Project Renaissance of OpenOffice.org opened up proposals for "Access Functionality" design changes for its office suite on April 20, 2009. The Impress presentation application was chosen as the Guinea pig. Deadline for submissions is just around the corner: May 4, 2009.

At CeBIT 2009, Linux New Media AG presented its annual awards for outstanding contributions to Linux and Open Source. The OpenStreetMap project took two of the six Linux New Media Awards.

Graphics can facilitate research into chemical compounds. The chemistry software, Avogadro, has no trouble handling the third dimension and has an intuitive interface that offers more than its share of functionality.

When Jeff Mahoney sent in a bunch of patches for reiserfs, he assumed that the filesystem would be frozen in maintenance mode from that point on. Things turned out differently.

Canonical has released its next Ubuntu offering in its typical half-year cycle. Fresh software and a faster startup characterize the new distro.

Debian developer Robert Millan is offering an alternative kernel for Debian's Lenny free Linux distro. Unlike the standard Lenny kernel, it contains no proprietary firmware.

Following the news of Oracle's purchase of Sun, we hear a lot about MySQL, OpenOffice and VirtualBox. But Btrfs vs. ZFS is yet another highlight of the takeover.

Florian Effenberger is co-lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project. Our sister publication Linux-Community asked him how the deal between Sun and Oracle would affect OpenOffice.