Although it is still an alpha version it already allows you to perform the regular navigation activities that you are used to with an incredible speed.

It’s layout is also a bit different of what we are used to, in my opinion it is great, KISS principle all the way.  I also like the new functionalities like the task manager which allows you to take control over the used memory with each tab/window and the browser itself.

With all this in mind I expect a great browser to arise from Google in the next months. Below are the steps that I needed to perform to install Chromium on Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid).

First of all you need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

$ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following two lines at the bottom of the file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Now save/close the file and add the GPG key using the following command:

--rev-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5

Next we will update the source list and install the browser:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

If you want you can also enable flash support by copying (or linking) your previously installed flash library into browser plugins directory:

$ sudo cp /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins

And you are done, next time you run it you will only need to specify the plugins usage with following command:

$ chromium-browser --enable-plugins

Although I’m a big fan of Fedora I wasn’t very happy with the lack of speed while running a few applications, then I’ve decided to try a different Linux distribution.

The first one that I thought it would be a good alternative was Ubuntu, but after reading a couple of threads, I’ve finally decided to get Xubuntu.

Xubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system and it uses the Xfce desktop environment.

My laptop is running Xubuntu since last Friday and it’s very stable, one of the things that made me very happy, considering that I have an ATI Graphics Card (9200 series), was 3D support being enabled out of the box.

I’m also loving Xfce, I thought it would be minimalistic but it has great potential.

Another thing that I really appreciate is the speed of Synaptic while listing/installing new packages.

When I was using Fedora that was one of the turn offs because Pirut was slow and most of the times it didn’t allowed me to see the package installation process because it used to freeze all the time.

If you can’t waste much time in instalation processes and your system is getting old.. this is the right distribution for you!