The pending release of Ubuntu 8.10 was announced by Steve Langasek last night. The Ubuntu team is confident the latest candidate, codenamed Intrepid Ibex, is stable enough to be used without risk.

Groupware vendor Open-Xchange and Linux distributor Univention have exhibited a product based on their cooperative effort at the SYSTEMS 2008 trade fair in Munich: the combined Open-Xchange and Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 2.1.

In the closing speech of the Linux Kongress in Hamburg, Intel's CTO Dirk Hohndel appealed to the developer community to orientate themselves more strongly on the needs of users.

For quite a while Ubuntu had been including example-content packages with its releases that contained the same content: some audio and video data to test the playback, including a video of Nelson Mandela.

The upcoming Ubuntu 8.10, alias Intrepid Ibex, is now in beta.

To improve communication with developers of Ubuntu delivered packages, distributor Canonical has, as a first measure, created the Upstream Report; a real-time website with a list of 100 projects with the most open bugs.

A new product, Iron, is a viable alternative for those reluctant to reveal their personal data when using Google's Chrome browser. The Iron browser is based on Chrome's source code.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's keynote address at the Linux Plumbers Convention 2008 was officially about the Linux Ecosystem, but started as a direct attack on Ubuntu developer Canonical. He claims that the company contributes next to nothing to kernel development.

The dispute over the display of the EULA in the new Firefox has been settled.