It is pretty much impossible to manage a help desk without some kind of help desk tracking system. Eric Geier rounds a sampling of five of the best Free/Open source help desk software systems.

In part III today, we focus on the desk accessory, popularly known as the widget, applet, mini-app, gadget, or whatever the fashionable term is these days.

Unless you have fully embraced the virtualization movement, you probably have more than one machine in your home or office, particularly if you run more than one operating system, and you probably have more than one keyboard and mouse on you desk. If you would like to regain some desk space without having to purchase a KVM switch, x2x may be the solution.

The Front Desk will be manned by volunteers to act as mentors and advisors for derivative developers asking how to contribute work back to Debian.

OTRS is an open source software system for managing a wide range of business processes, from Help Desk to Support Center to IT Service Management. Based on a set of functions built on a "trouble ticket," OTRS is built to allow support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, support desk and many other departments to react quickly and responsibly to inbound inquires.

About five years ago, it was clear to me that personal computers would disappear… in our pockets. Along many other analysts, I could see computers getting smaller and smaller, and mobile phones getting busier and busier. Eventually, my dream-prediction said, it wouldn’t quite be “one computer on every desk” but a much more exciting “one computer in every pocket, and one monitor/keyboard paid on every desk”.

Do you have multiple computers on your desk? Is one of them a laptop that is sat off to the side a bit? Have you ever wished that you could get rid of all but one of the keyboard / mouse combos that clutter your desk or that your laptop was easier to control? If so then Synergy is the answer to your woes.

Today's been a slow day and without knowing I found myself with a screwdriver in my hand and a dissected laptop on my desk in front of me.

All right. We can't be serious about SCO all the time. Time for a laugh. And this is funny. Thanks to Christopher B. Wright using a Creative Commons license his cartoons, we can add this one to our permanent collection.