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.

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.