ichtus

imagine..
4-1 for Brazil against Argentina,
like Brazil will win again in World Cup this time again

uda2 di 15 menit awal brazil uda menang 2-0 lawan argentina! lewat adriano dan kaka. he3x two thumbs for brazil!

ichtus “iPlug Team” - http://mbone.petra.ac.id/u/ichtus - http://ichtus.blogs.friendster.com * sent by: N6230

looking for a decade for linux based solution (free too of course, but somehow maybe I can propose
some company to buy support or donate if the implementation works well)

1. ERP5:
http://www.erp5.org/sections/download/

http://www.computer.org/itpro/cover_stories/smets.htm

ERP5: A
                Next-Generation, Open-Source ERP Architecture
               

When someone says enterprise resource planning (ERP), most IT
                professionals think of the expensive, complex, and
                difficult-to-implement commercial products that were the rage a
                few years ago. Although many large corporations did reap
                tremendous cost savings from the implementation of such
                systems, an average implementation cost counted in the millions
                of dollars; this has prevented ERP systems from spreading to
                small and medium-sized businesses. After ERP deployment, its "blackbox"
                nature prevents from understanding and eventually improving the
                business processes it implements, leaving some important
                business decisions to the software publisher rather than to the
                corporate manager, preventing scientific researchers from
                getting involved in management innovation.
               

This situation provides much of the motivation for our
                architecture, ERP5, which offers several advantages for
                business. All ERP5 tools are open source, so are free and have
                openly available source code that a business can change to suit
                its processes. ERP5 incorporates, from scratch, advanced
                concepts such as object-oriented databases, a content
                management system, synchronization, variations, workflows, and
                a method to model and implement business processes. ERP5 is
                also a Web site where researchers can share innovation on
                management techniques and their implementation through software.
               

In 2001, two companies initiated the ERP5 project: Nexedi, a
                Zope service provider in France (Zope is a well-known
                open-source application server), and Coramy, a European apparel
                manufacturer. They aimed to develop a set of ERP software
                components for small and medium-sized companies. In addition to
                source code, the project also produced educational material and
                a clearly defined theoretical model. To fit the needs of
                smaller companies, they also designed ERP5 for distribution
                across distant sites with slow and unreliable Internet
                connections.

ERP5 MAIN COMPONENTS

Like other ERP systems, ERP5 uses components as the basis for
                the system. All functions derive from or depend on only five
                basic concepts.

• Planning. ERP5 offers common ERP
                    functions like production planning and control, materials
                    management, finances, accounting, billing, budgeting, human
                    resources, and the compatible transactions.
• Customer Relationship Management.
                    ERP5 tracks customer relations (like meetings, sales
                    prospects, and phone calls) and provides a reporting engine
                    to classify customers into categories (by country, size, and
                    market segment, for example).
• Content Management System. ERP5 can
                    act as a content management system for an intranet. The
                    system can store, index, and classify all documents. The ERP5
                    content management system can retrieve a document based on
                    the combination of a category (production incidents, for
                    example) and a keyword (such as "overheat"), which
                    helps to capitalize on knowledge within the company. This
                    way, ERP5 can deal with both structured and non-structured
                    information.
• E-business. ERP5 implements B2C and
                    B2B systems. Thanks to workflow modeling, a sales process can
                    manage all the interactions between the online shop and
                    customer, including e-mail exchanges. Using this component,
                    it is possible to automate typical transactions, such as when
                    a customer returns a purchase.
• Groupware. ERP5 integrates with
                    groupware products, including those for e-mail, agendas,
                    directories, shared workspaces, IP telephony, IP
                    conferencing, and instant messaging.
                    

ERP5-SPECIFIC FEATURES

ERP5 is multilingual and deals with many types of currency; it
                works across several companies and users. It also incorporates
                the unified model of business flows in Figure 1, which
                maps all corporate information into five basic concepts (thus
                the name ERP5). It also uses the concepts of variation,
                meta-planning, and information synchronization.

To support these features, on the technological side, ERP5
                offers a new mapping technology for object or relational DBMS
                (database management system) integration, a new
                active-messaging technology for interaction modeling, and a new
                synchronization technology for electronic data interchange.

