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LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 15, 2005The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)It has often been said that free software developers are a self-interested bunch. They will work on programs which are interesting to them personally, while avoiding projects which they may never use. That is why we have several complex window managers but little in the way of free payroll systems.If this saying is true, one might well wonder: why has it taken the community so long to develop a truly capable personal finance manager? Almost every developer will have a checking account of some variety, bills to pay, taxes to deal with, etc. Tracking accounts in paper registers is tedious and error prone - and nearly impossible once a few complications (such as, say, a spouse whose attention to detail in these matters is sporadic at best, not that your editor would know about such things, honest) are thrown in. Keeping track of one's finances is clearly a job for a computer. Be that as it may, this is an area which has not drawn much attention from the development community. There has long been little choice for those wanting a free finance manager, and the available applications have lagged behind the proprietary offerings. Perhaps all those desktop hackers are simply pretending not to notice as their spouses balance their checkbooks with Quicken. That said, the situation is not all bad. Your editor has managed his eternally frightening finances with free software for some years. In more recent times, the number of available packages with a minimum of useful functionality has grown. So it's time for your editor to put together a review of what's available. Personal finance managers are complex applications; as a result, a comprehensive review will be long. This review will be done in two parts; this part looks at basic account functionality, while the next will cover more advanced features. There are a number of projects out there, but this review will concentrate on three of them. Many of the others have not advanced beyond a simple list of transactions, and many of them have seen no development for years. There are also a few proprietary alternatives available for Linux, but they will not be reviewed here. This review looks at:
First impressionsFirst impressions matter, especially when one is dealing with one's money. So Grisbi's initial screen - essentially a large, empty, gray box with a small menu bar on top - can be a bit disconcerting. A personal finance manager should be designed to work well for people who are not particularly familiar with computers, so it would be polite, when starting from the beginning, to lead the user through some sort of initial setup. Or, at least, give a pointer in that direction. KMyMoney starts in the usual manner for KDE applications - slowly, and with a lot of strange stuff written to the standard output. Once you get past that, a splash screen comes up, followed by a window with a place to click to go through a set of setup screens. It asks for a bunch of personal information, the purpose of which is not entirely clear. Next, the user gets to pick a "base currency," with the Afghani being the rather unhelpful default. Almost every imaginable currency is available, from the Mongolian Tugrik to "Gold." After picking from a directory of account templates (they could have set a default from the currency the user just chose, but don't), the user lands in the main KMyMoney2 screen. GnuCash throws up a "tip of the day," immediately overlaid by a little window giving an opportunity to create accounts from scratch or import a QIF file. The former option yields a "druid" which enables a choice of currency and presents a set of common accounts to create. GnuCash arguably has the most capable and friendly startup mechanism, but it must be said that its continued use of GTK1 shows. It simply is not as pretty as other GNOME applications, large pulldown menus (currency choice, for example) cannot be navigated with the scroll wheel, and it feels generally older.
Account creationOne way or another, users will have to create accounts in their shiny new finance manager. So each application provides an account creation screen. We'll get into those shortly, but, first, it's worth looking at the types of accounts which are supported by each application.
GnuCash takes a "one big window" approach to account creation - everything
one may wish to add is to be found there. Some of the fields are obvious,
others less so. "Commodity" is, for most accounts, the currency in which
What the GnuCash account creation window lacks is any way of creating accounts (such as mortgages) involving regular, complicated payments. That capability does exist, but it is to be found deeply under the "actions" menu in the main window. The "Mortgage/Loan Druid" is highly capable, though with some strange defaults (interest rate of 0.001%, for example). It understands things like escrow accounts and mortgage insurance, and can set up everything which is needed to track the loan. It gives every impression of being a feature which was bolted on relatively late in the game, however.
KMyMoney implements hierarchical accounts, but there is no way, in the account creation process, to specify where in the hierarchy an account should be created. Accounts can be moved later, however.
Creating an account with Grisbi starts with selecting the account type.
Then the main application window is taken over by a form where the relevant
information can be filled in. Grisbi, like KMyMoney, keeps track of
Grisbi accounts have a currency associated with them; your editor was somewhat surprised to see that the Euro was the only option provided. As much as your editor would have rather had all of his accounts in Euro over the last few years, that is not the case. Currencies, as it turns out, are one of the stranger corners of the Grisbi interface. It is possible to change the list of "known currencies" under the Edit->Preferences menu. Clicking on the "Add" button yields the usual lengthy list of currencies, sorted in a way seemingly designed to force both North Americans and Europeans to scroll for a long time before finding anything useful. Once the currency has been "added," it is available for use in new accounts. But this dialog is not available until at least one account has been created. So those of us unlucky enough to have our accounts in $US must first create a throwaway Euro account before adding our native currency (which Grisbi clearly knows about) to the "known currencies" list. Grisbi has no notion of hierarchical accounts, and no "druids" for the addition of more complicated accounts.
