Vamos, Opensource Automotive Simulation Framework

Vamos is a very young project concentrating on being an automotive simulation framework with an emphasis on thorough physical modeling and good C++ design. Vamos includes a real-time, first-person, 3-D driving application.


It also includes a number of cool real-world locations, with tracks such as Germany’s Nurburgring and Japan’s Suzuka Circuit, among others. However, this won’t be a major draw card of authenticity just yet, as the graphics are still at a level comparable to a 286, and the cars resemble something more like what Postman Pat would drive. As a result, the project’s author is inviting anyone to contribute to the effort. Still, it looks promising, especially as parts of its code are being borrowed from another project.

For more info and download this game engine, feel free to visit here.

The Best OpenSource Firewall and Gateway: Untangle

Untangle is the free & open source alternative to Sonicwall. In addition to the basics (Firewall, VPN, IPS & routing), Untangle makes it easier to block spam, spyware, viruses, phishing, porn, gambling, MySpace, Facebook, IM, peer-2-peer & much, much more.

Features:

• Runs at the gateway... No clients to install!
• Easy to use: Intuitive GUI, logging, reporting & automatic signature updates
• Installs on standard Intel/AMD hardware

Highlights:

• Comprehensive Security Protect the network from spyware, spam, viruses, hackers and identity thieves. Untangle is network security, web security, mail security & secure remote access integrated into one platform. And as an open source platform, new applications can be added at anytime, so Untangle has you covered when the next new networking technology is developed.
• Increased Productivity Block time-wasting websites & applications like MySpace, instant messenger, online games & gambling. Untangle even blocks the most difficult port-hopping applications dead in their tracks.
• Increased Visibility Great reporting provides the visibility and data necessary to monitor behavior and track incidents at the network, user, and client levels.
• Easier to Use Each application comes pre-configured for business use and Untangle’s intuitive “virtual rack” GUI makes additional fine-tuning a snap.

Hardware Requirements:

• The Untangle Server requires a dedicated PC installed at the gateway to your network.
• Your hardware does not need an operating system - the Untangle Server installs its own operating system.
• The Untangle Server software completely erases any content or data that may exist on your PC hard drive.

Download now this nice tool at Here.

Blender 2.46 Final Has Been Released

Professionals who edit 3D always had a big headache: the cost of software. Prices finished by astronomical prevent even that students could develop their skills at home, not counting a tool of quality.

However, this framework is changing. Blender is a 3D modeler free, open source, which has so many features as the major competitors paid, thus offering an alternative to cost both for companies and for home users.

The interface of the program differs slightly in relation to the vast majority of software of this genre, which can entail an initial difficulty of learning by the user, but if you speak English, just visit the official website of tutorials, Click Here.

What you find in Blender

Customizable interface
In a fully customizable interface to better meet your needs, you can find all the tools they need and how to find better organized. Some visual improvements are present, such as anti-aliasing on the sources (ends with the "cracks" of images) and the possibility of use of themes.

Tools of animation
To compose their animations the program provides several important tools. Thus, after creating the movements of their individual character, you can use a non-linear editor of motions to join the scenes that previously produced and then may include total sync with sound, through the tool of integrated audio. You can still take an editor of poses, line-of-time and achieve precise deformation of armor.

Effects of particle physics
The physical effects that can be applied to models allow extremely realistic results. Thus, through a system of particles that can be integrated with any object, you have complete control over textures, curves and various effects and properties of objects. There is also a special tool to simulate fluid material, which allows the manipulation of parameters such as gravity and viscosity in some models.

Creating Games
Blender can be a good option for developers of games looking for a powerful and free. For this, he has devices for detecting and simulation of collision dynamics, support the multimateriais, multitexturas and luminosity and many other resources.

Supported formats
To save and open their files, the program supports a wide variety of popular files, including TGA, JPG, PNG, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, Iris, SGI Movie, IFF, AVI and Quicktime GIF, TIFF, PSD, MOV , Between 2D and 3D Studio, AC3D, COLLADA, DEC, DirectX, Lightwave, MD2, Motion Capture, Nendo, OpenFlight, PLY, Pro Engineer, Radiosity, Raw Triangle, softimage, STL, TrueSpace, VideoScape, VRML, VRML97, Wavefront, X3D Extensible 3D and xfig export.