Variation
                ERP5 can represent possible variations for a
                given resource, such as color, size, and speed. Variations are
                very useful in industries such as computers, to specify memory
                size, disk size, or processor speed; apparel, to specify color
                and size; and cars, to specify color, engine, or options.
                Variations define complex resources that result from successive
                transformations. ERP5 represents each transformation as a
                collection of transformations, some of which apply to all
                variations. Others apply only to certain variations.

Variations use only a single resource descriptor and a
                collection of options to define many configurations of a given
                product. This strategy avoids the creation of a complex
                taxonomy, a huge number of database records, and the tracking
                of a product number for each variation of the same product.
                Although used extensively in the apparel industry, the concept
                of variations is not well-known or used in other industries.

Most commercial ERP software does not support variations, but
                we believe variations should be at the heart of any modern ERP
                system. Variations will be essential to creating product lines
                according to a customer’s needs without creating thousands of
                product identifiers. This mass-customization concept manages
                customer needs without losing the benefits of standardization.

Meta planning
                We base ERP5 on a model that can associate anything to a
                category. Examples include a category of resources (such as
                service, raw material, skill, or money) or a category of
                organizations (such as a group of companies, a group of people,
                or a retail chain). ERP5 can manipulate these categories just
                as it manipulates resources and organizations. This means that
                users can plan resources at any given level, whether for a
                group of companies or for a retail chain. Resource planning can
                be detailed (the company expects to sell 10,000 items of model
                number 223311 to customer C) or general (the company expects to
                sell 10,000 of product X to small retailers). In this example,
                product X is a meta-resource and small retailers are a
                meta-organization-a metanode in ERP5 terminology.  ERP5’s
                meta feature helps manage a group of companies that belong to a
                common holding; it can also manage factoring partnerships-partnerships
                where one company asks a few other companies to cooperate and
                together build a product.
               

Information
                synchronization
                We designed ERP5 to function on multiple sites with low-quality
                Internet connectivity, so each site must be able to run by
                itself in the case of a network failure. ERP5 implements
                distribution by using synchronization and an extension of the
                SyncML protocol. For example, suppose a stock A and a stock B
                located on two production sites AA and BB exchange some
                resource through a business rule. If this rule requires site BB
                to know the stock values of A, ERP5 will create a local
                representation of stock A on site BB and synchronize data
                between this local representation and the real values of stock
                A. Site BB will then process its business rules on the local
                representation of stock A rather than on the real A itself. We
                believe synchronization is the next generation of EDI
                (electronic data interchange). It defines a subset of data that
                two companies want to share. We call this synchronization a
                common business vision.

Synchronization implements all standard EDI features. Order
                synchronization is equivalent to EDI order trans- mission.
                Model synchronization is equivalent to EDI model transmission.
                Although theoretically equivalent to EDI, synchronization is
                much easier to implement than an EDI approach. PDA users are
                perfectly aware of this: Every day they synchronize their
                personal information (contact lists, agendas, tasks, and
                expenses) with a corporate server. Such a transfer of
                information is rare in EDI, although in theory not difficult to
                implement.

USING AND EXTENDING THE
                ZOPE INFRASTRUCTURE

ERP5 uses Zope as its foundations. Zope is an open-source
                Python-based application server and content management system.
                Zope runs on major operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD,
                many Unix flavors, MacOS X, and Windows.
               

On the hardware side, Zope runs on many platforms, including
                x86 PCs, Macintoshes, Sun workstations, and IBM mainframes. It
                also provides Zope enterprise objects (ZEOs), which are
                designed for applications that answer thousands of requests a
                day. ZEO allows an application to run on more than one
                computer, providing clustering and load- balancing
                capabilities. Running Zope on multiple computers allows even
                distribution of requests; administrators can add more computers
                as the number of requests grows. Further, if one computer fails
                or crashes, other computers can still service requests. Table 1 shows
                Zope features that justify its use in environments that service
                a high volume of requests and must remain in constant
                operation.

