FOSS for Small Medium Retail Businesses

Below is my favorite Free and Open Source Software for Small and Medium Businesses (especially retail).

Contact Management
SugarCRM


PBX
Asterisk / Trixbox


Accounting
Quasar


Enterprise Resource Planning
OpenBravo


Point of Sale
LibrePOS (formerly TINA POS, now acquired and renamed to OpenBravo POS)


Payroll/ Human Resources/ Scheduling
TimeTrex


Wiki
Mediawiki


Supply Chain Management
Compiere


Project Management
OpenProj


Office Suite
OpenOffice


Human Resource Management
OrangeHRM


Data Mining
Paterva


Web site development
Drupal


Digital Signage
Spectakle

A new Linux Commando is born

Today, I started a new blog: Linux Commando.
I will blog Linux commands in the new blog. Enjoy.

I will focus more on applications in this particular Open Software blog.

Plug & Play USB Flash Disk

I bought a USB flash drive: Kingston USB 2.0 Data Traveler (2 GB). I mostly intend to use it for quickly transporting files between my home computers and computers offsite.

According to the packaging, this USB flash drive is supported by Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. That is perfect because
my home computer runs Linux, namely, Debian Etch (4.0). It has several USB 2.0 ports both on the front panel, and on the back panel.

I booted up my Linux computer, and logged into Gnome (the X Windows manager).

Then I plugged in the flash disk into the USB 2.0 port in the front panel.

Lo and behold, it automatically mounted the drive for me.

I could see an icon on my desktop for the usbdrive ("labeled Kingston"). Also, it opened the flash file system in nautilus (the default file manager).

The flash drive is now mounted, and ready for my use.

It is that easy: just plug in and play.

When you are done, don't forget to unmount the drive before you remove it from the USB port.
If you don't unmount it, you run the risk of losing any data that is cached and not yet written back to the disk.

To unmount, right mouse click on the USB drive icon, and select Unmount Volume.

Now you are ready to unplug it, and carry it away with you.

Free Linux E-books

Want to upgrade your Linux skills, but you don't want to spend tons of $$$. Of course, you can surf the Net and read the different web sites and knowledge bases about Linux. But nothing beats a good (e-) book to give you a systematic treatment on a specific topic.

I found a web site, http://freebooks.homelinux.org/ that lists free e-books on Linux. There are quite a few gems on this list, albeit some are a little out-dated. The web site has become so popular that the site administrator had to put a limit on it: you can only download at most 10 e-books per day.

For example, you can download this free e-book published by O'Reilly, http://freebooks.homelinux.org/download.php?OS.Linux.Server.Hacks.OReilly.pdf.pdf. It contains 100 hacks/tips for Linux system administrators. Just last week, I started reading Volume 2 of this book (not free) and found it to be very helpful. I was overjoyed when I discovered that Volume 1 is being offered as a free book. It did not disappoint me.