Unison is offering the first commercial version of it's software product combining telephony, e-mail, address book, calendar and instant messaging.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, wants a more elegant and user-friendly Linux-Desktop for it's users. In a full blown statement at this year’s OSCON, Ubuntu grounder Mark Shuttleworth proclaimed: ‘'The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art'’.

Poppler, a library for rendering PDF data, was released in its developer version as 0.9.0. For the first time it enables interactive documents using Javascript.

RSS preview, Atom-feeds and improved bookmarking facilities are the new features in the upcoming version 9.6 of the Opera Web Browser.

After some stops and starts, the first release candidate for Open Office 3.0 is finally ready; after some discussions the project team decided today to go for a second try.

The second early Firefox 3.1 test version (code-named Shiretoko Alpha 2) provides at first glance a video tag, which allows audio and video to be played in free Ogg/Theora format.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution is offering online workshops from September 1 through 5 for those who would like to jump on board the initiative.