Is IBM gearing up to disrupt Microsoft Office? Apparently so. In fact, Big Blue is bringing Lotus Symphony 1.2 — an open source application suite — to the Mac.

Impress Tables are one of the most welcome features in the recently-released OpenOffice.org 3.0. Using them is straightforward, but they have their limitations, and you may miss one or two useful features before you learn your way around their somewhat awkward interface

It's all about bipartisanship and unity in this week's roll call for the Linux.com forums. Old distro and new distro coming together, peripheral and computer learning how to work as one, and, just as the framers intended, a run-off between several distinguished' absentee answer' questions.

On the surface, it would appear that a slowing economy might pave the way for increased Linux and Open Source software adoption by the unwashed masses, those who may want newer software than what their current XP system provides but don’t want to pay the high premium of upgrading to Windows Vista/Windows 7 and all new software to go with it.

Maps are cool; there's no end of applications which can make good use of mapping data. There is plenty of map data around, but it's almost exclusively proprietary in nature.

OpenOffice has hit version 3, and the free alternative to Microsoft Office and other commercial office suites is looking more professional and fully featured than ever before.

Without much fanfare, developers of Ubuntu Linux have delivered the latest version of the open source operating system that scores higher than Windows Vista in performance testing, does a better job than Windows in making wireless connectivity easy and, overall, leaves fewer reasons to stick with Windows than any other previous release of Linux.

It's not easy for a Linux company to let go the reins of control over its community Linux distribution. Just ask Red Hat, which started to let go of Fedora and then decided to keep managing it