Even though this is the end of the decade only for those who can't count, retrospectives seem more common than predictions in the last days of 2009. Or maybe, after a year of recession, all the pundits are nervous about the future.

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.

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.

With the stabilizing of the AJAX space, and the resources of a company like Google behind it, XML as a binding language has a great deal to offer.

Palm's Pre smartphone, which Sprint began selling in June, hasn't become an iPhone-like megahit. But it's the most interesting new phone since the original iPhone.

The new year is almost upon us, so it's a good time to wrap up the year 2009 and ruminate over the best open source software and hardware this year brought us. So without further ado, let me present my personal "Best of 2009" list in no particular order.

You might be interested in trying out Linux applications, but the idea of creating a dual boot system, using slow Live CDs, or setting up a VM doesn’t appeal to you. Today we take a look at andLinux which allows you to run Linux applications on your Windows computer.

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.