By using the format of the programme itself, the BLEND, you also have more resources available, including compress, add digital signatures and encryption.

You can get Blender for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows or Mac at Blender site.

Adobe Lightroom Alternative: Picasa for Linux

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks and share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web.

The special Picasa Basic Fixes are buttons that make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and color, and enhance your digital pictures, and they are very similar to the professional features in Lightroom!


Picasa helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your computer. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized.

Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips. And Picasa makes it a snap to share your pictures – you can email, print photos home, and even post pictures on your own blog.

Picasa should work on any Linux system with Intel 386-compatible processor, glibc 2.3 or greater, and a working X11 display system. Optional: XVideo extension on your display driver (to view things full screen); having a newer kernel (>= 2.6.13) to get notified of file changes; having a new kernel and HAL to automatically detect new media insertion.

Notes:

• There are other variations -- for example, setting screensavers and desktop backgrounds only works on certain Linux windowing environments.
• Desktop Integration features require a current version of Gnome or KDE.
• Camera detection and integration requires kernel >= 2.6.13, hal >= 0.56, and gnome-volume-manager or equivalent.

Picasa is available in US English now and plan to expand to more languages in a future release.

Feel free to download Picasa for Linux at Here.

OSS Open Sound System v4.0 for Linux

Open Sound System (OSS) is the first attempt in unifying the digital audio architecture for UNIX. OSS is a set of device drivers that provide a uniform API across all the major UNIX architectures. It supports Sound Blaster or Windows Sound System compatible sound cards which can be plugged into any UNIX workstation supporting the ISA or PCI bus architecture.

OSS also supports workstations with on-board digital audio hardware.Traditionally, each UNIX vendor has provided their own API for processing digital audio. This meant that applications written to a particular UNIX audio API had to be re-written or ported, with possible loss of functionality, to another version of UNIX. Applications written to the OSS API, need to be designed once and then simply re-compiled on any supported UNIX architecture.

OSS is source code compatible across all the platforms. Most UNIX workstations, thus far, have only provided support for digital audio sampling and playback (business audio). OSS brings the world of MIDI and electronic music to the workstation environment. With the advent of streaming audio, speech recognition/generation, computer telephony, Java and other multimedia technologies, applications on UNIX can now provide the same audio capabilities as those found on Windows NT, OS/2, Windows 95 and the Macintosh operating systems.

OSS also provides synchronized audio capabilities required for desktop video and animation playback.

You can download OSS for Linux at Here.

Free Video Editing Software For Linux

Here are the best application softwares for Video Editing that run on Linux; Cinelerra, Lives, Blender, Kino, Blender, Avidemux, KDEnlive, Jahshaka and ZS4 Video Editor.


CINELERRA
Cinelerra, the first Linux based real-time editing and special effects system is a revolutionary Open Source HD media editing system. Long developed by Heroine Warrior with vital assistance from LMA, Cinelerra gives you real-time 1080p editing and compositing power on a state-of-art Linux video workstation.

Developed for AMD64 OPTERON technology, the LMA CINELERRA system is a powerful and highly productive workstation for adding cost effective hardware and Linux software for Video and film production studios. The LMA CINELERRA system will support SMPTE-292 and SMPTE-259 native 10-bit resolution - the maximum resolution allowed in SMPTE SDI standards on OPTERON. CINELERRA was the first media editing system ported to support the AMD OPTERON 64 bit technology. CINELERRA has a number of effects built into the system including numerous telecine effects, video special effects including compositing, and a complete audio effects system. Cinelerra is featured on the APRO, the first 64 Bit Intellistation ever offered by IBM. More useful fork is here and here.




LiVES
LiVES began in 2002 as the Linux Video Editing System. Since it now runs on more operating systems, LiVES is a Video Editing System. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features. You can get more info at here.








BLENDER
Blender is a free software 3D animation program. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD with unofficial ports for BeOS, SkyOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Maya.

These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting. More info about Blender can be found at here.


KINO
Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. More info at here.




