The second alpha release of the inventive Linux media player Amarok has hit the web, and while there's a new look and some cool new tweaks, there's really two big reasons to take a look—namely, Windows and OS X. You heard right: The next full release of Amarok, one of our readers' favorite media players, will be cross-platform.

A research paper BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance delivered at a conference in Singapore this week, highlights Microsoft Asia Research's alternative to Google's PageRank algorithm, BrowserRank - "The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important.

At OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, says he doubts Microsoft would file a claim against Linux developers.

Ubuntu 8.04(Hardy Heron) comes with a full featured version of Compiz Fusion, but the main problem is that there is no way to configure these effects. To configure the different options we will use a tool called Compiz Config.

Some current news in the Linuxosphere, and some things going on on my very own desktop, have me wondering about the nature of the Linux Desktop. Here are a few questions to ponder.

Could hardware vendors be deliberately blocking and sabotaging Linux? What would their incentive or motivation be? One would think that would be just stupid, since no matter how small the Linux market is, at the end of the day there will be money exchanging hands. Why would a company say no to paying customers?

"I am happy to announce the release of Zile 2.2.60, the tiny Emacs clone..." (Zile is Lossy Emacs)