The super power Google last week released Chrome , its entry to the segment of web browsers.  But, as you might have noticed we didn’t write a thing about it. Why?

1. I was super busy with other projects;
2. Chrome wasn’t released for Linux (my main OS);
3. When I tested on my Windows install, it was fast but not thaaaat fast (at least for me);
4. It actually completely froze on me a couple of times when testing;
5. No extensions (yet). C’mon! Even Songbird has had extensions since the very early days;
6. Google didn’t release it for Linux (yes, I´m writing it again). How rude was that??
7. A web browser made by Google… even though it is open source I’m still a bit suspicious to know what they’ll be watching for on my data. I think it is enough I give them my email, online docs, news feeds, … I want at least a part of my web life not related to Google.

I’ve heard a great number of people liked it. But, for me it is just not there yet.

Throughout my blogging years and web experiences Filezilla has been of great use. The Filezilla client allows transfering of files through FTP, FTPS, and SFTP. Actually, you can also delete files on your server or rename them.

It runs nicely on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and you can run it through a USB drive with Portable Apps.

If you prefer to run something similar on your Firefox, you may also try out FireFTP.

Launchy, our favorite application launcher which we’ve reviewed before has now been made to work with Linux!

The list of plug-ins has increased a lot since our last review making Launchy an even cooler application.

Download the application for Windows or Linux here.

For those who are a bit lost with the word “partitions”, they are sectors in which your hard disk is divided.

You can divide your HD to have one OS in one partition and data on another, or add a partition just for back up data, and if you’ll be installing more than one OS in your system each one of them will have to sit in its own partition.

The Firefox add-on Gears, formerly known as Google Gears, allows you to use web applications as if they were installed on your computer. Consider it as a fancier offline browsing.

So, basically the data instead of being completely stored on the web is actually stored in your computer. You’ll have access whenever you want. The number of websites compatible with Gears isn’t that huge at the moment but there are some very good ones already adopting it such as RememberTheMilk, Google Docs, Zoho, Google Reader, and most recently MySpace.

If you’re afraid of the Linux transition because of your loved Windows-only app, your fears are greatly reduced with Wine.

Wine is a compatibility layer that will allow you to run and install Windows programs. A huge list of softwares has been tested to run with Wine pretty successfully. Specially now, that after 15 years in the making it has achieved its milestone 1.0 release. A large help was provided by the support received from Google to speed this development.

The folks at Mozilla will be giving us the full stable Firefox 3 in a bit more than 24 hours. A really really nice improvement from the 2.0 release which now seems pretty ancient for all of those already testing beta releases and release candidates.

Mozilla is even trying to set a new world record for most number of downloads of a single software in one day. Join in the campaign if you’d like as well.

Workrave is a Windows and Linux only program that can help prevent dreaded repetitive strain injuries. Unfortunately techies are quite familiar with RSI.

Once installed, Workrave runs silently in the background monitoring how much time you’re using the computer. In pre-set times of activity, the program gives you alerts on when breaks are needed. You’ll see three types of alarms:

• Micro-Pause of 30 seconds;
• Rest break of 20 minutes;
• Daily limit (to turn off the computer).

The times established for each alarm can be modified according to your preferences or, better yet, you can leave everything as standard.

Virtualbox, our favorite multi-platform virtualization software has just been upgraded to version 1.6.2. This was mainly a bug fix upgrade.

The main reason for me to post this here is to remind our readers to make an upgrade to one of the most recent versions of Virtualbox if your current version is giving some problems.

My VirtualBox on Linux was completely gone, all of a sudden it just stopped working. But then all I needed to do was uninstall it and install again. What happened was that after it got purchased by Sun, the repositories changed so for some reason the software wasn’t cooperating much with me.

For users who have already made the switch to Linux, first congratulations!!

Most likely you’re now familiar with something called GRUB, the bootloader that will manage your access to the different OSs you have installed. GRUB comes in when you have a dual-boot (or more) installation on your machine.

If you’re sticking with a simple dual-boot Linux install most likely you’ll not have to change anything after you’ve made the OS installation. GRUB should work well. But… in case you start messing around too much with removing or adding other Linux distros or even want to completely remove Linux, things start getting a little complicated.