Novell layoff rumors swirled this week, but analysts were quick to dismiss any doomsday scenarios involving the SuSE Linux operating system. Current users of SuSE should not panic even if the 20% workforce cuts cited in recent news reports come to fruition, said Charles King, principal analyst for Pundit-IT Research, Hayward, California.

More handbrake turns concerning ODF. In an official statement, Microsoft has said it will not support OpenDocument in Office 12: ""We have no plans to directly support the OpenDocument format at this time." This contradicts reports from yesterday. Andy Updegrove, OASIS' legal counsel, responds, once again. Really, there's no need to turn on your TV to watch soap operas.

SymphonyOS has reached beta stage-- well, sort of. They released the first preview release of the first beta (are they trying to beat this?). The stability of the Mezzo dektop environment and Orchestra rendering has been improved, various applications have been updated, and much more. Download here.

Google may not be releasing an open-source operating system or a desktop suite, but the company is promoting, supporting and using open-source software. In a Ziff Davis Internet interview, Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager, said that while he can't "talk about any future products," he also added that, to the best of his knowledge "Google has no plans to release an operating system or an office suite."

Red Hat is shying away from taking "control" of its relationship with customers and instead hopes to become a thought leader that champions innovation through freedom of the community. Matthew Szulik, Red Hat chief executive, chairman and president, said Wednesday it was wrong to think companies like Red Hat could control what the open source community builds and that it's important to stay true to the premise of the Gnu General Public License.

There appears to be no performance penalty for using dual-core processors instead of two single-core processors with the same clock speed, Macworld Lab has concluded after preliminary testing of the dual-core Power Mac G5s released by Apple a week ago.

"After using Smoothwall Express 2.0 for years and now testing out v3.0 alpha I can conclude that this product is shaping up to become even more fantastic than I ever thought it could be. It gives power to the end user, allows them to decide how to control their network and makes it easy to do so. The new GUI (web based interface) is much clearer, easier to read, and provides more information about what is going on."

This is an interesting comparison of OpenOffice 2.0 Calc and MS Office 2003 Excel. The author found that OOo is slow in some operations and takes a lot of RAM & CPU.

The first in a new series of development builds of GNOME has been released. You can compile GNOME 2.13.1 by using these jhbuild modulesets. Planned features can be found here.

"With the release of StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org, and the rumors about MS Office 12, office suites are making their rounds in the press again. Microsoft's office suite is certainly the most popular on Windows, but there are competing suites from Corel and IBM. On GNU/Linux we have KOffice, GNOME Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and more. But no matter if they are free or proprietary, expensive or cheap, and regardless of what platforms they run on, the one thing that all software suites have in common is that they suck."

A controversy surrounding Lycoris (which got acquired by Mandriva) is brewing. Apparently, Rus Bayne, ex-vice president of sales at Lycoris, is trying to start up a new distribution-- but allegedly "ripping off" Lycoris along the way. Read the thread on Lycoris' community site and judge for yourself.

"I couldn't help but make a joke with the title, because it's seemingly right on the money. You see, Google is getting ready to take the wraps off of a new service called Google Base. If it can be posted online, it would appear that they would, in fact, prefer it belong to them. At least, they'll store it for you and make it searchable."

"Slackware is old-school Linux. Back in the day - before Red Hat seized the throne - Pat Volkerding's Linux distribution was the undisputed king of the hill. Many still use it today. By the time I started playing with Linux in 1995, or running my Web server with it in 1996, Slackware's slump in market share had already begun. I've tried a lot of different Linux distributions during the years since then, but until recently I had never tried Slackware. Here's what I've learned about Slackware while installing and using the recently released Slackware 10.2."

Actually, there's more on processors today, but the processor in this article is so out-of-the-ordinary, that it deserves its own item. "Niagara has eight processing engines - called cores - each able to simultaneously execute four instruction sequences called threads. It's neither the first multicore processor nor the first to employ multithreading, but it embraces both ideas more aggressively than competing chips from IBM, Intel and AMD."