Entering transactionsPersonal finance applications offer no end of features and capabilities to users. What most of those users will spend their time actually doing, however, is entering transactions into the program. It would thus make sense for those working on this kind of software to focus a great deal of effort toward making this task quick, easy, and relatively easy to get right.
GnuCash is the clear winner in this area. The register window has all of
the information required, and is highly configurable. Transactions can be
entered quickly, with no need to use the mouse once the process is
GnuCash allows the date to be changed with the + and - keys (= works in place of +, saving wear on the little finger). A + in the number field will generate the next check number. This number is calculated from whatever was entered last, rather than from the largest number ever seen; this feature is much appreciated in households where more than one checkbook is in use for the same account. Unfortunately, there is no way for GnuCash to help effect any control over what the spouse does with that other checkbook.
The KMyMoney register, instead, is harder to work with. Starting a new
transaction requires an action with the mouse. Thereafter, everything can
be done with the keyboard, but more keystrokes are required. When GnuCash
proposes an expansion for a payee, a single tab is sufficient to accept it,
KMyMoney can also guess check numbers (again, after an option has been explicitly turned on), but it is a simple "biggest yet" calculation with no attention to the numbers the user is entering at the time. The check number cannot be incremented or decremented with any keys that your editor was able to find. KMyMoney will warn the user if a transaction with a duplicate number is about to be entered; GnuCash does not perform that check. The date can be adjusted using the up and down arrows, but something inspired the KMyMoney developers to have the arrow keys adjust the year of the transaction by default. Even your editor does not normally get quite that far behind in his checkbook maintenance; it should not be necessary to hit two right-arrows to be able to change the day of the month. KMyMoney requires the user to choose between five different types of transaction to enter: checks, deposits, transfers, withdrawals, and "ATM." GnuCash has done away with that distinction; everything is a transfer. Things are simpler that way; there should be no need to categorize transactions for the application in this manner. While KMyMoney is, in many ways, a very nice application, the slower transaction entry process would, on its own, be enough to disqualify it as far as your editor is concerned. Fortunately, none of the issues mentioned here should be particularly hard to fix.
In many ways, Grisbi almost gets transaction entry right. It is possible
to get through most of the form by tabbing, payees are expanded and
previous information substituted, and check numbers are guessed based on
what was entered previously. Your editor had some difficulty at the
beginning, where Grisbi was convinced that transactions were being entered
Dates can be adjusted with + and -. Unlike GnuCash (and a number of other programs), Grisbi does not accept = as a substitute for +. Each Grisbi transaction always starts with the current date; it would be more useful to use the date of the previous transaction, as GnuCash and KMyMoney do. But the truly obnoxious feature is that Grisbi assumes that all transactions are done with a credit card (for a checking account, even), and telling it that a check is involved requires using the mouse. That slows down the entire process. GnuCash is also able to work with banks supporting the (German) Home Banking Computer Information (HBCI) protocol, but your editor, lacking bank accounts in Germany, was unable to test this feature. There is much to be said for not typing in transactions at all. Quite a few banks will make transaction information available via the OFX/QFX file format, and all three programs reviewed here are able to import that format. GnuCash sorts imported transactions into three piles - those which it cannot import at all, those which need to manually have transfer accounts (categories) set, and those for which it was able to guess categories itself. The category assignment process is a bit cumbersome (it would be nicer if the same interface was used here as in the register) but effective. The automatic assignments appear error prone, so one needs to glance them over before finishing the task. Grisbi will simply import the whole set of transactions into the indicated account with no category information at all; the user must go in afterward and fix things up one by one. Unfortunately, your editor was unable to build OFX support for KMyMoney.
ReconciliationThe other common time-consuming task performed with personal finance managers is account reconciliation, otherwise known as the process of figuring out why the bank thinks you have less money than you thought you had. The reconciliation process tends to be tedious, with occasional unpleasant surprises. A finance manager can do nothing about the financial pain involved in reconciliation, but it should at least make the process as quick and straightforward as possible.
