The first release candidate (RC1) of OpenOffice 3.1 is available to download and includes several new features. The 3.1 update to the free open source office suite includes anti-aliasing to improve the clarity of graphics, such as lines and circles. Improvements have also been made to the comments system in documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Jigdo, if you’re not familiar, takes a current Ubuntu image and compares its contained packages with the packages within an updated image (ie; alpha vs beta, beta vs RC, RC vs final). Using this method you’re only downloading the packages that have *changed* between images and not the entire image again.

This is the ninth development release and first release candidate for GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released later this month. This release is the last before hard code freeze starts on september 10th. Please test this as much as you can and file bugs if you want them fixed before the final release.