JAHSHAKA
Jahshaka aims to become a cross-platform, open source, free, video editing, effects, and compositing suite. It is currently in alpha stage, supporting realtime effects rendering, but lacking useful implementations of many features such as the non-linear editing system. It is written using Trolltech's Qt, but its user interface is written using an OpenGL library to create GUIs. Checkout the latest info at here.



AVIDEMUX
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. More info at here.





KDEnlive
KDEnlive is a non linear video editor for the KDE environment running on Linux. KDEnlive is Free-software. The project was initially started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developers.

KDEnlive aims to become the most advanced non-linear video editor under GNU/Linux. More info and the latest news can be reached at here.


ZS4 Video Editor
ZS4 Video Editor is video editing and compositing software which aims to provide media experts with a facility to combine a variety of media types (currently photos, videos and audio files) into one (or more) output file(s). More info about this can be get at here.

GParted: Gnome Partition Editor

GParted is the Gnome Partition Editor application. Before attempting to use it, here is some basic background information.

A hard disk is usually subdivided into one or more partitions. These partitions are normally not re-sizable (making one larger and the adjacent one smaller) The purpose of GParted is to allow the individual to take a hard disk and change the partition organization therein, while preserving the partition contents.

GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).

GParted uses GNU libparted to detect and manipulate devices and partitiontables.

Several (optional) "file system" tools provide support for file systems not included in libparted.
These optional packages will be detected at runtime and do not require a rebuild of GParted.

GParted is written in C++ and uses gtkmm for its Graphical User Interface (GUI). The general approach is to keep the Graphical User Interface as simple as possible. Every attempt was made to conform to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

GParted comes under the terms of the General Public License
For Download, look at their homepage. The software is free so I will not post any rs-link or anything else.

More info and download can be found at here.

70 Nice OS Wallpapers for your Linux Desktop

70 Nice OS Wallpaper for your Linux Desktop

You can have 70 nice and beautiful wallpaper for your Linux Desktop. All of them come with OpenSource motives and symbols.



Here's one of them, its very nice, isn't it?



You can get all those 70 wallpapers by downloading this RAR files at Here.

KompoZer, The OpenSource Web Authoring System

KompoZer is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs.

Now there's no need to pay a little fortune for a program to create and edit great-looking web pages, including powerful and easy to use CSS capabilities. Like the other web authoring softwares that run in Linux, such as Quanta and Aptana, KompoZer is OpenSource and free.


KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

KompoZer is based on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla; it's a super-fast, very reliable, standards conformant engine maintained on a daily basis by a wide community of developers. Its remarkable support of XML, CSS and JavaScript offers the best authoring platform on the market. Its architecture based on XUL makes it the most extensible editing tool ever.

KompoZer is a stand-alone tool; hence its small size and fast speed

Those who are familiar with the DreamWeaver interface will feel right at home with KompoZer:

• WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
• Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
• Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
• Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
• Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
• Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
• The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.

You can download this opensource software at here.

phpMyAdmin 2.11.2 has been released

phpMyAdmin, a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web has released version 2.11.2. This opensource tool currently can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields.

phpMyAdmin's project have won the 2007 Sourceforge.net Community Choice Award "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins" on few months ago.

Currently its available for Linux, Windows for free to download. You can visit here to learn more and download this SysAdmins Best Tool.

Vyatta 3.0, Debian-based disto for routers and firewalls, Has Released

Vyatta (pronounced vee-AH-tah.) today announced the latest release of its open-source networking software.

The Vyatta software combines router, firewall, and VPN capabilities into an integrated solution that delivers twice the performance of proprietary network solutions at half the price.

The latest release, Vyatta Community Edition 3 (VC3) provides substantial enhancements and feature additions from the previous VC2 release, including IPSec VPN, multi-link PPP, and BGP scaling and security.

"I’m a firm believer in the value of open source over proprietary technologies. If you’re looking for price-performance—which I have to do for the taxpayers—you can’t beat Vyatta," said Paul Wheeler, IT manager for the City of Madera. "I have been continually impressed with Vyatta’s attention to detail, excellent support, and ability to reliably add more power and flexibility to the solution. Vyatta is no longer just a lower-cost alternative to high-priced Cisco proprietary routers. It’s a flat out better solution."

