Summary: A summary of events that occurred in the past two weeks for those who may have missed it.

Aurora Enters Beta Testing

The next version of Warp Server, code-named Aurora went into formal beta testing last week with copies shipped to applicants worldwide. This first beta is expected to last until about December 18^th (the software is set to expire on that date), we do not yet know if IBM plans additional test stages after this date. Among the more anticipated features of Aurora are the new Journaling Filesystem taken from AIX and Symetric Multiprocessing (to handle more than one CPU). OS/2 e-Zine! will have a full report on Aurora beta in our December 1^st issue, including performance results on the new filesystem.

Star Office 5.0 released, free for personal/non-commercial use

Happened on: Friday, November 13^th
Where:Star Division web site

Unlucky for some, but not for OS/2 users. On Friday 13^th, Star Division released the latest version of their office suite, Star Office 5.0 for OS/2. Not just released it, but released it for free. Free as long as you use it for personal or on-commercial use. As of now, you can head to Star Division's web site and register to download the suite, as long as you can stand grabbing about 75 megabytes of data, of course. At the moment the suite is packaged as one file, so you might want to make sure you're downloading it with a client that is capable of resuming an aborted transfer.

Included in this new version of the suite are the usual productivity tools (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics and database), but also a personal information manager, e-mail client, newsgroup reader, web browser, drawing program with 3D and OpenGL support, a primitive paint program, plus quite a lot of other goodies.

To learn more about Star Office, read our First Looks at the German beta of the suite published one month ago. OS/2 e-Zine! will have an extensive report of the entire suite early in the future.