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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.

The developers behind the XBMC project have released a new version of the popular open source media player. It comes with an impressive new user interface theme.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from January 20th - 22nd, 2010.

Google’s Android OS has been making consistent progress in the smartphone world. If you’re anything like me, you may have been curious about this mobile OS but not willing to spend much on a phone. Fortunately, the LiveAndroid project on Google Code provides a bootable LiveCD image that can be run on your home computer. With the free virtualization program VirtualBox, we can try it out on Windows, Linux or Mac without even burning a CD.

I've been running Debian Lenny exclusively for more than a week now, and I can tell you that in an apples-to-apples comparison with Ubuntus 8.04 through 9.10, my immediate impression is that you do get a recognizable speed boost in just about all operations between the generic Lenny and generic Ubuntu on my 9-ish-year-old hardware, a Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB of PC133 RAM.

Firefox 3.6, which had been expected by the end of the year, has been delayed with a release now expected in the "first quarter of 2010". The news comes from the Mozilla Wiki where "Ship Firefox 3.6" has now been carried over as a goal for the first three months of 2010. This change has triggered a slight ripple through the foundation's roadmap and Mozilla meeting notes now place the release of Firefox 4 in "late 2010 or early 2011".

One problem I run into a lot when recommending Ubuntu to complete Linux newbies is they aren't used to installing codecs or using the terminal when they want to play DVDs, MP3s and other file types. Explaining the legal situation is something I make a point of doing but some people "just want it to work".

For the last 40 years, Unix operating systems have helped to power mission-critical IT operations around the globe. Now, as Unix enters middle age, its backers are busily developing the new specifications that they hope will carry the OS forward into the next age of computing.

Would you like to see some places where Caldera has copyright notices in Linux on code it contributed under the GPL, and you're frustrated because some of us have Caldera CDs and you don't? Just go to Google code search and search for license:gpl "caldera.com" You'll be buried in GPL'd Caldera code, 5,000 hits.

Google and its applications are fast becoming the backbone of the internet. They seem to be solving everyone’s problems with free stuffs. Just when you get happy with something like Firefox, Google comes along and makes a browser that’s fast, super secure and has all kinds of add-ons and themes to personalize it. If you have not make the switch to Google Chrome because of the extensive extensions library in Firefox, here are a few must have extensions in Google Chrome that might make you reconsider your decision.