Mandriva Linux recently announced the Mandriva Flash 2008 Spring operating system, the latest version of its Linux-on-a-USB-stick distro. The Flash sticks come with a complete, bootable version of Mandriva Linux and make it dead simple to take your Linux with you wherever you go - a huge help when you're trying to impress the babes at the beach. ("Can I show you my dongle?

PlayOnLinux 3.0.5 has been released, its a minor update with the main change being improvements made to the integrated tchat client.

Mozilla has touted Firefox 3 as faster and more secure than earlier versions of the open-source web browser. But there's another reason to look at the browser upgrade: it is highly customizable for individual users by utilizing the massive library of Add-ons - additional features that users can choose to install on top of the browser.

The KDE System Guard at first glance just looks like a simple system monitor application which lets you take a look at the System Load and Processes running on your machine. It is actually capable of a lot more monitoring than that, and if you delve deeper into it, you can customise the way it works to show you information about your system that you are interested in.

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks.

openSUSE 11.0 was one of the most anticipated Linux distro releases of 2008. Despite a few bugs in the final code, which was released yesterday, it was worth the wait. The openSUSE version of KDE 4 alone is worth the download, and the improvements to the software manager make customizing a pleasure.

While Firefox 3’s location bar is perhaps my personal favorite new feature and the one I missed the most when I have to use Firefox 2 for some testing, there are a lot of people who find it weird, obtrusive and don’t like it including bookmarks and history among its results.