Infopirate.org

Free, alternative office suite OpenOffice.org's latest version 3.0 is now available for download by testers. OpenOffice.org 3.0 Release Candidate 1 offers several new features and improvements from its last major release, including better Mac support and collaboration capabilities. Let's take a look at the notable fso you can decide if it's worth taking another look at OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

Linux 2.6.27 kernel released 9 October 2008.

Note: The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was held September 15 and 16 in Portland, Oregon, immediately prior to the Linux Plumbers Conference. LWN, as always, has excelent coverage of the event. You can download here all the papers of the conferences in two PDF files. LWN also has coverage of the Linux Plumbers Conference

The PCLinuxOS development team has announced the availability of the first public beta release of PCLinuxOS 2009: "The Ripper Gang is pleased to announce the first public beta ISO release of what will ultimately become PCLinuxOS 2009. This beta ISO features kernel 2.6.26.6, KDE 3.5.10, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, Firefox 3.0.3, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, FrostWire, KTorrent, Amarok, Flash, Java JRE, Compiz Fusion 3D and much more.

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.1 beta release, an important development milestone for the popular open source web browser. Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3.1 a strong incremental improvement with user interface enhancements, new features, and increased support for emerging web standards. The new beta release includes a modest handful of noteworthy changes that improve the user experience.

The MEPIS project has announced the release of a testing live DVD featuring the recently announced KDE 4.0 Beta 1: "Warren Woodford of MEPIS has built KDE 4 Beta 1 live DVDs to verify the compatibility of KDE 4 with SimplyMEPIS 7.x. Both 32-bit and 64-bit editions are available. They are about 1 GB each and include all of the KDE 4 applications that are working at this time. KDE 4 Beta 1 is a very early release and is meant for developers, testers, and reviewers. The live DVDs were built using a MEPIS 7.0 Etch core and include the usual MEPIS kernel and hardware compatibility features.