The GnuCash reconciliation process starts with a request for a statement
date and ending balance. GnuCash attempts to come up with a default date,
The Grisbi reconciliation option is hard to find - it is not anywhere in
the menubar. Instead, one must go to the "transactions" window, then
Conclusion to Part IWith the features described above, any of these three programs can be used to keep track of a set of bank accounts. Personal finance programs can offer much more, however. The second part of this article will cover some of the other capabilities expected of a contemporary finance application, including:
If space and time allow, the second part may also include a look at the business features offered by GnuCash. Or that part may have to wait for the Exceedingly Grumpy Editor's Guide to Small Business Accounting Packages. Your editor's final comment is this: for many years, there was only one free personal finance application of any note: GnuCash. It is now interesting to see there are three viable programs out there. The situation has changed significantly - for the better - over the past year. Come back for the second part (to be published, probably, near the beginning of October) to complete the tour of what these programs can do, and a final recommendation from the editor. [Part 2 is now available]
Mercurial: an alternative to gitOne of the more visible outcomes of the BitKeeper fiasco earlier this year was the development of git to replace the use of BitKeeper for kernel development. A less prominent, but equally capable alternative began development at roughly the same time. Matt Mackall started work on Mercurial just a few days after git and since that time it has made great strides as a distributed source code management system. It has matured to the point where at least one large project, the virtual machine monitor Xen, is using it to manage their code.Mercurial, like BitKeeper, git and others is targeted at projects where the developers are spread out geographically and need to be able to perform source code management functions without the bottleneck of a central repository. Matt adopted the design goals that Linus used for git (speed, distributed operation, and trustability) and added the additional constraints that it should be CPU, storage, and bandwidth efficient. Mercurial is written in Python, with some C extensions for CPU intensive pieces and is fairly small, weighing in around 7500 lines of code. Disk based storage of Mercurial revisions is done using delta compressed revision logs (revlogs) that are stored with disk access optimization in mind. The revlogs are stored in a directory structure that mirrors the structure of the project and filesystems are generally optimized for this kind of access. Over time, fragmentation of revlogs will occur, but a tar or copy of the directory will have the side effect of defragmentation. Other SCMs that use filenames based on the SHA1 hash of the contents (git for example) tend to require more disk seeking because file locality is a function of the hash rather than the filename. Because the revlogs are smaller than keeping each individual revision of a file as a separate object, Mercurial uses less bandwidth when syncing repositories as well. A single command, called 'hg' after the chemical symbol for mercury, is the command line interface to Mercurial and provides a consistent set of switches used for various source code management tasks. Users of CVS or subversion will find it immediately familiar to type commands like 'hg commit' or 'hg update'. Also, there is the 'hg help' command which gives a quick overview of the commands available and a summary line for each of the individual commands. The framework that Mercurial provides will be familiar to anyone who has used a distributed SCM. The push/pull style of development where tree maintainers pull changes from contributor's feature branches and merge them into their current working tree is the model best supported by Mercurial. Both HTTP and SSH are supported for network syncing and the hg command itself can be run as a server to export a repository for pulling via hg and for browsing via the web. Various extensions and other tools have been created for Mercurial, or, in some cases, ported from git. Visualization tools for examining repositories are available as well as conversion utilities to convert repositories from other SCM systems. Chris Mason's Mercurial Queues extension adds patch management features, similar to quilt, to hg. Interoperability with git is clearly a feature desired by Matt and the other developers. Matt's intent with Mercurial was to create a tool that he could use for kernel development and since the various official kernel trees are using git repositories, tools to extract information from git and into Mercurial have been created. There is a repository that tracks Linus' git repository for the 2.6 kernel and there are plans to add a git export feature to Mercurial. Mercurial has an active development community, a wiki with a great deal of information for new users, and a very responsive mailing list. It is a fast, scalable, easy to use, and generally well thought out system that is being used for kernel and other development. It currently lacks a few features that developers might want (a way to compare repositories for example), but the pace of development has been rapid and these holes are likely to be filled quickly. For anyone who is thinking about using a distributed SCM, Mercurial is definitely worth a look.
