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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.

The merge window is normally a bit of a hectic time for subsystem maintainers. They have two weeks in which to pull together a well-formed tree containing all of the changes destined for the next kernel development cycle. Occasionally, though, last-minute snags can make the merge window even more busy than usual. The unexpected merging of the Nouveau driver is the result of one such snag - but it is a story with a happy ending for all.

One thing any hacker should know is how to hack into login account of any operating system. Major Operating Systems that are used these days are Windows, Linux and Mac. So today I will show you how to hack into these Operating Systems. Are you curious how easy it is for someone to gain access to your computer? If so, read on...

If you're an ASCII-head of any kind, you will feel immediately at home in Markdown. It was so obviously designed by someone who has done a lot of writing online, as it apes common plaintext conventions that we've collectively been using for decades now. It's certainly far more intuitive than the alternatives I've researched.

Coming up in our forums was a testing request to compare the performance of Linux between using 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit kernels. This is coming after Linus Torvalds has spoke of 25% performance differences between kernels using CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G and those without this option that allows 32-bit builds to address up to 4GB of physical RAM on a system. We decided to compare the performance of the 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit kernels on a modern desktop system and here are the results.