The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application.

Softpedia posted today a small review of three anti-virus software that are free to use, complete with screenshots. Consider using Microsoft's or Adaware's anti-spyware utilities too to keep your XP healthy.

Fedora Core 6 has been delayed again. "Over the weekend we ran into a few more bugs with Fedora Core 6 that we decided were important enough to fix. There were some multilib compose issues (wrong packages landing in the wrong dirs), some translation files that would cause tracebacks in things like anaconda (whoops), and a fedora-release package that forgot to enable updates (double whoops). For these reasons and a few others, we decided to respin the release candidate tree and push the release date out another couple of days."

The Enlightenment team has released 0.16.8.4, and as usual, this is mainly a bugfix and maintenance release. You can grab the release from the Sourceforge page.

Who makes the most reliable computers? Lenovo, closely followed by Apple, if you believe online service and support company Rescuecom's latest reliability audit, derived from more than 20,000 calls made by the firm's customers during the second quarter this year. Rescuecom assigned a reliability rating to computer vendors. Lenovo, in its guise as provider of IBM desktops and notebooks, scored 243. Apple attained 201. Third-placed HP/Compaq scored a mere 12. Dell's rating was 4, Gateway -12 and all the rest together scored -16.

"The Firefox web browser has come a long way since the project was announced as a fork from the open-sourced Mozilla project. Version 1.0 was released in 2004 and quickly won critical acclaim for its speed, compatibility with web standards, and features. In a couple of years, Firefox managed to reach a milestone that its predecessor never quite reached: hitting 10 percent market share worldwide. Version 2 of the browser recently hit RC2, but the team is already making plans for 3.0. The Mozilla organization has set up a feature brainstorming web site that allows everyone to enter their favorite wish lists for the open source browser."

LinxForums reviews Mandriva 2007, and concludes: "If Mandriva could have improved their packages, their artwork and fix a few little things here and there they could have made this release the best on the market. They got really close though, and although I can find things to criticize I am still very impressed by some of the innovations and the overall quality."

NeoSmart has just released EasyBCD 1.5, complete with support for Vista, Windows NT/2k/XP, and Windows 9x/ME. EasyBCD 1.5 adds experimental support for dual-booting any of these along with Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD - straight from the Windows Vista bootloader without any additional configuration needed. "Windows Vista's new bootmanager is a double-edged sword. It's one of the most powerful booting scripts in existence, and a far cry from the very limiting boot.ini of legacy Windows operating systems. But it overwrites the MBR without a second thought, and doesn't provide any means for users of alternate operating systems and boot managers to use their old system. That's where EasyBCD 1.5 comes in!"

The new issue of the OS2eCS 'ezine' (a fancy web 2.0-like word for a magazine on the internet) has been published. "The WorkPlace Shell, A Powerful Jewel of OS/2 and eComStation" and "Setting up a TCPIP Network Printer on eComStation" are just two of the articles in this issue.

With Namesys founder Hans Reiser recently arrested as the prime suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife, a brief thread on the lkml discussed the future of ReiserFS.According to a report at Linux.com, employees at Namesys are circling their wagons and plan to continue working on the project 'in the short term.' One employee admits, "we are rather shaken and stressed at the moment, although I cannot say we didn't see it coming."

"The results of the latest round of Debian Project general resolutions are in. The resolution to recall the project leader failed, while the counter-resolution reaffirming support for the leader (and the Dunc-Tank initiative) passed. The attempt to make section 2 of the Debian Free Software Guidelines apply to all programmatic work (and firmware in particular) failed, with the project voting (narrowly) for 'further discussion'. While this discussion takes place, however, the project has voted to release etch when it is ready without requiring a complete and final solution to the firmware problem first."

"Since SkyOS build 6179 was released many important milestones have been reached. Among them include USB support, printing support, a new Python port, but I think most importantly, DMA support. We set out to determine how much of a difference DMA made on the installation time, speed of indexing, program loading time, and general hard disk performance."

"Linux had always lacked a Open Source virtualisation technology in the same league as Solaris containers or commercial product like Vmware. That was until Xen came into the picture. Xen is an opensource virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems. Recently, I downloaded the Xen Live CD ISO image from their website and burned it on to a CD in order to give it a trial run. What follows below are my experiences in trying out this very promising virtualisation technology."

"During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Apple climbed back to profitability and fame. Apple's colorful computers put them back into the spotlight, and the iPod diversified Apple's business successfully, bringing the Apple name to music." Jobs about the Cube, introduced in that timespan: "The G4 Cube is simply the coolest computer ever. An entirely new class of computer, it marries the Pentium crushing performance of the Power Mac G4 with the miniaturization, silent operation, and elegant desktop design of the iMac." I definitely agree. Best-looking computer ever made. I want one.