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Long-frustrated network neutrality advocates headed into 2009 with high hopes. After all, there was a new administration headed by a man whose campaign promises included the assurance that he would "take a back seat to no one" on the issue, a decidedly Democratic Congress and a general warming to the idea that unfettered access to content and applications on the Internet was somehow essential to the new economy and the sacrosanct rights of the First Amendment. In many ways, they weren't disappointed. But the gears in Washington turn slowly, and, for all the talk and proposals, 2009 saw little material action on the Net neutrality front. Next year will be different.

In part 3 of our gamers recommendations we present more strategy games, puzzles, card games, language skill training and more. To be continued..

A post on the Ubuntu Tweak blog points out that the new 0.5 version release should come today: I plan to make it online at the the last day of 2009: I don’t want to take this task to the new year, because I’ve been developed for them over half year! Ubuntu Tweak 0.5 will come with a redesigned UI (but version 0.6 will suffer major UI changes), XFCE specific features and most importantly: the ability to fetch online database to keep the ppplication information up-to-date. That means that you will be able to keep your applications and sources up-to-date without updating Ubuntu Tweak.

Free software made steady progress in 2009, even if it didn't have the excitement of previous years.

It's been over a year since I wrote about my conversion to a Linux based digital media environment, and since it's the holiday season (or just after) I thought it was time to update the story, and describe some new Linux based devices I'm using that others might find useful.

Editors' Note: The author's main source is not very reputable in my opinion and I see a lot of old information copied and pasted as one liners throughout the article. I would take anything gleaned from it with a grain of salt at best. - Scott

Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft gets pretty scared by the success of Linux & other Open Source Software. Microsoft wants to hire a so-called "Linux and Open Office Compete Lead", as the job description in one their recent marketing job ads shows.

Today I’d like to talk to you about Linux Mint 8, AKA Helena. I’ve said this many times before, but the codenames still sound a little tacky to me. The distro itself is anything but tacky though and it’s been one of my firm favourites in the past. How would this release stack up? Well, I’ll tell you…

Almost everywhere I go I find MS-Outlook, MS-Office, MS-IExplorer and Adobe Acrobat reader. Some of these installations even lack MS-Project, MS-Visio and in some cases even MS-Access. If those really were the only tools at my disposal, I would call it working with "stone axes and bear skins".

A public letter from the President of the FreeBSD Foundation which discusses the future of the organization, it's value/worth and other items. In 2009, the FreeBSD project had the misfortune of losing two long time contributors: John Birrell and Jean-Marc Zucconi. I chatted with John recently, during this year's BSDCAN, so his death was all the more shocking. It forced me to recognize my own mortality and to consider what contributions from our lives remain after we pass away. Reviewing the heritage of FreeBSD it becomes clear that our work on this project takes on a life of its own. John and Jean-Marc's efforts live on in FreeBSD.

Lower the Lifeboats and hoist the Mains'l, this is going to be a rough ride. While companies worldwide look for ways to reduce costs, shed dead weight from their labor resources and streamline their businesses, it makes me wonder if Linux will survive the global economic meltdown. Oh, I know it will survive in terms of us geeks who use it and tout its goodness. It will survive in ISP data centers, some cloud-based businesses and as the de facto platform for virtualization. But will businesses such as hospitals, law firms, trucking companies and retail stores adopt it for their productive operating system of choice?

The NTP service that uses network-time servers to keep your computer's clock from drifting is another thing that Ubuntu includes by default but must be added to Debian if you want to use it.

Google's Android market is bursting with great applications. We look at some of the best for your phone.

Bruce Byfield, avoiding a look back at his last years' predictions, looks ahead and makes nine specific predictions about what to expect in 2010.

I do tend to go on. But here's the short version of why I'm running Debian instead of Ubuntu.

After I finished my recent articles on Teaching with Tux and Learning with Gcompris, I received a couple of suggestions from readers that I take a look at Childsplay. I spent some time looking at Childsplay and if you have small children, I think you should too.

As you may recall, Microsoft announced back on September 10 that it had launched a new, open open source organization called the CodePlex Foundation. It also pledged to announce a new board within 100 days - which passed without comment 11 days ago.

Once you have set up Spamassassin so it is working and you have run it for some time you may want to tune it to provide automatic whitelists and blacklists. The whitelist will provide a way to insure that the mail from a particular source will never get rejected. This may be important clients, users on the system or messages from servers that do not necessarily have the right credentials for sending mail.

If you’re like a lot of IT organizations, you’ve got servers from Hewlett-Packard, routers from Cisco, operating systems from Red Hat and Microsoft – and you may even have Solaris from Sun somewhere. For good measure let’s throw in a few databases from MySQL that occasionally take a virtual table or two from your SQL Server farms – and let’s not forget to mention the Oracle database that runs your CRM software. To top things off you’re running a slew of other open and closed source software that all together keeps your business running.

The year ended with a flood of new Linux releases. Here are some of the best. Karmic also included by default Ubuntu One, Canonical's file synchronising and collaborating software. It is very similar to the Dropbox service which allows users to automatically synchronise desktop files with an online service as they work. Ubuntu One's advantage is that it is tightly integrated into the Ubuntu desktop. It's downside is that it only works on Ubuntu at present.