Never one to rest on their laurels, the Ubuntu team is hard at work on the next cutting edge version of their popular distro, Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex (who the heck names these releases?).

As with most other Ubuntu alphas, there isn't much to write home about yet. However, much to our surprise, it has a new interface theme, for the first time since Dapper Drake. "That ugly brown theme", as many people on the internet referred to it, has been the standard on Ubuntu for over a year now, and you either love it or hate it.

"NewHuman" takes the art of Ubuntu in a new direction, and only time will tell if it makes it into the final release, scheduled for October of this year. Those who are interested in participating in the testing process may download an ISO image from the official site. As always, the Alpha versions are not recommended for production machines, so distro shufflers need not apply.

If you haven't heard of Linux Mint by now, you probably aren't listening very well. Mint is a distro that is heavily based on Ubuntu, but has gradually evolved on its own, with unique management tools and a stunning set of artwork (no dirt brown here!). This latest iteration brings clarity and convenience to the newest Ubuntu base, 8.04.

The most obvious improvement on its parent distro is the fact that it actually contains codecs and Flash support out of the box. The desktop layout is more similar to Windows, making this a good migration path for Microsoft refugees.

For those already familiar with Mint, this new version may not seem very different at first glance, but one big difference between this release and pretty much every other Linux distro is the inclusion of Flash 10 beta. Flash on Linux has been a rather sluggish experience for a while now, but on our humble Pentium 4 testing machine, sites like Youtube and Hulu seemed to work just as well as they do on Windows. The rest of the changes are generally little tweaks and usability improvements.

Mint can be downloaded from any one of many mirrors provided on the site, but we found the Torrent they provide to be very active and well seeded, so that is probably the best choice for now.

Installing or reinstalling Windows can be a real hassle. Although Windows XP comes with a basic set of drivers, there's a good chance you'll have to dig out the driver disc for some of your hardware, or scour the Internet for the appropriate files. And many power users apply hundreds of tweaks to Windows for increased performance and stability. Indeed, a simple reinstall can become a full fledged weekend project.

With Tiny XP, cumbersome installs are a thing of the past. This powerful custom install disk contains hundreds of the drivers, both new and obscure, meaning no more hunting. The supercharged version of the Windows installer properly configured devices on our test machine, a Latitude 640, that even Dell didn't mention, such as an infrared port. In addition, Tiny XP installs thousands of registry hacks, that improve the system so much you'll never want to go back to the standard version. As if that's not enough, it even includes a bunch of cool options at boot time for trouble shooting, and even a fully functional copy of the Damn Small Linux live CD!

Downloading TinyXP is very illegal since it's basically pirated version of Windows. The argument between fair use and IP law isn't going to end any time soon, so use at your own risk. Don't worry though, although it might not be as easy, there are legal ways to get similar results.

Since before the dawn of time, open source projects have forked more often than Lindsay Lohan cheked into rehab. The Mozilla browser is a great example of a successful fork, it was once based on Netscape, but evolved on its own and eventually rendered classic Netscape obsolete. Many -- if not most -- forks disappear into obscurity. We aren't so sure this one will go so quietly.

Go-OO is a fork of OpenOffice that has quite a few impressive features which really ought to be in official OO, but for some reason or another aren't, such as support for OpenXML, better Microsoft Binary support, and Word Perfect Graphics support. It also boasts significantly better start times -- at least on our poorly equipped test machine.

Long story short, this is a fast, lean beast of an office suite with great compatibilty with Microsoft Office. The price is right at $0.00, but as with any community project you are both welcome and encouraged to donate to the developers for their efforts.

TuneUP is an an application designed to help keep your iTunes library more organized. While a library of only iTunes Store music will be tidy indeed, if you have acquired music from many different sources, the ID3 tags might be a bit confusing.

TuneUP works by comparing the unique sound print of each song to a database, and if new information is available, TuneUP will fix the metadata and rename your songs. It's sort of like having a genius put your books on your shelf for you. Not only does it help with naming, but the software also is able to download album art automatically with a few clicks.

