If you are looking for a fast, reliable, trouble-free, lightweight PDF viewer, and you stumble upon xPDF in your distro’s app listings — keep stumbling. Chances are it will not run on your Linux configuration. In theory, xPDF is a promising alternative to PDF viewers available for the Linux desktop such as Adobe PDF Viewer, Okular and Evince. It is a fast and light application that does not exhibit sluggish performance.

PeaZip is a handy utility for reducing the size of large files and archiving different files into one big container. Unlike most file compression tools for Linux, PeaZip’s user interface makes it easy to manage. When it comes to zipping and unzipping files, simplicity counts for most everything. PeaZip is a cross platform file and archive manager available for Linux, BSD and Windows platforms.

Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro’s menu, favorites bar or panel icons. Instead, it cuts down on how often you resort to using them. A semantic-based tool that makes use of the Zeitgeist engine, Synapse is a graphical launcher that pops up when you call it with the Control-Space key combination.

With the unexpected news that Google’s RSS feed reader, Google Reader, is being put out to pasture, many users are scrambling to find new tools for news consumption. There are still plenty of excellent free news apps out there, and here’s a look at the top five available for the Android platform. Google Currents is a pretty, magazine-like aggregator with a true offline solution that works well in airplane mode.

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I’d been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

Fedora 18, dubbed “the Spherical Cow,” was finally released on Jan. 15 after seven postponements that stretched two months beyond its scheduled six-month release cycle. Despite some noteworthy improvements overall to the operating system, I found little about Fedora 18 to justify adopting it over other Linux distros or upgrading to it from an earlier version.

Distinction’s Cocktail Flow features a cabinet system that lets you inventory your bar and then proposes cocktail recipes based on what you’ve got. This is functionality that really shows off the power of app over website or book. Shopping suggestions for augmenting your bar, along with a budget guesstimate, tell you how many new types of cocktails you’re going to be able to make and at what cost.

The ZE Rescue Disk is a very handy rescue tool to fix damaged or missing hard drive sectors that prevent a computer from booting into its operating system. It runs automatically as a boot-repair rescue tool at startup from the optical drive. ZE Rescue Disk provides what was a missing link in permanently recovering from failed boot sequences.

Wink, a software package for creating tutorial and presentation screen shots, works reasonably well when it works at all. However, getting it to run may not be worth the bother, given the better alternatives available. Wink’s premise is a good one for anyone who needs to create a show-and-explain presentation on how to do things with a computer.

Gregstoll’s FlightPredictor app takes FlightCaster.com’s powerful flight prediction data and wraps it into a mobile app, in this case, for Android — and what a great job Gregstoll, FlightCaster and its data supplier FlightStats have done. FlightPredictor for Android uses historical flight data going back 10 years, along with real-time conditions.