Super OS 10.10, a modified version of Ubuntu has been released today and with it, the Super OS repository I was telling you about a while back has also been updated to support Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

IBM is working intensively on their free office suite called Lotus Symphony. The current stable version (which we reviewed HERE) is based on an obsolete OpenOffice.org 1 code, but the forthcoming version 3 will use the up to date code of OpenOffice.org 3. Recently, IBM has released the second beta of the new Lotus Symphony 3.

Not so long ago, IBM teamed up with Canonical to create an application which contains an office suite featuring word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications based on IBM Lotus Symphony, an e-mail client that is based on IBM Lotus Notes, the social networking and collaboration cloud-based tools provided by LotusLive.com and the underlying Ubuntu operating system. Alternatively, companies can opt to use the cloud-based LotusLive iNotes application instead of IBM Lotus Notes.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical CEO, said that:

"Canonical is proud to partner with IBM to help open up the American corporate desktop through Ubuntu. [...] IBM's smart client package running on Ubuntu will allow U.S. organizations the financial freedom to redistribute the costs of expensive software licenses into IT projects that will innovate and drive critical growth."

[via softpedia]

Because of this, I decided to test the IBM office suite called Lotus Symphony. From what I've understood, Symphony is available in Ubuntu Jaunty repositories, but I couldn't find it in Karmic so I downloaded a copy (comes in Ubuntu .deb package) from the IBM website. You can, however, search for in in Synaptic Package Manager if you use Jaunty or older Ubuntu versions.