Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

We've already seen unofficial Mac and Linux builds of the Google Chrome browser's open-source base, but now the Chromium team is throwing them out for real—even if they're also saying "DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM"

That is, of course, just a tongue-in-cheek warning that these early builds will certainly see bugs, crashes, and real limitations in day-to-day use. As with their fan-compiled predecessors, these builds lack support for Adobe Flash and other plug-ins, changing privacy settings, setting a default search provider, and, just to round out the to-do list, printing. So what you can really do is see how snappy the rendering and navigation controls are.

On an Ubuntu 9.04 system, at least, this Chrome/Chromium Alpha is noticeably snappy and speedy, and doesn't have trouble with many pages, other than those reliant on Flash, of course. If you're down for test driving a rig with a great engine but not a lot else, grab your (Intel only) DMG and (Ubuntu/Debian only, for now) .DEB files at the link below.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel