Recent Ubuntu releases have introduced major changes, including a new theme, a new application stack and - gasp - a new position for window buttons.  But Karmic and Lucid also included a number of tiny usability enhancements that you might not have noticed, but which are central to making Ubuntu a Linux distribution for human beings.  Here's a look at five of them.

Time to enter the Wayback Machine to an experience I had with a new Linux user and compare it to today's more tech savvy audience. The year was 1997 and I had settled in for the evening with my favorite beverage and a bit of channel flipping, when I received a telephone call from a guy who'd installed Linux on his computer.

The Wine development release 1.2-rc2 is now available.

There are no new features in this release, only bug fixes, since we are in code freeze. If you find a new feature that's a bug.

OpenOffice.org isn't the only game in town for open source word processing. One of the best, and underexposed, open word processors is AbiWord.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 13, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 13 Screenshots

Today openSUSE 11.3 milestone 7 is out which is the last stop ahead of a Release Candidate in June and a final release in July. The openSUSE Build Service 2.0 Beta 1 came out yesterday with a final release now set for June 10.

In my previous posting I had simply stated that SC2 was "playable" under Wine. Today I would like to detail exactly what I meant by "playable" with some hard numbers. Also, it seems on my own system that Starcraft 2 prefers to run with a glass of Wine instead of natively on Windows.