Security Brief items Firefox buffer overflow and full disclosureTom Ferris announced a potentially exploitable buffer overflow in Firefox this week and the discussion surrounding the flaw has focused on the nature of the announcement more than the bug itself. Advocates of full disclosure and those opposed to it have clashed on various internet sites.The bug is in the handling of international domain names (IDN) and the proof of concept released by Ferris is a specially crafted URL that will cause Firefox 1.0.6 and earlier to crash. Unlike other similar bugs, the user does not need to actually follow the link, just parsing the URL in the page will cause Firefox to crash. It is not yet known whether a malicious person can exploit this to execute arbitrary code on the host but Ferris claims that it can be done in his bug report. A workaround that disables IDN parsing was quickly released by the Mozilla team, and both Red Hat and Fedora released updates to fix the buffer overflow. Complaints have been heard about the amount of time Ferris gave to the Mozilla team to fix the problem before he announced the flaw on the full-disclosure mailing list. His report states that he reported the problem on September 4, but the entry in bugzilla was made on September 6. He disclosed the problem on September 8 before a fix was available and many people find that to be irresponsible. Full disclosure is a contentious issue and many people argue that security flaws should be reported to the author of the software, and that they should be given a 'reasonable' amount of time to investigate and fix the problem before it is announced to the world. The presumption is that the delay reduces or eliminates the possibility of an exploit being crafted while the program is vulnerable. The proponents of disclosure point out that it is quite possible that other people, possibly having bad intentions, know about the flaw already and are working on exploits or have already deployed them. Even if there is no known exploit 'in the wild', security conscious users may wish to stop using the affected program until it can be fixed, and without disclosure they do not have the information necessary to take that step. An additional complication arises because Firefox has been touted as a more secure alternative to Internet Explorer and many less than technically savvy people have installed it. These users do not tend to frequent LWN or other sites that report on security issues and, unfortunately, are likely to ignore the problem even if they do find out about it. This problem is not unique to Firefox, of course, nor to free software in general, but as free software extends its reach, it is a problem that needs to be addressed. A widespread exploit in a free software package, even if the vulnerability has already been fixed, will provide the competition with ample opportunities to suggest that all free software is insecure.
New vulnerabilities common-lisp-controller: design error
mozilla: buffer overflow
mysql: buffer overflow
tdiary: cross-site request forgery
util-linux: unintentional grant of privileges by umount
xorg-x11: heap overflow
Updated vulnerabilities a2ps: input validation error
apache information disclosure if modssl=yes
httpd: off-by-one overflow and cross-site scripting
awstats: command injection vulnerability
bzip2: race condition and infinite loop
cpio: directory traversal
CUPS: multiple vulnerabilities
cvs: insecure temp file
cyrus-imapd: buffer overflows
dhcpcd: denial of service
elm: buffer overflow
emacs21: format string vulnerability in "movemail"
enscript: arbitrary code execution
ethereal: dissector vulnerabilities
evolution: format string issues
Foomatic: Arbitrary command execution in foomatic-rip
gaim: buffer overflow
gdb: multiple vulnerabilities
gtk-pixbuf, gtk2: denial of service
gedit: format string vulnerability
gettext: Insecure temporary file handling
ghostscript: symlink vulnerabilities
glibc: tempfile vulnerability in catchsegv script
grip: buffer overflow
groff: insecure temporary directory
gzip: arbitrary command execution
htdig: cross site scripting
imap: buffer overflow in c-client
imlib2: buffer overflows
junkbuster: heap corruption and settings modification
kdebase: local root vulnerability
kdeedu: tempfile handling vulnerabilities
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
krb5: double-free flaw
libconvert-uulib-perl: arbitrary code execution
libdbi-perl: insecure temporary file
libgadu: memory alignment bug
libgd2: buffer overflows in PNG handling
libnet-ssleay-perl: weakened cryptographic operations
libpam-ldap: authentication bypass
libTIFF: buffer overflow
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
libxml2: multiple buffer overflows
libXpm: new buffer overflows
lm-sensors: insecure temp files
mantis: missing input sanitizing
mod_python: remote access vulnerability
Mozilla: frame injection spoofing
mplayer: heap overflow
mysql: low-impact security fix
ncpfs: multiple vulnerabilities
nfs-utils: arbitrary code execution
ntp: uses wrong gid
openssh: GSSAPI credential disclosure
OpenSSL: information leak
OpenSSL: denial of service vulnerabilities
openvpn: multiple vulnerabilities
pam_ldap: plain text authentication leak
pcre3: arbitrary code execution
perl: setuid vulnerabilities
perl: symlink vulnerability
php: arbitrary code execution
phpsysinfo: cross-site-scripting
postgresql: database initialization errors
Pound: buffer overflow
pstotext: remote execution of arbitrary code
rp-pppoe, pppoe: missing privilege dropping
ruby: arbitrary command execution
shorewall: rule bypass vulnerability
slocate: long path bug
smb4k: temporary file vulnerability
squid: DoS issues
SquirrelMail: several XSS vulnerabilities
sudo: race condition
sysreport: insecure temporary file
File overwrite vulnerability in tar and unzip