.ERP5 uses, extends, or provides five Zope products:

• page templates for Web user interface
                    presentation logic,
• workflows for rapid development of decision
                    processes,
• a formulator for rapid form development,
• the ZSQLCatalog component to provide the
                    capability for SQL (Structured Query Language) queries to the
                    ZODB. ZSQLCatalog is an object-relational indexing component
                    that allows searching the ZODB using SQL queries. It is
                    crucial in terms of features, because it allows implementing
                    complex queries in Zope, and performance, because it allows
                    you to manage, for example, 10 workflows with 20 states and
                    10 roles each. This would be impossible with the standard
                    Zope indexing system, and
• the XMLObjects component to add SyncML
                    synchronization and autonomous activities to Zope objects.

Figures 2 and 3 show how system administrators organize and
                view the objects through the ZMI (Zope management interface). Figure 2 shows how Zope organizes objects into folders.
                This ZMI snapshot shows a partial view of an ERP5
                installation’s main folder, called nexedi, as the right-hand
                panel indicates. Among other objects, you can see subfolders
                like organization and person. Figure 3 shows a view of the person folder through the
                ZMI. This manage view shows what the system administrator can
                see in a personal folder. Figure 4 shows the user’s view of his personal folder.
                Notice that the title field contains a search criterion (%u%).
                This shows one way that ZSQLCatalog can provide a SQL interface
                to data in Zope objects. Also note that the browser points to
                http://xavante.cefetcampos.br:8080/nexedi/person. The first
                part of this URL relates to the server and the port (in this
                case 8080) where Zope answers HTTP requests. The "/nexedi/person"
                part shows the actual folder hierarchy. Using templates for
                rendering the basic page structure and data from the objects in
                a person folder, Zope dynamically builds this final user view
                of the folder’s contents.

Workflows, defined according to the business rules and by
                using the Zope workflow tool, regulate data and information
                sharing among components. The tool associates objects of a
                given type with workflows, each workflow representing a
                business rule and specifying the actions that are possible in
                any phase of the object’s life cycle. In other words, Zope
                implements workflows through collaborative objects that know
                each other’s location-its Zope path-and follow certain actions
                to implement business rules.

ERP5 ABSTRACT MODEL

ERP5 defines an abstract model for business management. A
                clean abstraction layer helps consistently implement new or
                specialized business components. This abstract business model
                can represent management activities within a single company as
                well as commercial and management activities across a group of
                companies. This model’s purpose is not to optimize production
                but rather to predict the consequences of management decisions.
                We based this model on five classes as Figure 1 shows:

• Resource. A resource describes an
                    abstract resource in a business process (like an individual’s
                    skill, a currency, a raw material, or a product). Relations
                    between nodes define bill of materials as well as prototypes.
• Node. Nodes can receive and send
                    resources. They can relate to physical entities (such as a
                    workshop that receives raw material, processes it, and sends
                    it) or abstract entities (such as a bank account that can
                    receive money). Stocks are a type of node. Metanodes are
                    nodes that contain other nodes. For instance, a company is a
                    metanode, and a project is both a resource and a node.
• Movement. This class describes the
                    movement of resources between two nodes at a given time and
                    for a given duration. For example, a movement might send raw
                    material from a stock to a workshop; another movement might
                    send money from one account to another.
• Path. A path defines a way for a node
                    to access a resource it might need. Prices and commercial
                    profiles can attach to a path to define the default price for
                    a given resource procured at a given maker. Paths can also
                    define how a workshop obtains its resource from a stock.
                    Paths have a start and end date, and can represent the
                    assignment of an individual to a temporary project.
• Item. A physical instance of a
                    resource is an item. A movement can expand into a series of
                    traceable movements through items. Items also define how
                    resources ship (such as by parcel or by listing the serial
                    numbers of items in each container).

These five classes represent businesses ranging from chemical
                plants to services.
               

Transformations in the
                ERP5 model
                Transformations represent a complex resource built from the
                transformation of multiple resources. Rather than following a
                hierarchical model, ERP5 uses a networked model based on the
                chemical transformation metaphor:
                A + B ‘ C + D.

To make it easier for users to define complex sets of
                transformations, ERP5 can make prototype transformations where
                one transformation is equivalent to another except for a few
                differences. For example, transformation Y is like
                transformation X, but instead of producing resource R1, it
                produces resource R2, and instead of using material M1, it uses
                material M2. This creates new, complex resources that derive
                from existing complex resources.

