OStatic

Earlier, Lisa talked about Funambol's addition of non-intrusive advertisements to their myFUNAMBOL portal, at least for a few phone models.Being the somewhat reluctant owner of a new Blackberry, and a Linux user, I had heard of Funambol. I knew it was open source software, and I knew that Funambol was one of a few applications that had reasonable success syncing BlackberryOS, and a few other platforms, with Linux.

MyFUNAMBOL portal has a few hiccups to iron out (it is still in beta), but it seems to be truly useful. The operating system used on the desktop could become a non-issue for most.

One of the chicken-and-egg problems that keeps some users from trying out and becoming skilled at good open source applications is lack of adequate documentation. How are you supposed to learn effectively without it? The good news is that for a whole lot of open source applications and operating systems, there are good, free books you can get online. We've covered these for the powerful Blender 3D graphics and animation app, for Ubuntu, for Linux hacks, and for the GIMP (graphics). We've also covered FLOSS Manuals, which free documentation for many open source applications. In addition to these, one of the best online sources for free books and tutorials is Linuxtopia.?

One of the great things about open source platforms and applications is that skilled authors often put free books online as guides. We've written about excellent ones for Ubuntu, one for Linux hacks, and one for the GIMP graphics application. ? Recently, I came across a great, free online book on the super powerful open source 3D graphics and animation application Blender. The book is called Blender Basics, Second Edition, and while it has the slight shortcoming of showing examples from Blender version 2.4 (Blender is now on version 2.48) it's still an excellent, very thorough way to learn the application. If you're unfamiliar with Blender, it's so flexible that impressive, full-length animated movies have been created with it. Here's more on what's in the book.

Ramesh Natarajan is giving out free copies of his ebook, Linux 101 Hacks (the password linuxrocks starts the download). Though it targets a more experienced audience than the Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference download Sam covered last month, it looks like a handy reference for those common command line tasks that arise every so often -- but not often enough that you completely recall how to do them.

Linux 101 Hacks can best be described as a study guide for beginning systems administrators ( Linux 101 ). It focuses entirely on terminal use -- from using the command line to manage system processes, search and sort files, and make remote connections to using common text-based utilities (such as fdisk).

Have you been considering trying Ubuntu or are you new to running it? Keir Thomas, a noted Linux author, is out with a new book called Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference which is designed to get you up to speed quickly. It's available for $9.94 from Amazon, but you can find a nearly identical version online for free, downloadable as a PDF here. I did the download and like what I see--lots of plain language information on getting started with one of the most flexible, powerful and compatible Linux distros.

Bugs, system conflicts, and errant bits of code add unique challenges to the technical area of open source development. They also affect a project's community -- and as any community manager can tell you, developing a healthy community is often more difficult (and has higher stakes) than rogue code.

Management is tough all round, but managing open source projects is different still. Most developers are giving their time because the project interests them, and non-developers join because they find the project useful, and they want to share their enthusiasm. But a community not being any one remotely homogenous group means that passions sometimes run high, and it's not always easy to keep a project's community -- it's life -- moving forward.

It may have just gotten easier. Ubuntu's Community Manager, Jono Bacon, announced his upcoming book, The Art of Community will be available later this year.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to find that the number of books about the Ruby language, and about Web development using Ruby on Rails, has soared over the last year. Many books tell you how to write Rails applications, but very few tell you how to put them into production. Deploying Rails Applications, published recently by the Pragmatic Programmers, does try to answer these questions, and does so quite well, introducing a variety of programs and techniques that can make the difference between a painful deployment and a pain-free one.