Not yet; at least not any official native release by Google that we know about. But if you would really like to try out chrome without the hassle of having to install MS windows in a virtual machine, try out Crossover Chromium. This is not a native port of chrome for linux, but a package installer to be used with wine embedded. Also, this is nowhere close to being as stable as it is under windows and as rightfully pointed out by the developers; this is essentially a proof of concept to show Wine’s capabilities of running native windows application. Packages are available for debian and RPM based linux systems; Mac OS build is also available. Have Fun.

A few weeks ago I became the proud owner of an Acer Aspire One Linux edition (reviewed here). Out of the box, this little wonder comes with the relatively unknown Linux distribution Linpus Linux Lite, which has been customized somewhat by Acer to make the most of the hardware in the Aspire One. The screenshot above and many more pictures of Acer’s version of Linpus are available at Golem.de, or you can find captures of the vanilla Linpus Lite 9.4 here.

The installation is indeed very ‘Lite’, and brings up the desktop from suspend in less than 10 seconds, or from cold boot in around 20 seconds. Part of the reason for these amazing startup times is that Linpus doesn’t attempt to start up a fully blown integrated desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, and is in fact based on XFCE, including the XFCE’s Terminal and Thunar Filemanager.

A big selling point for Linpus is it’s support for Asian languages out of the box, and the Acer version is no exception: I was able to type Thai characters with the default setup, and there are additional smart input managers for Korean, Japanese and both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

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The what?

If you haven’t been following the news lately (not the political type), Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu (Canonical), has officially named Ubuntu 9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope“; which is expected to be released on April 2009. But before that we are expecting Intrepid Ibex next month. Even though Ubuntu is my default distro in all my computers; two things I absolutely dislike about Ubuntu, is their naming convention and their default look. At the rate of six months release cycle I am hoping they will soon run out of funny names for Ubuntu.

On the bright side there is a storm brewing at Ubuntu brainstorm for a killer Ubuntu theme with a large number of user vote. Even though it might be too late for this to be the default look for ibex, but with enough support, this might end up being the default theme for Jaunty, so if you like this theme show your support by voting for it. It’s better than the theme the developers were trying out on their earlier Ibex Alpha releases.

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In our last poll we asked you to vote for your favorite distro; as expected Ubuntu pretty much dominated the poll with more than 57% of the votes. In my opinion, this poll ‘roughly’ reflects the Linux desktop market share out there. As with most polls there are error margins, since we didn’t add “Kubuntu”, “Xubuntu”; understandably, these users probably voted for Ubuntu. So in our next poll, we ask you to vote for your favorite Linux Desktop Environment. If you think any candidate is missing, feel free to let us know so that we can Add/Remove in the early stage of the poll. Feed subscribers will need to visit the site to vote. Poll is located on the sidebar.

So why do you prefer the Desktop Environment you voted for, over others? Let us know.