OpenThinClient, a Linux-based thinclient solution is available in version 0.4.5. The numerous enhancements to the open source suite include support for touchscreens.

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.

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.

Even though Ubuntu 9.10 is officially completed, developers managed to slip in the new beta version of Apache CouchDB that stores addresses, notes and bookmarks.

About-information from developer profiles, desktop searches in online forums, an interface library and update notification of web page content bring the concept of a social desktop a step closer to reality.

Akonadi is the magic word for data storage for the KDE 4 desktop. Unfortunately none of the KDE 4 apps really use it. The KDE address book, KAddressBook, should become the first to do so.

German company Freecom has announced, by its own reckoning, the first external USB 3.0 hard drive.