While most people focus on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org as being each other's competitors, there's a third player in this market: KOffice. While KOffice is obviously geared towards use on KDE, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME-based distributions as well, making it much more platform-independent than Microsoft's Office suite. Version 2.0.0 was released today, and comes with a whole boatload of improvements.

Mozilla Jetpack makes it so easy to filter, modify, and mash up pages that it might end up pitting developers and users against content producers in a battle for the Web, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. By allowing users to modify the behavior, presentation, and output of Web apps and pages to their liking, Jetpack brings us one step closer to a more democratic Web. Yet, as Jetpack produces fruit, expect more SaaS providers and media companies to call for 'guardrails for the Internet.'

"EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager that automatically changes your sound depending on the current application using it. For instance if you listen to music and a Skype call comes in, the music will fade out (based on your settings) until it's turned off, and the skype sound will be the only one running. Or if you listen to music and then play a YouTube video, the music will be again turned off and you will only hear the sound of the YouTube video. The application doesn't have a fancy interface, it only does what it's supposed to, and does it well."

There's been a new release of DOSBox, version 0.73. It's got support for more graphics modes and cards, improved Vista support, new OPL emulation cores, sound fixes and improvements for Mac OS X, lots of compatibility fixes, lots of CD-ROM detection improvements, lots of memory (EMS/XMS) improvements, various fixes and enhancements for the recompiling core, and much more.

FreeBSD's jails technology received an interesting new feature. "Add hierarchical jails. A jail may further virtualize its environment by creating a child jail, which is visible to that jail and to any parent jails. Child jails may be restricted more than their parents, but never less. Jail names reflect this hierarchy, being MIB-style dot-separated strings."

Apple has quietly updated its cheapest notebook offering, the white MacBook at EUR 999. "The bump measures in at just 0.13GHz on the processor, 133MHz more oomph from the DDR2 SDRAM, and an extra 40GB of disk space." A modest speed bump, but welcome nonetheless, especially as the price remains steady.

The Genode project has released the version 9.05 of their operating-system framework. The highlights as detailed in the release notes are the support of the OKL4 kernel as base platform, the introduction of basic USB support, the integration of Qt4 into the main-line source tree, and 64-bit support.

There has been a lot of talk about Android maybe making its way to various netbooks. However, thanks to the boys and girls at Canonical, Android might be taking a completely different direction when it comes to these little laptops: they're building an execution environment which will allow Android applications to run on normal Linux distributions.

The news has been out for a few hours already, but we were waiting for some official documentation and sources until we would publish it: Psystar, the Macintosh "clone" maker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Apparently, the small company has a debt of USD 259000. The filing was made on a voluntary basis, and according to Psystar the financial troubles arise from the economic downturn.

We've got some serious progress for Haiku for you. Firstly, the Haiku WiFi stack compiled for the first time. Eventually, it will be a native WiFi stack with FreeBSD driver compatibility, much like the ordinary Haiku network stack. Secondly, progress has also been made in TV card support.

Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators.

In our latest "Ask OSNews" installment, a reader asks: "Do you think Apple will ever have a standalone Windows version of their email app so that us Window users can download and use it? My family and I currently use Incredimail and occasionally Thunderbird."

The geek world might be all over Windows 7, and the rest of the world might be sticking to Windows XP for now, but there is also this Windows Vista operating system lingering around. Microsoft has just released the final version of the second service pack for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

The Safari 4 beta is having a little bit of trouble cleaning up after itself, as has been revealed by C. Harwic on his blog. Safari 4 is still in beta, so it's easy to forgive the browser for this rather sloppy housekeeping, which left gigabytes (!) of browsing data in weird places all over your filesystem, even after cleaning the caches or history. Still, this does raise a few questions.