Also, to implement choice of resource, equivalence resources
                allow defining one resource as any resource among a group of
                resources. Equivalence resources are useful to implement
                equivalence classes of resources for procurement from multiple
                sources. Transformations in the ERP5 model are instantiated
                into causalities of actual movements between nodes. The only
                causality that exists in a complex manufacturing process is
                from the definition of a transformation. Stocks (a type of
                node) have no causality: No one can ever say why a stock is
                below zero whenever multiple orders generate multiple outbound
                stock movements.

Movements and orders
                The actual resource planning occurs in movements. Movements can
                include sub-movements that business rules generate. For
                example, a business rule could make the costing of a
                procurement result in a movement between source and stock
                nodes. Through causalities, different movements can also be
                associated with each other. Because movements have a beginning
                and an end (this is important, for example, to represent flows
                in a chemical process), the whole collection of movements with
                past dates and future dates represents the overall planning for
                the company. However, movements are low-level objects in ERP5.
                Users are not supposed to deal with movements except in rare
                cases (such as in accounting). Therefore, ERP5 gathers
                movements into deliveries. Deliveries are the documents that
                manage the company planning.

Path planning
                Some companies, especially service companies, assign people
                (such as a consultant) to projects at certain periods of time
                or send people (such as a service technician) to customers at
                certain periods of time. ERP5 can represent these situations by
                using a temporary path with a given start and end date.

Capacity
                Each node has a capacity that is measurable in two ways.
               

Stock capacity.
                The stock manager defines this capacity in terms of the maximum
                amount of a resource that a node can contain. A set of
                inequalities that the stock must satisfy defines the stock
                capacity. Each equation uses the amount of a given resource as
                a variable. The stock capacity is a parameter in these
                equations. To define a stock capacity inequality, we actually
                provide a set of points in N dimension. Each point defines a
                resource (or an "equivalence resource") and a
                quantity. ERP5 then uses the convex hull of all points for
                capacity calculations. Because we consider that we only use
                convex areas, it is equivalent to provide a set of inequalities
                or a set of points. The planning is done by doing calculations
                on convex hulls or on cartesian products of convex hulls.
               

Production capacity.
                The production manager defines this capacity in terms of the
                maximum or minimum amount of a resource that the node can
                produce in a given period of time. A set of inequalities also
                defines production capacity. For example, a typical node can
                store at most one resource with a maximum quantity MS and
                produce at most one resource with a maximum production MP for
                each period of time. Planning at the node level requires
                accounting for movements that arrive or depart from that node.
                A movement that arrives at a node increases the level of stock.
                A movement that departs from a node decreases the level of
                stock. A movement that departs from a node and goes nowhere
                represents a consumption of resource, and a movement that
                departs from nowhere and goes to a node represents a production
                of resource. Calculating a node’s stock level requires looking
                at the history of movements, adding inbound amounts, and
                subtracting outbound amounts.

Simulating the future
                The ERP5 abstract model simulates a company’s future, including
                orders, bills, shipments, and cash flow. Business rules handle
                the simulation process in ERP5. They transform a movement into
                another movement and generate deliveries of movements that are
                again transformed into new movements. For example, if a source
                on a node that has production capabilities creates a delivery
                of goods, then a manufacturing rule should generate all
                necessary movements (those for production, consumption, and
                delivery). All generated movements then go into a causality
                that relates to the transformation.

A delivery of goods should generate an invoice movement,
                depending on the commercial conditions for the particular
                customer and the delivered goods.

Each invoice movement should generate a future-payment
                movement, depending on the commercial conditions, as Figure 5
                illustrates. Another example is the cost evaluation of a
                delivery. Each delivery between nodes should generate a
                movement to represent the cost of paying people to move objects
                across the workshop.

Another example is the salary rule. Each month a company
                should create a movement for each of its employees. That is,
                the movement should move an amount of a resource (cash) from
                the company’s funds to the employee. This movement represents
                the payment of the employee’s monthly salary. From this
                movement, a set of rules should generate movements to represent
                the payment of bonuses, insurance, and taxes.
               

From the previous examples, we can synthesize two generic
                concepts: Movements relate to each other by causalities;
                causalities relate to a rule.
               

There seems to be an origin to causality: One movement
                generates other movements. In other words, causality does not
                seem to be symmetric. This situation differs slightly from the
                more general symmetrical model first introduced for
                causalities.
               

