Relative new kid on the block, Linux Mint seems to be winning the favour of quite a lot of Ubuntu users, and it seems perilously close to kicking openSuse off the number 2 spot on distrowatch.

Based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, this 'polished up' Ubuntu provides all the goodness you would expect from an Ubuntu distro and all the necessary tweaks that you have to do by hand in Ubuntu to make it a multimedia workhorse all done for you. This is appealling to Newbies and computer novices especially as it offers 'fire up and go' and removes those extra installation steps that you might otherwise have to get your local computer nerd / grandson to come around and show you what to do.

• Short review available at tuxgeek.me.
• Linux Mint website.

Almost a month after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, here at ULNG towers we've been playing around with the latest release of Microsoft Office's closest competition and it's time for a short ULNG review.

What's OpenOffice again?

I've got one, you probably have one too - they make great portable Internet machines, they boot up in seconds and they often cost less than £200, so of course they are popular, but apparently nobody told Microsoft that people outside of Asia would want a computer the size of an A5 binder that surfs the web and does your email without the rest of the bulk of a computer. Whoops.

Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., which together account for 90 percent of the netbook market, are using the rival Linux on 30 percent of their netbooks and Microsoft are missing this good wedge of a really up-and-coming laptop market.

[read the full story on bloomberg.com]

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers as well as for packaging the SUSE kernel at Novell. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works.

[full story at O'Reilly.com]