8 to 15 next year.

We last left our hero (you) thinking to him/herself that "Alrightey, I'm ready to give this Linux thing a whirl. I have a few hours of extra time, a shiny-new or weathered-dull computer to try it out with, a couple beers left over from part 1, and I'm needing a book to guide me through whatever the heck this stuff is all about."

Where can I find Linux hardware drivers for my USB wireless network adapter?

Sita, the South African government's technology procurement agency, last week issued a request for bid calling for potential suppliers of open source solutions to government. The bid request is for the "procurement of an open source distribution(operating system and applications) and related software support services fro personal computers for a period of three years."

Sun Microsystems is hoping to steal market share from Microsoft Corp. with the release on Tuesday of a new version of its business software collection, StarOffice, with improved compatibility with Microsoft Office.

Linus Torvalds' deputy has claimed that the development of the Linux kernel is slowing down, with noticeably less features and bug fixes planned for a future version. Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer of the Linux production kernel, said last week that although the next version of the kernel is due for final release soon, few features have been planned for the subsequent release.

Company Extends Support for Open Source

Once a curiosity of computer rooms, open-source software applications are now giving commercial programs a run for their money in public-sector information technology shops. In fact, public-sector IT managers say free licensing isn't necessarily the most attractive characteristic of the best open-source products today. Many stand out for their stable programming code and array of useful features or, conversely, their stripped-down feature sets that eliminate unnecessary bells and whistles.

Often, this will actually involve a diverse group of interested parties, raising an interesting Babel-like challenge: how to communicate effectively. The common tongue that will bind collaborators will not be English, French, Spanish or Chinese — it will be standards, open business standards not controlled by any one participant. This has been the fuel behind the successful emergence of technologies like the internet and the open software movement as exemplified by Linux.

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. A slow start of the past week was followed by much activity during the weekend, with a new KNOPPIX live CD and DVD, an updated Ubuntu Colony CD set, and a number of other interesting development and final releases (but still no Mandriva 2006). Our featured distribution of the week is a little-known project called Hedinux GNU/Linux, while several new distributions have been added to the site's database, including Kororaa, a promising Gentoo variant with automated installation method. Plenty of news, comments, updated upcoming releases list and other regular columns complement this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Enjoy! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

The University wasted a whopping $2.7 million recently by purchasing licenses of Microsoft Office and Windows XP Pro for each registered student as Don Parris pointed out in his Sept. 15 letter. The opportunity existed for the University to distribute free software which would have liberated students from the endless cycle of increasingly expensive upgrades of proprietary software, but they chose not to take advantage of the deal