Since its debut, Vyatta’s networking software has been downloaded nearly 100,000 times. As the third major release, Vyatta Community Edition 3 adds a number of changes and enhancements, including:

• IPSec VPN – Vyatta now supports dedicated site-to-site (branch-to-branch or branch-to-HQ) virtual private networking and supports the most widely used cryptographic algorithms, including 3DES, AES (128 and 256-bit), MD5, and SHA1. In addition, IPsec VPN can now be configured in a cluster of multiple Vyatta units with failover mechanisms providing high availability for mission-critical services.
• Multi-link PPP (MLPPP) – MLPPP allows customers to increase WAN bandwidth by using multiple low-speed circuits, typically T1 links, in parallel, enabling a pay-as-you-grow strategy instead of paying the high cost of a T3 upgrade.
• BGP scaling and security enhancements – Improved BGP scaling provides faster routing convergence with many peers. MD5-based neighbor authentication delivers improved routing security. Per-BGP peer policy support makes it easier than ever to control route propagation. New monitoring and troubleshooting commands make Vyatta easier to use.

"We have proven the performance and reliability of our open-source networking solution in large, demanding networks, making Vyatta a no-brainer alternative to over-priced, inflexible, proprietary products," said Kelly Herrell, CEO of Vyatta. "Vyatta is the most flexible network infrastructure solution in the world and can be deployed on server blades, dedicated appliances, or virtual machines using VMWare and Xen. As a result, Vyatta is a universal solution to networking problems in the branch office, at headquarters, and in the data center, for both enterprises and service providers."

Vyatta builds commercially supported, open-source networking solutions that provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors. Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products.

Vyatta customers know that Vyatta's Linux-based router, firewall and VPN software gives them a level of control unavailable from proprietary solutions. Vyatta customers are thought leaders who recognize the benefits of flexible deployment options--x86 hardware, blade servers, virtualization--of freedom to integrate applications of their choice, and of the economic and performance advantages of commodity hardware and components.

Download Vyatta ISO at here or for vary downloads at here.

Open your Gmail on your Phone!

Gmail has released a brand new version of Gmail’s Java application for mobile phones. Gmail Mobile 1.5 now shows yours bandwidth usage whenever it loads or refreshes. It comes extremely useful for those running on pay-as-you-go plans.

Other new features include an option to access your contacts easily from the menu. The new contact option shows you the same contact information as seen in the standard version of Gmail. You can see email address, photo and recent conversation. You can also call your contact, if you have stored his/her phone number.

Gmail 1.5 lets you save your incomplete message, but surprisingly, the incomplete message is not stored as draft. Instead, it is stored in your phone and you can store just one incomplete message at any given time.

Oddly, the application automatically appends an ad at the bottom of each message, which reads: “Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com”. There is an option in the settings to disable this promotion ad, but still I think it’s a bad way to promote the Gmail Mobile. If it was Yahoo! or Hotmail doing the same in their mobile mail application, it was absolutely fine. Can’t imagine Google is doing this!

To install or upgrade Gmail Mobile, just go to gmail.com/app from your mobile browser.

OpenSource Alternative for Basecamp and Microsoft SharePoint

Mindquarry is an Open Source collaborative software platform for file sharing (documents, images, media files, etc.), task and project management, team collaboration and Wiki editing that meshes simplicity and functionality. As a result, knowledge workers are able to connect with team members and share information from wherever they are, effectively improving team-work and increasing productivity within the company.

With Mindquarry teams you can analyse and manage your teams and team members. Mindquarry file sharing stores all your documents and keeps a history of changes.

Work offline and at any time synchronize all files and tasks with Mindquarry's collaboration software as soon as you are back online.

You can see all your teams in a list. This list contains the team's name, description and photos of some of the team members. You can use the slider allows to the left and the right of the team member's photos to scroll through the list of team members.

At first, Mindquarry provides the opensource and commercial edition. But for full supporting the opensource community, it has stopped providing the commercial services and products. More info about this issue, you can read the Mindquarry's newsletter here.

Viva MindQuarry, Viva OpenSource!

NetBSD 4.0 RC3 Has Released

NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable UNIX-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from 64-bit AlphaServers and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices.

Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments, and it is user-supported with complete source. Many applications are easily available through The NetBSD Packages Collection.

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am happy to announce the availability of NetBSD 4.0 Release Candidate 3. This release candidate has several bug fixes and other changes since the previous release candidate - RC2. The most important ones are: build of the 32-bit sparc64 kernel is fixed, allowing the sparc release to be built; many fixes to nfe(4) and bge(4) drivers; fixed PR 37037 - kernel memory corruption due to ipnat; support for the HP ML110 G2 / Adaptec 2610SA SATA RAID added to aac(4); fix of an off-by-one error in OpenSSL; avoid kernel crashes in signal handling (PR 37004) and Linux emulation (PR 36920); fix ACPI related interrupt storms due to differences between IOAPIC and classic interrupt routing."

NetBSD focuses on clean design and well architected solutions. Because of this NetBSD may support certain 'exciting' features later than other systems, but as time progresses the NetBSD codebase is getting even stronger and easier to manage, while other systems that value features over code quality are finding increasing problems with code management and conflicts.

NetBSD was the first free OS to provide USB support, and was using USB on Apple Power Macintosh machines before Apple had Mac OS X even booting. The USB support is available on all appropriate platforms, including alpha, i386, and macppc. Supported devices include mice, keyboards, modems, and mass storage devices (ZIP), with more drivers becoming available as the USB standard develops.




With it's wide range of supported hardware platforms, NetBSD runs fine on many embedded systems, including ARM, XScale, MIPS and PowerPC CPUs. The image shows a (real) toaster that was modified to include a TS-7200 board equipped with an ARM cpu to control the toaster's heating coil, toasting time, and to also play MP3s and run Apache all at the same time.

You can download it here.

New OpenSource CMS: SilverStripe

SilverStripe is an easy to use content management system (CMS) based on PHP. Not only does SilverStripe offer an very cool looking user interface, but is is really simple to get started with and building websites of any size and for any purpose.

Each page has a behavior that acts as a template for the functionality the page features. Normally it will just be a standard page, but it could be a contact form, a forum or one of the other included templates. The behaviors match the modules listed on the SilverStripe website. These modules include (but are not limited to) e-commerce, google maps integration, a blog - and Flickr gallery that easily lets use integrate photos from Flickr by user, tag or photoset.

SilverStripe is also search engine optimization (seo) friendly - for each page meta-data such as description and keywords can be added. Additionally the meta-data lets you have full control of the URL, so that keywords can be embedded exactly as you wish in a seo manner.

Finally I wish to high-light the newsletter feature - now you don't have to struggle in Outlook or other e-mail programs that are really not designed for making newsletters. Everything is managed directly from your website - it does not get much more simple than this.

Also I really like that working with images in the WYSIWYG editor - you can scale them, and SilverStripe will automatically re-sample your original image. This makes images look pixel perfect - every time.

You can download it here.

Google updates desktop for Linux

Google has updated its desktop for fanboys Linux with the beta launch of version 1.1.

Now you can search and launch applications, and search within Microsoft Office documents. The team at Google has also upgraded the image search so better quality thumbnails are returned and more image formats are supported.

Software engineer Jim Zhaung adds that the hotkey that launches the quick search box is now customisable. Tasty.

The firm says the changes have been made in response to user feedback. No doubt there will be plenty more of that once tech-heads have got their mitts on the new version. Point your browser here to download it.

Open source CMS - promise without pitfall

Open source has changed operating systems, application servers and databases. Now, the benefits of open source are being realized in content management systems (CMS), traditionally a vendor-controlled world of expensive licensing and closed APIs.

Open source is putting CMS into the hands of developers and organizations previously unable, or unwilling, to use CMS. Early adopters include national and local governments and media companies.

As ever with open source, there's an almost bewildering amount of choice of systems - there are more than 80 CMS that I've counted, here.

Typically, the CMS you pick will be driven by your project requirements. For example, Joomla, Drupal, Xoops, e107, Zope, eZPublish and PHP-Fusion could be good choices for sites serving communities and offering social networking. For more personal publishing, like blogging, Wordpress or MediaWiki are better.

