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vtiger is the CRM / complete tracking solution I have looked for and needed for 10 years! An all-in-one tracking everything organic package that ties everything together - because every task has many things associated with it, and vtiger works the way people think.

Everyone loves a turnkey solution and everyone wants a turnkey solution. Who wants to use multiple vendors for what a customer perceives as a single service? Thanks to the coolness of Linux, the power of Amazon’s EC2 services and the entrepreneurial spirit of Alon Swartz and Liraz Siri, TurnKey Linux delivers turnkey solutions to bare metal, virtual infrastructure and to Amazon’s EC2 environment in the form of virtual appliances. And, TurnKey Linux is, like its Ubuntu parent and Debian grandparent, free.

Earlier this month we started once again our annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we poll our readers about their choices and opinions concerning graphics cards, display drivers, and other graphics / X.Org related features of the Linux desktop. While this survey is still going on through the end of September -- so you still have time to participate -- here are the results from the first 6,300 people to submit their responses. We are publishing the results so far since there is the X Developers' Summit this week in Toulouse and some of these findings may prove to be useful during those discussions.

Fink is a collection of open source programs built for OS X. These programs are largely available on Linux and on Windows via Cygwin. Another similar system for OS X is Mac Ports, which uses a ports system similar to FreeBSD's port system. Fink uses DEB packages and is more similar to Debian's package management style, although the Fink front-end to build the .deb packages is unique and quite robust. As a result, Fink makes it easy to get development tools on the Mac. With it, you can install server programs like MySQL and Apache, or development tools like Subversion and Git. Fink makes the installation of, and continued upgrading, of these tools extremely simple.

LXer Feature: 12-Sept-2010

In the LXWR this week we have some new happenings with Diaspora, debunking the 1% Myth and a rather subdued response to the announcement of the Open Solaris fork known as OpenIndiana. Also, a Gartner report predicts Android will the top mobile OS by 2014 and could Oracle fracture open source community? Enjoy!

A week ago we reported on the open-source GPU drivers causing headaches for KDE users when attempting to use the KWin compositing manager under certain conditions. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Compilation has a few improvements to KWin and while the compositing manager does check for optional OpenGL extensions, the open-source Mesa drivers don't always do things right and it's resulted in some bugs and other issues inflicting KDE users.

A group of classical music lovers have successfully appealed for funds to release copyright-free versions of symphonies by four famous composers. The money will pay for an orchestra to record the music on an “all rights basis”. The project, Musopen, aims to deal with a problem caused by the way copyright laws work. Although the actual symphonies written by composers in, for example, the 19th century are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra. That means that in most cases, the only recordings currently in the public domain are very old performances generally recorded with poor quality equipment and plagued with hiss and crackle.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Ubuntu 10.04. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Warzone 2100 is a free, open-source real-time strategy game available for Linux, Windows and Mac. This game was originally closed-source, developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in 1999, but in 2004 it was officially licensed under the GNU GPL.

If you thought Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux is small, hold your breath. Tiny Core Linux is a minimalistic GNU/Linux distribution based on Linux kernel 2.6, it comes with graphical environment and provides facility to download and install applications from the Internet and it fits into 10MB of ISO file.

A file archiver is computer software which brings together a group of files into a single archive file. An archive file is therefore a collection of files and directories that are stored in one file. There are many advantages of storing multiple files this way. For example, an archive is a great way to store backup data, transfer files to another directory, or to a different computer. Archive files are often compressed to save disk space and reduce transfer times.

Many have criticized syslog-ng, a replacement for the syslog logging daemon with many additional features, for not being open enough. Syslog-ng has a closed-source commercial version and keeps the entire code base under a single copyright by requiring copyright transfer for contributions, which has been a sore spot in the eyes of many people. This may be part of the cause for syslog-ng failing to become the default system-logging daemon of modern Linux distributions. Now the project seeks to relieve these concerns and attract a wider contributor base with a new licensing model.

GREYC's Magic Image Converter (G'MIC) is a image retouching tool which has been made available as a GIMP plugin. It comes with a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects (more than 190!) and works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

As you guys should know already, Shotwell is now the default photo manager for Ubuntu 10.10 instead of F-Spot. Yorba has released Shotwell 0.7.2 with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The latest update is available via ppa for Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick.

Have you ever thought about measuring the Internet in terms if malware per minute? Me neither, but someone has and it makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Microsoft Windows user.

[Not exactly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Acer founder Stan Shih, in a talks with reporters on September 8, commented that Apple's strong popularity is mainly due to its products such as iPad and iPhone, and these products are like mutant viruses, which are difficult to find a cure for in the short-term, but he believes that PC vendors will eventually find a way to isolate Apple and become immune. Shih noted that Google's Android operating system is already attracting a lot PC brands to develop related products and this is one of the factors that proves that PC brands will eventually be able to isolate Apple.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards. We see similar “dumbing down” pressures on other popular marks of distinction, such as the constant pressure by “big agriculture” to allow more permissive use of pesticides in organic/biologique food. It is almost a law of nature that any item of relative scarcity and value will be counterfeited. Dumbing down definitions is just one way to counterfeit an open standard.

Well, well, well, guess who's back! It's been over seven months since i last published an article here at TuxArena, but now we're back on track and kicking! The series of reviews continues today with an article about one of the most popular audio player out there (and why not admit it, even controversial). I'm talking Amarok here.

A how-to on using FFmpeg to copy audio and video streams from one container to another without re-encoding them. Downloading a video from YouTube is pretty easy these days thanks to various browser extensions; and if the downloaded video is in a .mp4 container, I don’t have do anything since just about any video player, including my 1st generation PopcornHour reads them just fine. But some videos on YouTube are stuffed into .flv containers. So for those videos in .flv format, I want to convert them into .mp4 files at least, or something better. Additionally, for music videos I sometimes want just the audio; so I can play it in my car or with my desktop audio player. So an additional task is to extract just the audio into an audio container. On top of that, I would rather not re-encode the video or audio, I just want to extract it and stick it into a different container.

Nearly 6 years ago when we first started thinking about doing project hosting on code.google.com we noticed something particular about the other open source project hosting sites. They either accepted all Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, like Sourceforge, or they only accepted one, like the Free Software Foundation's Savannah project, which only accepted GPL'd projects.