Today's Highlights: LibreOffice 4.0.4, OpenMandriva VMs, and GNOME Music

There were several interesting items in the news feeds today so let's just cover them all in today's highlights. LibreOffice 4.0.4 update was released and OpenMandriva announced the availability of virtual machine images. And, last but not least, GNOME Music continues to make progress.

LibreOffice 4.0.4 Released

Today The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.4, another minor version update to the milestone 4.0 release. The announcement said, "LibreOffice 4.0.4 features many improvements in the area of interoperability with proprietary document formats. [It] solves a number of bugs and regressions over the previous release, thanks to the work of QA volunteers."

A lot of interesting bugs appear to have been addressed this release. Just a few are:

• * fix make animations inside SmartArt work

• * Autosave causes Macro change not to be stored on save

• * Firefox plugin not recognized in LibO 3.6 (regression)

• * LibreOffice crash when opening a non-ascii named file in XML Source

•  * Command line conversion to HTML fails + crash

• * a lot more importing and exporting issues from/to proprietary formats

Get yours at the usual place.

OpenMandriva Virtual Machines

The OpenMandriva Gang today announced the immediate availability of OpenMandriva Alpha Virtual Machine images. They can be imported into VirtualBox for your testing pleasure. English is default in these. The rest is for you to discover. "Have fun!"

GNOME Music Enters Phase Two

The geekiest ogre alive and his team continue to make progress on their new desktop music browser player for GNOME. They want it to play and share music and audiobooks to and from about anywhere you can browse. It's been in development since at least March and Monday said ogre said "we triumphed over phase of one [and] phase 2 is shaping up nicely." It's been playing and browsing music for a while, but now it has different browsing views (e.g., Artist or Song) and repeat & shuffle. See Seif Lotfy's post for more pictures and info.