LibreOffice 7.5 Released

The Document Foundation has announced (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/) the general availability of LibreOffice 7.5 Community edition for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

This latest version of the popular free and open source office suite offers many new features and improvements, including:

• Major improvements in dark mode support
• Better bookmark handling
• Improved PDF export
• Data tables now supported in charts
• Customizable table styles

A complete description of the new features is available in the Release Notes (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.5), and the release can be downloaded now from LibreOffice.org (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/).

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux Now Available on Oracle Cloud

Red Hat and Oracle recently announced (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230131005412/en/Red-Hat-and-Oracle-Expand-Collaboration-to-Bring-Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux-to-Oracle-Cloud-Infrastructure) a new collaboration making Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available through the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Additionally (https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/red-hat-enterprise-linux-supported-oci), Oracle says, "OCI is now a member of Red Hat's Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program and can be found in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Ecosystem catalog."

This means that "starting today, customers can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI and receive full support for these certified configurations from both Red Hat and Oracle," says Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, OCI.

The unlikely pairing, says Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (https://opensourcewatch.beehiiv.com/p/can-now-get-red-hat-enterprise-linux-oracle-cloud), "is something like Tesla partnering with GM to sell Tesla Model S electric cars at GM dealerships. Unbelievable!"

Nonetheless, the collaboration means customers have more choice of operating systems to run on OCI. For example, says Oracle, "you can now run the latest version of RHEL 7, 8, and 9 on OCI's most popular, current generation of virtual machine (VM) shapes."

Wine 8.0 Released

The Wine team has announced the stable release of Wine 8.0 – a Windows compatibility layer for Unix-based systems, including Linux, macOS, and BSD.

According to the announcement (https://www.winehq.org/announce/8.0), this release represents a year of development effort and more than 8,600 individual changes. It contains many improvements, with "the main achievement" being the completed conversion to portable executable (PE) format.

"After four years of work, the PE conversion is finally complete: All modules can be built in PE format," the announcement says. "This is an important milestone on the road to supporting various features such as copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers, x86 applications on ARM, etc."

Wine 8.0 is available for download from the Wine website (https://www.winehq.org/).