While the design of this software is superb and visually appealing, it doesn't quite deliver in the area of organization. It does indeed make more coherent ID3 tags for songs, but we had hoped that it would properly shelve everything into one album each, rather than the usual album fragments, (with track 1 and 4 in one album, 2 and 8 in another, etc). Hopefully this will be refined in the final release.

TuneUP is in private beta, but we've got 100 invites to give away. Just click the link after the jump.

It has been a defacto standard for Web Browsers to be a free download for many years now. After all, who would want to pay for something that they can get for free so easily? Well, this is a question that Electrasoft must answer on a daily basis. A company that specializes in Web browsers, network utilities, and 90's era web design, they are among a dying breed for sure. We couldn't resist taking their shareware web browser for a spin, if nothing else for the sake of nostalgia.

The install program is a humble 300 kilobyte download, and installs in mere seconds. With another nod to old school internet culture, the installer is powered by the classic Winzip self extractor. Once installed, 32bit web browser delivers on its promises: it is indeed quite fast, and loads quickly. It seemed to render everything just as you would expect, and even supported flash out of the box. It's hard to say it it uses its own custom rendering engine or not, but it reports as Mozilla 1.6 to browser agent finding scripts.

While we can't see any use for this program in the mainstream, it might be a welcome addition to the many Pentium based Windows 98 machines that still hum away in some homes. It is fast, small code done right. It is available for $20 from the company's ordering page.

The openSUSE team has released the first beta of their popular but controversial Linux distribution, and it has some spiffy features that make it worth checking out.

The most exciting improvements are in the area of speed, as this is one OS that is often ridiculed by reviewers, mainly for its historically sluggish boot times and sloth-like package system. In contrast, openSUSE now uses an improved version of "zipper", which, long story short, makes incredibly quick package installation possible, much faster than Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS. Not only that, the system installation has been trimmed to 60%, meaning that it only takes about 24 minutes on typical hardware, which is damn fast for Suse.

There are still way too many bugs for you distro-shufflers to start revving your DVD burners, but if you would like to help with testing, check out the download page.

We're generally big fans of Ubuntu, but it's not the only Linux distribution on the block. After spending a little too much time trying to complete a simple operation in Ubuntu the other day, we decided to take another popular Linux distro for a spin.

PCLinuxOS has been called "The distro hopper stopper", and we can see why. System configuration tasks are handled by a rebranded version of the venerable HardDrake suite. All of our hardware was detected without user intervention, and we were on the local wifi in no time. Codecs are included out of the box as well, saving a lot of potential headaches. libdvdcss is included in the default repository, and we installed it with a click.

Something else that is worth mentioning is the package manager. PCLinuxOS is based on the RPM standard due to its Mandriva pedigree, but it uses the Synaptic Package Manager that Ubuntu and Debian users have come to enjoy. We found all package operations to be prompt and efficient, just as good as a DEB based system.

No review should be based on the first few hours, so expect a full report in a few days. Until then, feel free to try it out for yourself if you are impatient.

Recently, we reviewed Ubuntu 8.04 beta. We received several complaints for cranky people in the comments, and so we decided to take a look at some newer code. Always in search of variety, however, we decided to spice things up a little bit by trying Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. We downloaded the nightly build of the alternate installer, and took it for a spin.

As you can see in the gallery below, there is a lot to like. The latest Ubuntu family of distros now has support for partition encryption, provided that you use the alternate install CD rather than the graphical one. Users that chose this feature are prompted for the encryption password at boot time, making the system nice and secure.

We also found the KDE system management tools to be visually appealing and useful, but the Kubuntu APT frontend was sluggish and confusing compared to Synaptic on Ubuntu. We also had X crash for no apparent reason and without warning on several occasions, but since this is a nightly build of beta software, we won't complain too much, lest a thousand nerds shoot cheetos through their braces onto their monitors in indignation.

All in all, this is a distro that is shaping up well. It's not perfect, but there is plenty of time to polish up the edges. If you want to help the community with bug testing, check out the nightly build service.

