The Ubuntu community has a lot to celebrate this month: on October 16, 2004 the German ubuntuusers.de went online for the first time and October 20 of the same year saw the release of Ubuntu 4.10, alias Warty Warthog.

The free UNIX derivative OpenBSD is now available in version 4.6. Among other enhancements, developers extended the list of supported hardware.

Banshee is an audio video player for Gnome. The latest version 1.5.1 of the Mono program is regarded as stable and brings numerous new features.

The Renaissance UI improvement project for OpenOffice has rendered a click chart in Impress based on usage feedback data.

The Couturier Mono program merges multiple PDFs into a single file. It follows the old UNIX policy: one program for one task.

While the European Linux scene has been busy with KDE and Qt, a relatively unnoticed but important gathering occurred in the U.S. to determine the future of the GNOME desktop: the GNOME Boston Summit 2009.

The first openSUSE 11.2 release candidate is ready for download. RC2 is planned for the end of October with a final version expected November 12.

Genuine Amarok fans are still reminiscing about the good old version 1.4, code-named Fast Forward. The new Amarok 2.2.1 should bring back memories.