Causality trees are much easier to implement than causality
                graphs. It also seems that trees, instead of graphs, can
                represent most causalities. For these reasons, we chose to
                implement causalities with trees in ERP5. Production planning
                in most companies usually combines pull approaches, where
                orders are the cause of build-order movements. This sort of
                triggering represents just-in-time, zero-stock management. In a
                push approach, inbound shipments cause build-order movements,
                an approach more appropriate for the food industry, for example.
               

Profiles
                The whole simulation process sometimes must use predefined
                values to create new movements. Such values might include
                prices, discounts, and payment options. ERP5 calls the
                comprehensive set of such values a profile object. Profile
                objects can attach to resources, nodes, paths, or even orders.
                A dynamic acquisition path-a specific URL-defined by business
                rules aggregates profile parameters.
               

ERP5 is now in production at the first European site, and
                development continues. The ERP5 Consortium-a group of
                independent organizations-organizes the ERP5 project.
                Consortium members are users, developers, and IT companies that
                base commercial services and research efforts on ERP5. This
                consortium is in charge of coordinating research and
                development contributions, promoting the use of ERP5, and
                providing education and certification frameworks. Consortium
                members come from France, the Netherlands, and Brazil.
               

In the research arena, ERP5 members are developing advanced
                components for decision support, based on optimization, soft
                computing, and the data mining of object repositories. The
                first component, known as Strategic Sourcing, implements
                e-procurement. It uses fuzzy sets and integer programming to
                evaluate contract risk and to minimize the total cost of
                ownership for purchased items, while considering multiple
                concurrent sources.
               

ERP5 will also help increase the adoption of open-source and
                free software technologies in small and medium-size
                enterprises. and will improve a market of interoperable
                services and solutions based on the ERP5 platform. We believe
                this will lead to increased innovation and transparency in the
                global ERP market by setting new industry standards. Research
                on management and organization sciences will find a reference
                platform in ERP5.
               

ERP5 will create a new channel for e-commerce applications,
                which often require tight integration with ERP software. Today,
                vendors of proprietary ERP systems are blocking the entry of
                new vendors into the market for e-commerce application
                software. If open-source initiatives like ERP5 succeed, they
                will prevent these companies from having monopolistic control
                of future e-commerce applications.
               

Jean-Paul Smets-Solanes is
                the CEO of Nexedi SARL and the main developer of the ERP5
                project. He also heads the EuroLinux Alliance for a Free
                Information Infrastructure and is vice-president of the French
                Speaking Linux and Free Software Association. Contact him at jp@nexedi.com.
               

Rogério Atem de Carvalho
                is a teacher and researcher at the Federal Center for
                Technology Education of Campos-CEFET Campos, Brazil.
                Contact him at r.carvalho@computer.org.
               

2. Compiere with manufacturing module (MRP)
- http://www.compiere.org
- http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=97192&package_id=156335&release_id=338117

juz finish download yesterday, and juz install today..
good installation interface anyway..

almost 4 days trying FC4, yah sometimes thinking what for trying as no different from others
but take a look for a new feature that seems interesting:

from: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/

      Fedora Core 4 is the latest version of the free and popular Fedora Core
      platform with a number of unique features and significant
      improvements over previous versions.  This section provides an
      overview of the major highlights in this release.
   

yah, like a child getting a new toys
hear some minor news about FC4, about slow perfomance kernel,
just follow thread in the milis if u want to know more,
what can I say for what I know, is maybe FC4 too many security enhanchment
FC4 kernel
–
[ichtus@ichtuslaptop ichtus]$ uname -a
Linux ichtuslaptop.org 2.6.9-5.0.3.EL #1 Sat Feb 19 18:26:49 CST 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
–
based on 2.6.12rc

but need still a lot of experiment to implement in my client office for desktop..
here we trying build a new desktop using CentOS 4.0 Final,
for somebody that doesn’t know ,

http://www.centos.org
CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources
freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise
Linux vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors
redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS
mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and
artwork.)  CentOS is free. CentOS is now accepting donations via
PayPal, please click the button for more information.

juz install RHEL4 cd from friend, then erase for replacing with centos:)

anyway ever heard about ubuntu?
so nice distro I think, small, clean..
and what I’m surprised is that can hibernate, and install to my LVM partition for boot
good!