Have you ever been in a situation where you desperately need a copy of a font for something you’re working on, but you can only seem to find a copy in the wrong format? Often this can happen, and you have the font elsewhere, but it’s not in the standard .ttf format you expect.

Tulip a framework that allows you to create, visualize, manipulate, and export large graphs. Tulip can import graphs from the popular Graphviz package and allows you to export a graph visualization in a number of bitmap image formats as well as SVG and EPS for eventual inclusion into a PDF file.

Recently, I attended a small symposium here in Texas, with just over 70 people attending: the inaugural "Texas Open Source Symposium" (TexasOSS). Although small, it was a pleasant conference. Topics ranged from 3D applications to business models, to introductions into the inner workings of the free software community process.

Openbravo, maker of open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) and POS (point of sale) platforms, has landed $12 million in new funding. Openbravo’s new funding reinforces growing interest in open, easily customized alternatives to entrenched giants like Oracle and SAP. The VAR Guy traded email with Manel Sarasa, CEO of Openbravo, for his thoughts on the funding.

iPodLinux is an open source venture into porting Linux onto the iPod . So far, they have successfully ported a customized uClinux kernel to the iPod, and written a simple user interface for it dubbed podzilla. Additional applications and modules have been written, adding many capabilities not found in Apple’s firmware.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of how he went from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon for open source software by the end of the decade.

To install Firefox 3 RC1 on Ubuntu Hardy, go ti System > Administration > Software Sources. Then go to Third-Party Software, click Add, and add this (auto install):

Back in the Dark Ages of my home computer, when I was running Windows full time, I was quite the “Distro Dabbler”. I was forever downloading ISOs of various Linux distributions, burning them on a CD and trying them out by installing it on an unused partitions. Until finally, about two years ago, I bit the bullet and moved off of Windows forever (well, except for some gaming).