After being in development for a number of months and being challenged by a few delays, Mesa 7.5 was officially released last night. What's most significant about this milestone is that it's the first release to include the Gallium3D architecture.

Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.

We just released AbiWord 2.7.3. The most visible addition to this release is the return of our Maemo support.

With three months having passed since the release of ALSA 1.0.19, it is now time for an update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. ALSA 1.0.20 was announced this morning and it brings forth a slew of bug-fixes and other audio driver updates for Linux.

The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released. We have been able to fix several issues during the past few weeks.

KDE 4.2.2 has been released and is available for Kubuntu.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Cano", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.2), another bugfix and maintenance update to KDE 4.2.

There are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I've rounded up 25 of the most notable here.