A small number of Google users should already see the new Google main page with a new look to the Search Options. This will be released to everyone some time after the New Year.

This is how the new Google home page will look:

And here are the sprite image (as you can see, the image is hosted on Google.com):

More about this: Searchengineland

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We covered Maximus a while back:

Maximus will make sure that each window is maximised (hence its name) as soon as it’s open. The windows will also miss their title bar, freeing up precious screen real estate.

Maximus also comes by default in Ubuntu Netbook Remix. One annoying thing is that it maximizes every window you open, even small windows which should not be maximized.

Here is a quick way to tweak Maximus so that it doesn't maximize every window: press Alt + F2, enter gconf-editor, navigate to: /apps/maximus/no_maximize and set it to "true" (Do not automatically maximize newly opened windows. If undecorate is set, will still undecorate maximised windows.)

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WinCDEmu is a free, open source virtual drive mounting software allowing you to easily mount iso images of your CDs and DVDs exactly like you would do with Daemon Tools or Virtual Clone Drive softwares. The main advantage is that, this one is really, really tiny piece of software (about 500KB).

WinCDEmu makes mounting CD/DVD images simple: double-click on an image file in Windows Explorer and a new drive letter with the mounted image will appear. You can mount as many images as you want at the same time, and you don't need to reserve drive letters when nothing is mounted. WinCDEmu supports ISO, CUE, NRG, MDS/MDF, CCD, IMG formats and runs on all Windows versions from WinXP to Win7.

Download WinCDEmu

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Post updated with Megaupload download links with Chrome OS for VMWare and VirtualBox.

Mark Renouf has compiled a VMware hard disk image of Chrome OS for testing out in your virtual machine environment [via lifehacker]:

This is a ChromeOS image converted to VMware .vmdk file. It was built from instructions provided on the ChromiumOS developers site:
http://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/building-chromium-os/build-instructions

Built from sources retreived on 11/19/2009, following the announcement of the opening of the ChromeOS source code.

Shared user password (for sudo, etc is 'chromeos')

The image can be downloaded the Pirate Bay.

Keep in mind that Google Chrome OS might now be usable for now and that the source code has just been released yesterday.

Instructions for using the .vmdk image in VirtualBox can be found at TechCrunch.

Update: Korben (thank you!) uploaded the Chrome OS to Megaupload. There is a virtual machine disk image for VMWare and one for Virtualbox:

Download Chrome OS for VmWare (.vmdk)

Download Chrome OS for VirtualBox (.vdi)

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Cannonical just announced on their blog that they are "contributing engineering to Google under contract". For Chrome OS, obviously.

More about this, on the Canonical blog.

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We’re here today to talk about Google Chrome OS. We aren’t launching it today and not beta today. But we’ve made progress. As of today the code will be completely open. We’re excited to announce this.

You can view the event live, here (don't worry, it works on Linux too).

What is Chrome OS?

Live updates:

Chrome OS source code: http://src.chromium.org/

-In Google Chrome OS, EVERY application will be a web application!

-The boot process is one of the most important things. Right now Chrome OS boots in 7 seconds:

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I must admit, I didn't have time until now to install Fedora 12 on my system, but I have read a lot of great reviews about it and I was waiting for the week-end to give it a try myself. Then I found THIS.

Fedora 12 allows any user to install applications without asking for a password. The change in Fedora 12 has caused consternation amongst Fedora users (see their complaints, here). The change is part of PolicyKit's policy for desktop users and was made to make the system easier for desktop users. Easier how? Here's what a Reddit user has to say about this:

This is about the dumbest commit in a mainstream linux distro that I've seen in the last 10 years. What's worse, is people don't even get what the big deal is. Even WINDOWS knows not to do this now. Before UAC, it at least had "Administrator" accounts in XP home. Congratulations, you are now on par with Windows 98.

or:

you are now vulnerable to local root exploits not only in packages you installed, but also in packages you chose not to install.

For users who wish to return to the policy of always prompting for a root or administrator password, the command:

sourcepklalockdown --lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install

Read more about this change, HERE.

Update: Paul W. Frields, the Fedora Project Leader and chairman of the Fedora Project Board has made some clarifications:

• The PackageKit installer as shipped in the original release only allows users at the local console to install software without a root password.
• The PackageKit maintainers have changed the defaults in an update to be issued shortly

See his comment below.

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A new features was introduced a few days ago in Google Analytics, called "Analytics Intelligence", which monitors your website's traffic. Anytime something significant happens, it adds an automatic alert in your Intelligence reports. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps on one of your referrals, Analytics Intelligence creates an alert.

You can view these alerts on the Google Analytics Inteligence submenu:

But here is how to also create email alerts: on you Google Analytics dashboard, on the left side menu, click on "Intelligence" and then select "Daily", "Weekly" or "Monthy". You will then be able to create a custom alert for the period you selected:

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Sumatra PDF Viewer is a lightweight, very quick alternative to Adobe Reader for Windows. The open source application is just 1.2 MB (Adobe Reader takes up 199 MB after installation) in size and uses about 11 MB of RAM on my system (compared to 55 MB for Adobe Reader - tested on a single page PDF):

The focus is to build a small and simple program that starts up fast and offers basic features needed for comfortable on-screen viewing of PDF files. Simplicity and elegance have higher priority than additional features.

Sumatra PDF Viewer is not a fully-featured application, but it's perfect for quickly opening a PDF, even on an old computer.

Download Sumatra PDF

[via lifehacker]

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GMPC is a GTK2 client for Music Player Daemon. I'm not going to talk about Music Player Daemon again, because we covered it when we talked about Sonata (including how to configure Music Player Daemon - MPD).

This time we will talk about GMPC, or Gnome Music Player Client, which is a lightweight client for MPD, extendable through plug-ins: alarm, album view, AWN applet, dynamic playlist, fullscreen info, jamendo, last.fm, libnotify, lirc, lyrdb, lyricsplugin, lyricwiki, magnatune, wikipedia info, taglib (for editing tags) and so on (in the latest version).

The latest version (0.19.1) of GMPC adds a lot of new features, such as:

• Dynamic playlists
• Lots of new plugins (se above)
• Now Playing window: This shows a page full with metadata information about the playing song.
• Fully rewritten and more flexible metadata system.
• Metadata selector: You can now look through all the results returned by the metadata plugin and pick the cover, lyric, etc you like best.
• Guitar Tabs.
• Similar genre support. (For now only used by dynamic playlist plugin).
• Support for mpd's 0.15.0 single and consume mode.
• Show the title of the next song. (requires mpd 0.15.x)
• Translatable plugins: (Partial) translated plugin preferences pane.
• Integrated favorites support.
• A firefox like status bar, indicating repeat state, random state and when used the state of the dynamic playlist plugin.

For a full list of new features in MPGC 0.19, see THIS page.

Even though through plugins, GMPC becomes a fully featured music player and manager, it's still one of the fastest applications of this kind: currently it handles a play queue with more than a 1.000.000 songs without a problem. I have a collection of almost 40.000 songs and GMPC uses about 30 mb of RAM with all the plugins installed (the author says that for it's database of 32.000 songs, it used 11 MB of RAM but I guess that was either an older version, or he didn't test it using all the plugins).

Let's install GMPC in Ubuntu

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