The second alpha release of the inventive Linux media player Amarok has hit the web, and while there's a new look and some cool new tweaks, there's really two big reasons to take a look—namely, Windows and OS X. You heard right: The next full release of Amarok, one of our readers' favourite media players, will be cross-platform. At the moment, only Linux users can reliably run the testers' release, so I loaded it up and decided to share some early screens to let you all glimpse at the other open source, extensible, innovative app that's coming soon.

Linux with Firefox only: Free Firefox extension Tomfox does exactly what a fan of the Tomboy note system might think. Adding a "Create Tomboy note" option to Firefox's right-click menu, it creates a new note from selected text. Even better, it puts the title of the web page at the top, and a link to the page at the bottom of your new note, helping you remember just where you grabbed that text from. Tomfox is a free download, works with Linux/Firefox and the Tomboy note program.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth (who we interviewed last year) announced that he's out to make Linux a better-looking operating system than Mac OS X—within two years. An ambitious goal! At O'Reilly's OSCON conference this week, Shuttleworth said:

"I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that's art," Shuttleworth said. "Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware," he said. "You can paint anything on the screen because it's all software."

The Tombuntu blog points out a seriously helpful package available in Ubuntu's extended repositories that make creating super-efficient 7-Zip archives simple and fast, whether you're right-clicking or working with a command line. Run this command to install it:

sudo apt-get install p7zip

Windows/Linux: Free note-taking app Incollector is a pretty convenient and lightweight way to keep small bits of data close at hand, while also keeping everything organised and easily accessible. Pull up Incollector from the system tray and tell it what kind of note you're adding—conversation snippet, web address, plain text, among others—and what tags apply to it. Add comments, give it a star rating, and all that data can be used to create saved searches, filter by tags or ratings, and even search from the system tray by right-clicking the icon. Incollector isn't a high-powered, universal note collector, but it fills its desktop role nicely. Incollector is a free download for Windows and Linux systems.

If you've been checking out the newest VirtualBox beta for Mac OS X, or you're intrigued by Linux but not ready to deal with virtualizing it, the Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index—or, as it's skeevily nicknamed, veeDee-Eyes—has a host of pre-compiled, pre-configured images for you. No need to set up space, "boot" from a live CD and mess around with hardware config, as copies of Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and others are ready to run. Not all of them are free, with a few of the multi-GB distros asking for a buck or two to cover server costs, but a good number of interesting variants and betas are there for the taking. VirtualBox runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and is a free download.

Admit it—even if your desk could be the cover shot for Organized Worker Monthly, your data is all over the place. Between desktop apps, online networks, and webapp tools, it's easy to lose track of data and duplicate tasks, simply because it's not all accessible, or it takes too much of your time to keep it all synced up and together. Conduit, an in-development program for the Linux desktop, makes it simple to link your web data, desktop files, and other information all together, then synchronise them all with a single click. Follow along as we check out how Conduit works, peek at its potential, and try out a few examples (and solicit your own clever ideas).

Linux only: Linux systems are constantly writing status updates to a variety of different system logs—great news for debugging developer-types, not so great for anyone trying to save battery life on the go or get more life from their hard drives. Ramlog is a straightforward program that has your Linux system write log updates to RAM during a session, then dumps them onto the hard drive when shutting down. Ramlog creates a fixed-size RAM disk, so your memory won't be overrun by over-active processes, and experienced users can still check out their logs. I can't attest to long-term proof of the savings, but the hard drive conservation alone makes it worth running this simple program. Ramlog is a free download for Linux systems only, with a few pre-built packages; otherwise, hit the "via" link for instructions on installing from source.

Windows/Mac/Linux (All platforms): Online backup utility SpiderOak is notable for its true cross-platform availability, but it also offers (like Mozy) 2 GB of non-expiring free storage space and the ability to run in the background, making persistent backups as you change the contents of any folders you want to watch. The creators boast of a compression algorithm that speeds up both uploads and restoration, and unlimited bandwidth for paying customers, but its real value comes in its simple interface and set-and-forget nature. For any user—but especially Linux newcomers—who doesn't quite feel comfortable setting up their own automated backups, SpiderOak is a viable option. SpiderOak is free to download and create a 2 GB account; each 10 GB increment after that costs about $US5/month.

TechRepublic's 10 Things blog posts 10 shortcut ideas for Linux users (and Terminal-friendly OS X hackers) to make the terminal a friendlier, faster place to work. To use them, open up the .bashrc file found in your home directory and add lines in the following manner:

Alias NICKNAME='full command here'