Here, I've rounded up the eight most important things to evaluate before plunging in and picking an open source CMS.
Installation and upgrade

This should be a straightforward process, performed using wizards or a setup script file. It is not good to follow more than twenty steps manually - changing configuration files, deleting and creating folders, and so on. Download, extract and run installation wizard - that should do it. Upgrades can also tend to pose a problem, and the hallmark of a good CMS will be the frequent and reliable release of patches or scripts that you can easily apply.
Environment

If the CMS is open source, the environment - operating system, application server, programming language, framework and database system - will probably be open source, too. The most popular environment is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (better known as LAMP). But there are alternatives for each. You must have answers for following questions: is the CMS capable of running on different environments? Which environment is the best for the CMS that you have chosen? Is the environment easy to setup? Most of the CMS run on Linux, which now dominates more than 60 per cent of server systems on the internet. Apache is the most popular application server, but you can also consider Lighttpd and Zope as good alternatives. Similarly, you can consider PostgreSQL and SQLite over MySQL.
License

A word to the wise: check the license under which your CMS has been released. To avoid possible confusion down the line over use rights and terms and conditions, it's best to pick a license that isn't tied to a specific product or company, allows for free distribution of the code, re-engineering, and the creation of commercial applications.
Customization

Is your portal, blog or website going to be used by users in different counties? If so, then your CMS should support your ability to localize - support multiple languages translations and work with different currencies and date formats. You should be able to add new languages to your site using just a few simple steps - for example, uploading language files or translating clauses using the administration panel. Also, evaluate whether there are XML and CSS templates available that allow you to change the skin of the site, for a different look and feel.

You should also assess the plug-in architecture for ease of use and richness of capabilities. Drupal, for example, has a plug-in architecture that literally "just works". Plug-ins from the official Drupal site download and install just by uploading the archive file and using the administration panel. The plug-in directory is so rich you can find almost any plug-in for any purpose.

Support and community

Evaluate the level of community backing your chosen CMS. The number of active developers in the community will directly influence the quality of the CMS, as they will be able to add features, fix bugs and provide some level of support. A good CMS should have valuable support channels like official forums, mailing lists, wikis and knowledge bases. In short, the bigger and more active the community, the better the CMS.
Users and clients

See who's using your chosen product. Some users have added their support to CMS communities through donations, which can help promote growth and maturity; others have contributed to development, testing, translations, themes and skin design, or simply promoted and spread the word.
Documentation

If and when something does go wrong, often the fastest way to solve a problem is to check out the documentation rather than wait for a quick response from the community. Documentation - installation and upgrade guides, user manuals, and administration and developer manuals - should be so simple that non-technical staff should understand them, yet detailed enough that every step can be followed easily.
Age, simplicity and complexity

Maturity matters. Forget a CMS with a version number less than one, as this is a good sign of its stability and completeness. The CMS that's been on the market more than eight to ten years might also have problems, because it can become very big, and start to pack in too many features and add-ons for your needs. However, more features may be what you want - it just depends on your requirements: a simple website with just news, event and pages support versus a portal with membership, discussion board, photo gallery, blog, auction and payments.
Conclusion

Open source is opening up CMS, putting the ability to filter and serve information in the hands of more developers and organizations with big plans but tight budgets. Hopefully, this guide will have given you some helpful tips when it comes to choosing the open source CMS that suits your needs.

Source: Bayarsaikhan Volodya

HP: Linux ready for most applications

Linux is ready to take on a more serious role in enterprises, a senior Hewlett-Packard executive has said.

Randy Hergett, HP's director of engineering for open-source and Linux organization, said at the Gelato Itanium Conference & Expo in Singapore on Monday that Linux is ready to be used in some mission-critical applications, despite a perception that there are gaps in areas such as manageability.

Linux is "ready for most applications," he said, noting that there are telecommunications companies running mission-critical databases on Linux, and overall adoption levels are ramping up.

Citing an HP-commissioned global study conducted by market-research company GCR earlier this year, Hergett said that three out of five decision makers were ready to deploy Linux for mission-critical applications within the next two years, while one in five saw that happening in five years' time.

According to the study, which surveyed more than 600 decision makers who were using some flavor of Unix, security and reliability were the top two concerns in a mission-critical environment.

