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Last week, Ilooked back at Ruby in 2006. This week, it's time to look ahead. Here are 10 Ruby things I think are going to be hot in 2007:

SabayonLinux 3.25 has been released, now with the latest X.Org 7.2, the new Kernel Virtual Machine, Beryl 0.1.4 and other enhancements. From the changelog: "Linux kernel 2.6.19.1; the first live implementation of the new Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) supporting both Intel and AMD architectures; X.Org 7.2 RC3 with better LCD/CRT display detection, improved Intel graphics cards support and more stable ATI open source drivers; new NetworkManager stack that supports many wireless cards; Beryl 0.1.4 with a nearly perfect OpenGL auto-detection and configuration; NVIDIA drivers 1.0-9631 and latest ATI drivers; new Kicker menu picture and better default cursors...." - DistroWatch. Screenshots of SabayonLinux 3.25 are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

Every programmer loves to optimize, even when we know we shouldn't.

Right now I think that the GNU/Linux kitchen has everything we need to cook some delicious FLOSS meals, we have projects, documentation & source code everywhere, people who to try to offer us freedom, protection and their money; people with creativity, people with enthusiasm, and ever growing & vibrant community

Skrenta explains what many of you already grasped about Google's growing power.

The Free Ryzom campaign failed to acquire the rights to the Ryzom Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG), but is refocusing its efforts on developing or acquiring another game. However, what strategy a new campaign will take and what support it will be able to attract remains unclear.

The open souce arena is forming a rather formidable fan following. In the beginning this was a small community known onl to a niche audience but today we see a different pisture. Commercial software and the the open source software seem to be at the same footing.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- DSP Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: DSPG), a worldwide leader in developing and providing chip-set solutions for residential wireless connectivity, announced today the availability of its new product demonstrations at the upcoming Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas. -- WiFi multimedia enabled dual band 802.11a/b/g solution supporting the following functionalities: Voice over WiFi, Music streaming and Photo sharing from Home Entertainment Center according to DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standard, Instant Messaging (support for Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo!, ICQ, and GoogleTalk) as well as Internet Radio streaming. All of these features are running under Linux OS, with advanced MMI applications.

A few hours before the new year, Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.20-rc3 Linux kernel,"in order to not get in trouble with MADR ("Mothers Against Drunk Releases") I decided to cut the 2.6.20-rc3 release early rather than wait for midnight, because it's bound to be new years _somewhere_ out there. So here's to a happy 2007 for everybody." In good humor, he noted that the new kernel would be available on all the kernel.org mirrors by the time everyone's New Years celebrations had concluded,"it's probably going to be up-to-date by the time the hangovers are mostly gone. At which point the first thing on any self-respecting geek's mind should obviously be:'is there a new kernel release for me to try?'" Regarding the changes in the new release candidate, which include a data corruption fix [story], Linus summarized:"The big thing at least for me personally is that nasty shared mmap corruption fix, but there's a number of other changes in here, many of them just documentation (and some media and network drivers). Shortlog and diffstat appended."read more

"The final release of version 2.13 has been uploaded. This build has the complete suite of kernel drivers. More compact builds with a subset of the full driver suite and different selections of applications will follow soon." From the release notes: "NdisWrapper upgraded to v1.33, which fixes the problem; Soxgui, a great little front-end for SoX and FFmpeg, which can perform various operations on audio files, including file format conversion; Geany text editor upgraded to v0.10; Isomaster ISO file editor tool upgraded to v0.6; SeaMonkey upgraded to v1.0.6...." - DistroWatch. Screenshots of Puppy Linux 2.13 are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

Dunc-Tank, the unofficial organization set up to fund selected Debian activities, has made its first experimental payment to release managers, but community members are still debating whether a missed deadline and the alleged demotivation of some programmers make the experiment a failure.

Firefox fans will be facing 2007 with more tranquillity than they did 2006. A year ago, it was clear that Firefox's free ride was about to end: after an astonishing five years of inactivity, Microsoft was finally launching an updated version of Internet Explorer. There seems little doubt that much of Firefox's success is down to the fact that Internet Explorer was so bad, both in terms of the eternal round of security problems and its general technical tiredness (half a decade is a very long time in computing.)

I've spent the past few years using an ATI TV Wonder analog video capture card running under Linux. Although this card has served me well, times and technology have been a'changin'. That's why I recently purchased a pcHDTV HD-5500 to see if HDTV was all it was hyped up to be. I can report that HDTV under Linux is not only possible, it's downright fantastic.

"Just before new year, on December 31st 2006 the Free Culture Foundation site has been launched. The site appears to be mimicking the Free Software Foundation in form and also presents four core freedoms on which the Free Culture Movement should be based, to use, create, share and learn. On Libervis.com we have been discussing the need for defining core principles of the Free Culture Movement before and the FCF might just be filling the gap."

Neither the ext4 filesystem nor Samba 4 are ready for prime-time yet, but they are chock-full of promise and potential, so let's take a look at what they are promising to deliver.

FusionCharts v3 Lets Users Create Animated, Interactive and Data-Driven Flash Charts & Graphs for Web Apps

AT&T made a pragmatic decision to embrace network neutrality this past week. The goal was to grease the skids for the company's proposed merger with BellSouth, of course, but the move could have broad ramifications in the industry. Why? Because the AT&T agreement is the first of its kind, and it has given network neutrality supporters designs on a larger prize—industry-wide legislation.

He raises some big points dealing with the goals of the FSF and how to accomplish them

The existence of legal systems without robust enforcement of copyright law, in countries where software development is a highly robust enterprise, is a serious threat to the free software model.

You'll see these words in more than one article penned by the pundits. Every year since about 2003 has been called the year of the Linux desktop - and then, when that fails to transpire, those who predict these things set about rehashing their predictions for the next year.