A while back, the EFF caught cable provider Comcast using basic hacking techniques to restrict the use of Bittorrent on their connection. This irritated a lot of people, not only illegal file sharers, but also the growing number of consumers who use the bittorrent technology for legitimate purposes, such as downloading Open Source software or getting quality, legal media from one of Bittorrent's many partners.

The EFF, ever vigilant, has created an excellent guide to "packet shaping", the technique that ISPs use to futz with your data. In a nutshell:

• You the consumer have the ability to monitor your connection for suspicious packets using a tool called Wireshark.
• People who catch their ISPs in the act can send evidence to the EFF, which will in turn help their case to take legal action against sneaky ISPs.

Check out the white paper at their site, complete with cute illustrations and explanations that just about anyone ought to be able to understand.

Wine Doors is a project that aims to make the installation of Windows software on Linux as easy as regular apps are via a package manager. Like any respectable Linux package manager, Wine Doors has a software database and resolves dependencies automatically (at least in theory).

After playing around with the latest version of Wine Doors, we have mixed feelings about this program. While it looks stunning, and seems to have some pretty powerful macro based installation technology, it doesn't actually work. Obviously, this realization was the biggest disappointment for us. We used the app to install 3D Mark 2000 and Internet Explorer 6, but neither program would actually run. Some poking around in the console revealed that Wine Doors had failed to resolve a DLL dependency.

Although the program might not be ready for mainstream use yet, we see real promise, and look forward to a 1.0 release.

Yahoo! Mail has been one of the most popular free web-based email services ever since its humble beginnings. Not too long ago, Yahoo! started to feel the pressure from the brazen upstart Gmail, which offers a gradually increasing mailbox limit. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! introduced an unlimited mailbox size, promising that users would "never need to delete a message again."

As many of us expected, there is a limit, and it has been found. The Wall Street Journal has found a bug in the system that renders a account inoperable if it has too many messages in one folder. According to their findings, 55,000 or so is the maximum that the system can handle. Yahoo! is working on fixing the issue (of course), but be sure to point and laugh in the mean time.

Ubuntu has become so popular, so quickly, that it is almost synonymous with the word "Linux". Common wisdom holds that it is the easiest to use, simplest, and most stable Linux based OS out there, and that it is the best hope for "Linux on the Desktop". This reputation is a well earned one, but after trying out the latest beta of Ubuntu Hardy, due out this April, I can't help but wonder if they are getting a little careless. More on this after the jump.

For many recent Windows refugees, one of the hardest parts of a switch to Linux is the search for applications. Don't get us wrong, there is a HUGE selection of quality freeware for the Linux platform, but when someone has been using a specific software solution for years, it takes time to find workable replacements for the programs they are accustomed to. For former users of the venerable Nero Burning Rom, there is K3b, an application that is similar to point of suspicion, but sometimes it's nice to stick with the program you trust, rather than switch to something similar.

Nero has actually been available for Linux for several years, but previous versions were underwhelming. We decided to to take the newest version, NeroLinux 3, for a spin, and were impressed with what we found.

NeroLinux is distributed in both DEB and RPM form, which means that it installs easily on most popular Linux based operating systems. We installed it on the latest beta of Ubuntu Hardy, and it worked just fine. The program installed without any issues, and we were pleased to find it to be GTK based, which means it blends in perfectly with the GNOME desktop, the default desktop system in Ubuntu and Fedora. We burned several CDs and DVDs, and it worked just the way we expected. Anyone who has used Nero on Windows is guarenteed to feel right at home here, as it has feature parity with Nero Burning Rom 7.

NeroLinux 3 is available for € 19.99 on Nero's web store, or as a free trial download.

After nearly 15 years of development, the WINE project is scheduled for the landmark 1.0 release. As with most open source programs, it is hard to sit back and say "ok it's done". The work will always continue, but at some point the program at least accomplishes the original, or in this case, realistic goal. The WINE website now has posted a list of programs that are planned to work properly, constituting the 1.0 release.

This sudden optimism in the WINE developer community probably has something to do with the huge boost that Google gave them recently. WINE will probably never boast full compatibility with every Windows application there is, unless Microsoft decides to help (hey, stranger things have happened).