On whether Linux can satisfy these two requirements of security and reliability, Hergett said: "It does...From a security standpoint, we think Linux is actually very secure."

"With reliability, I think it's not as robust yet (as HP's own iteration) or some of the other proprietary Unix systems, but it's making great progress," Hergett added.

On whether the availability of different flavors of Linux will affect its adoption for mission-critical applications, Hergett said he did not think so.

"In some ways it actually gives those decision makers more flexibility and more choices to choose from," Hergett explained, adding that Unix has several iterations too, and decision makers are "used to having that choice."

Source: Lynn Tan

Dell: Microsoft warnings haven't hurt Linux uptake

Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Michael Dell.

Speaking to CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK at a conference Thursday, Dell's chief executive said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft's claims.

"On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows," said Dell in an interview during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. "We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down."

However, for those customers who might be concerned about whether Microsoft's claims of patent violation could result in legal action, Dell added that there were "certainly mechanisms if customers are concerned about patents."

In May, Microsoft claimed that free and open-source software violated more than 230 of its patents, but hasn't provided more detailed information following the statement.

Dell's chief marketing officer, Mark Jarvis, claimed that though the two vendors have had a close relationship in the past, Microsoft had not given Dell any more information about the issue of patent infringement, despite Dell supporting Linux on its server range and more recently on its desktops and notebooks.

"When we announced the Linux notebook, we didn't get a call from Microsoft--whatever rumblings have been heard, they haven't been heard in Austin, Texas (near where Dell is based)," Jarvis said.

On May 24, Dell launched its first PCs based on Linux in the U.S.: a basic model, Inspiron E1505n, a more powerful Dimension E520n and a top-of-the-range XPS 410n.

Jarvis added that Dell did not expect its Linux PCs to sell in large numbers, reiterating that Linux growth was with servers.

"Are they (Linux PCs) going to sell a lot? Absolutely not. But on the server side we've seen continued growth," said Jarvis.

Source: Tom Espiner

At Microsoft, seeking the next billion computer users

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got Microsoft its first billion customers. It's Will Poole's job to get the next billion.

Poole, who co-leads Microsoft's emerging-markets push, is chartered with enabling the company's goal of allowing 1 billion more people to access computing technology by 2015.

The company has a number of efforts under way in the area, from the Starter Editions of Windows XP and Vista, to shared computers for classrooms, to research into turning a cell phone into a low-cost computer by connecting it with a large display. Poole said the last effort, which has garnered a fair bit of interest, is moving from the drawing board to reality.

"We've got it in development in China right now," he said during a recent meeting with CNET News.com reporters and editors. "We've got a manufacturing partner signed on with us and our group in Beijing is working quite hard on it. It'll be in trials I think within a year, and we'll see how people respond to it."

In the meeting, Poole talked about Microsoft's approach, as well as some of the challenges, which stretch well beyond the fact that many people can't afford the latest technology. In actuality, relevance and accessibility are bigger hurdles for the world's poor, Poole said.

Q: How can Microsoft reach people who historically have not been users of its technology?

Poole: Let me begin by clarifying the difference between emerging markets and emerging segments. An emerging market is what people typically think about--such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. The other includes very large developing economies. Of course there are many people in those countries who do not have very good access to technology. At the same time, we look more broadly at a concept called emerging segments...people who do not have access to technology in whatever market they're in.

So what do you do to reach those people? There are obviously people who can't afford technology here in the United States, as well as in our neighboring countries and in emerging markets.

Poole: There are three primary areas where we can help people realize social and economic opportunity through technology. Transforming education is one. The second one is looking at fostering local innovation, and the third one is enabling jobs and opportunities.

When I travel around the world I see the power of the PC to bring people new opportunities--either to have skills that they can apply to get better jobs to earn more money, or to take a disadvantaged person who simply could not get a job at all because of a handicap.

What are some of the technologies that you guys are working on that can really help beyond the economic issues that are in play?

Poole: You bring up a very good point. When I started looking at this about five years ago, I thought that affordability was the biggest challenge. It turns out that affordability is actually the third on the list of issues. The first one turns out to be relevance. That means bringing a product to market that really meets the needs of somebody in an emerging segment--be it in rural India or in urban China or down the street, here in San Francisco. Are we building a technology that is relevant to the specific needs and problems that they have?

