The South African government has decided on the Open Document Format (ODF) as its standard for internal communications.

It was good news across the board for ATI graphics card owners with AMD deciding to go for a free driver and immediately delivering the goods. Now the proprietary Linux driver, Fglrx 8.42.3, has been released, and it promises various improvements.

Novell today appointed Tim Wolfe as president, Novell Americas, responsible for the execution of Novell's strategy across the Americas. Wolfe, who brings nearly three decades of software, technology and consulting leadership experience to the role, most recently held the position of vice president and general manager of Novell's East region in the United States. He will play a key role in Novell's transition to a greater focus on customers and partners in implementing the company's go-to-market strategy.

One year after releasing version 9 Norwegian software developers Opera have now officially opened the public test phase for version 9.5 of the Opera browser. The Linux version integrates Qt4.

Deviceimage by Firma Waxar backs up hard disks and partitions on backup media or across a network. The software launches from a bootable Linux CD.

Back at the Kernel Summit in September Andi Kleen announced that he would no longer be maintaining the i386 and x86_64 branches if they were merged in the new x86 branch. A new patch shows that Kleen has kept his promise.

Microsoft cooperates with yet another Linux distributor. Turbolinux has concluded a contract with the Redmonder software giant.

The update for the Mozilla Firefox browser to version 2.0.0.8 does not remove all of the vulnerabilities disclosed in the changelog, and the update introduces some new bugs.

Now that Microsoft has stated that it is prepared to give competitors access to technical documentation in a case heard by the EU Commission, the Samba project is considering purchasing a license.

Version 2.0.2 of the GnuTLS security library does without the TLS authorization extension due to threats of patent claims.