IBM's Lotus Symphony will be unable to break the dominance of Microsoft's Office package according to market researchers Gartner. Open Office still has too many deficits for enterprise use, they say, and the future belongs to Web-based office and collaboration solutions.

The first KDE 4 beta release gives users a sneak preview of the many innovations the next K Desktop generation will introduce.

About one week after IBM joined the Open Office project, Big Blue is releasing its own free office package. The office software, dubbed Lotus Symphony is based on Open Office.

The latest version of the PDF viewer Adobe Reader for Linux, version 8.1.1, is now available as a download.

Codeweavers, the manufacturers of Crossover, the Wine-based runtime environment, have announced version 6.2 of their software for Linux and Mac OS X, and given users a sneak preview of new and improved functions.

Red Hat Linux has just released JBoss ESB 4.2, a community variant of its JBoss middleware.

Ingres has launched a software appliance that combines Ingres's own Icebreaker database and Jaspersoft's Business Intelligence Software (BI) with Linux.

Wine, the free runtime environment for Windows applications on Linux/Unix has released version 0.9.44 with enhancements and innovations.