The second thing is to look at whether the technology is accessible to them. Can they find a place to buy it? Can they get support? Can they get broadband connectivity to bring them into the world of the Web? And then the third thing is affordability.

So, for example, in Asia we focus a lot on education because that's a very high priority there. In Latin America, we focus a little bit more on the jobs and opportunities and helping people get better jobs through the use of software technology. So there's a variety of different technologies we'll bring to the market, depending on the specific needs of local people.

I've seen a lot of interesting demos from across the company of some different approaches. One of those is called MultiPoint, where it's basically an entire classroom using one computer. Can you talk a little about how that works?

Poole: MultiPoint came from Microsoft Research India. They had sent people out to see what kids were doing with PCs in schools. What they found was that kids tended to be gathered around a PC and (watching) one person do their thing and then they took turns every five minutes or so. It was really not very engaging. So they developed this technology called Microsoft MultiPoint, which enables an application to be built that lets multiple mice be used with a different cursor for each kid. So one kid can be solving a math problem in one part of the screen while another one is solving a math problem on another part of the screen.

They basically can be time-sharing the screen and working collaboratively. What we found is that not only do they get to be more engaged with what they do on the PC...but they help each other. That's turned out to be something that's very beneficial from an education perspective. The kids are engaged and collaborating to solve a problem.

A lot of people think that for much of the world the first computing device that people use won't be a PC. It'll be some sort of mobile device. Obviously, that's an area that Microsoft has spent some time on, but it's a little bit further from its comfort area. What are you doing in the mobile space as far as non-PC devices?

Poole: Well, we certainly agree that the first computing device which will be used by many people around the world will be a phone. You see this happening in emerging segments all around the planet today. Mobile phones are really just taking off as the prices come down and the access is going up. We think that there are some interesting things to do to help make the mobile phone become a better device.

How close is that to being a product? You take the phone that people are already getting, hook it up to the TV they already have and you've got a computer. The phones that we use today in the U.S. certainly are capable of that from a technology perspective. How close is that?

Poole: Well, it's still got a ways to go. We've got it in development in China right now. We've got a manufacturing partner signed on with us, and our group in Beijing is working quite hard on it. It'll be in trials I think within a year and we'll see how people respond to it. It's a new concept in the sense of trying to bring together PC and phone technology in a lower-cost device. It's not something that you're going to see a businessperson in a developed market using while walking down the street. We're trying to really target the needs of a broader population and so we're very excited about the opportunity there, but time will tell.

Obviously, Microsoft is not the only company looking at how to get computing devices into the hands of more people across the globe. The project that's gotten the most attention is the One Laptop Per Child project. What do you make of a program the group is launching in which people in the U.S. can buy one of the laptops for their own use, and then a second computer would go overseas?

Poole: It's an interesting way to get people involved in this challenge that we all see, which is how do you effectively apply technology to education. I'll be very interested to see how it comes out as well.

How important is it that that first device people use be running a Microsoft operating system versus Linux or another operating system?

Poole: Interestingly enough, we don't see that as much of a battle. The battle is around nonconsumption or around buying a new two-wheeled motor vehicle as opposed to buying a PC for the home...Clearly, we have an interest in having our software used and we think that the value that we offer is very deeply desired--particularly as people get into more of the business world...But our primary goal is around just getting technology to be adopted.

How much might Microsoft benefit in the coming years from these efforts to get more people using computers?

Poole: There's no doubt that the growth potential in emerging markets is tremendous...When Bill Gates announced the Unlimited Potential effort back in April in Beijing, he said that we'd like to see the first billion people get benefits from technology by the year 2015. It's going to take a while for us and all of our partners working together to make this happen. But it's something that we think will happen.

I've heard he's really tasking you guys to do it a few years sooner than that.

Poole: Well, you know, Bill is never one to let you off easy. He wants to set a high bar and usually he finds out that people will go for it. We're going to go as fast as we can, but it's not something that Microsoft alone can do. It really is a matter of us working with many, many other companies around the world, including the NGOs or governments or foundations. I think as people get excited and see the results, it will snowball and really pick up momentum.


Source: C|Net News