Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Alpha 1 has been released today.  Since Unity received an update a couple of days ago, I though you might want to see a new video with Unity in action:

Gnome Shell and Unity may have started on separate paths, but they are definitely heading to the same direction. Seif Lotfy has just posted a screenshot (not mockup!) of his current work: Zeitgeist and Gnome Shell:

Adobe Flash Player 10.2 beta was released today with preliminary support for Stage Video which is supposed to reduce the performance impact while playing back video content across all platforms.

Unity has finally been made default in Ubuntu (desktop) 11.04 Natty Narwhal yesterday, as you can see in the Ubuntu meta changelog. That means that if you download the latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal daily build and boot from it, you should get Unity without having to install / enable anything. The same changelog mentions that Screen has been removed from the desktop version.

Foobnix, a very interesting music player we wrote about a while back (check out that post for a complete review) has been updated to version 0.2.2 and also it now comes with an Ubuntu PPA.

In my search for a clean Desktop (because I got tired of cleaning it manually), I came across "Directory cleaner and files organizer", a script (with Zenity for a GUI) that automatically cleans any directory (and thus the Desktop folder) by moving the files to various folders such as all the pictures into ~/Pictures, the archives into ~/Archives, documents into ~/Documents and so on.

Pidgin 2.7.6 was released yesterday, fixing the "Unable to validate certificate" error for omega.contacts.msn.com (so if the 

DockBarX 0.40 has been released last night, bringing the following changes:

-The default theme has changed. The new default theme DBX is made by BigRZA. It's made to look good with Radiance and Ambiance. (The old default theme is still included under the name Old.)

-Another theme by BigRZA, Sunny Colors is also included by default

If you're using Pidgin with MSN, you probably got lots of "omega.contacts.msn.com" certificate errors today. Here is how to fix it.

Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file.

Because there are many Twitter clients out there, we asked you to nominate the best Twitter client in a comment on a post last week. Today, you all get to vote for the best Linux Twitter client based on your nominations (top 5 nominations).

Compiz 0.9.x has been re-written and should now be a lot faster. Also, it comes with many enhancements such as minimized windows previews, per window compositing and more. Read on for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat installation instructions!

Compiz 0.8.x has some very cool plugins which are marked as "experimental" and thus are not available in the Ubuntu repositories. Johnnyg posted instructions about installing these plugins @ Gnome Look - I gave it a try and everything seems to be working (though I've only tested 3-4 plugins so far).

Your favourite music player is not supported by the new Ubuntu 10.10 sound menu or not using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat yet?

Nautilus Easy Union is a Nautilus extension (comes as a stand-alone application too, but it requires Nautilus anyway) that allows you to create a "union point" which is basically a folder that displays the contents of other (multiple) directories. You can use it for easily accessing all your pictures, music, videos or other files from a single location.

An update to the Avant Window Navigator trunk PPA from a few days ago brought per dock/panel Intellihide to AWN (taskmanager).