tcpdump: denial of service
tcpdump: multiple DoS issues
ucd-snmp: denial of service
vixie-cron: crontab allows any user to read another users crontabs
wget: file overwrites and arbitrary code execution
XChat 2.0.x SOCKS5 Vulnerability
xine-lib: buffer overflows
xine-ui - insecure temporary file creation
xorg-x11: integer overflows
xpdf: buffer overflow
xpdf: denial of service
zlib: buffer overflow
zlib: buffer overflow
Resources A fix for the Firefox IDN buffer overflow vulnerabilityMozilla.org has announced a simple workaround that closes the Firefox International Domain Name (IDN) security vulnerability. "On September 9, the Mozilla team released a configuration change which, as a temporary measure to work around this problem, disables IDN in the browser. IDN functionality will be restored in a future product update. The fix is either a manual configuration change or a small download which will make this configuration change for the user."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.13.1, which was released on September 9. It includes about ten patches, including fixes for two known security issues.The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.14-rc1 released by Linus on September 12. Here is the announcement from Linus. According to the revised development process, this release should contain all of the major patches that will go into 2.6.14; everything from now on should be a bug fix. So it looks like 2.6.14 will include the ipw2100 and ipw2200 wireless drivers, the HostAP system (which allows a Linux system with suitable hardware to function as a wireless access point), version 19 of the wireless extensions API, relayfs, a large InfiniBand update, an abstraction layer for ethernet PHY devices, four-level page table support for the ppc64 architecture, a big netfilter update, a DCCP implementation, the filesystems in user space patch, and v9fs. Other changes of note include the "sparsemem extreme" patches (preparing for hotplug memory), a NUMA-aware slab allocator, kzalloc(), a number of swap file improvements, some kernel build system improvements, some klist API changes, a serial ATA update (with a Marvell driver supporting PIO mode only), ongoing work to shrink the sk_buff structure, and some block subsystem enhancements.
The current -mm tree is 2.6.13-mm2. Recent changes to
-mm include some token-based swapping tweaks, some memory hotplug work, a
PCMCIA update, and the usual pile of fixes. The -mm tree has shrunk
considerably as patches have flowed into the mainline.
Your editor is out of town this week, so the Kernel Page will be a bit
thinner than usual. Everything should be back to normal next week.
Kernel development news
One of the big issues since the beginning has been the reiser4 metafiles feature, where every file can, itself, be treated as a directory with the file's attributes accessible as files in their own right. This feature raised many eyebrows just by looking weird and non-Unix-like, but the real issue was one of locking. The Linux virtual filesystem code is simply not set up to handle files as directories, so it is easy for a user to deadlock the system. Even Hans Reiser, a strong defender of the metafile feature, sees these deadlocks as an undesirable thing. So, while reiser4 has been in -mm for quite some time, the metafile feature has been disabled. There is no talk of turning it back on for a mainline merge; the real issue, instead, is whether the code should be allowed to remain at all. The consensus on the kernel side would appear to be that unused code does not belong in the kernel, so the metafile implementation is likely to be removed altogether. Someday, if the locking issues are resolved, it might yet return. Reiser4 has long had trouble working with 4K kernel stacks (see last week's Kernel Page). It would appear that this issue has now been resolved. Another complaint which has been raised has to do with a large number of debugging tests in the code itself; some developers see it as clutter and would like it to be removed. Here, however, Andrew Morton has sided with the reiser4 hackers and told them to leave the tests in. Reiser4 implements a couple of its own types for condition variables and linked lists. In both cases, it is thought that the in-kernel primitives could be used, rather than introducing new, redundant types. Those will probably have to be fixed before this code can be merged. The end result is that quite a bit of work remains to be done, meaning that it is unlikely to be ready before 2.6.14 closes to new features. Andrew has hinted that reiser4 might just slip in after the deadline, though:
But something like a brand new filesystem can go in pretty much any
time, as long as it compiles. Because it can't break anyone's
current setup.
The one issue which, interestingly, has not come up in the recent discussion has been the plugin architecture used by reiser4. To a number of developers, that sort of feature does not belong at the individual filesystem level; it should, instead, be made part of the VFS layer and made available to all filesystems. It would appear that a more moderate viewpoint, allowing the feature to be merged now with the idea of shifting it up into the VFS over time, has won out.
Some API changes for 2.6.14From what has been merged as of this writing, it appears that the 2.6.14 kernel will have few API changes which will break code. The changes which have been merged are mostly additions to the kernel API. Here is a quick discussion of a few of them.Some previously-discussed additions have finally made it to the mainline. One of those is kzalloc(), which allocates pre-zeroed memory. The two new variants of schedule_timeout() (which perform the setting of the task state) have also been merged. Speaking of task states, there is now a TASK_NONINTERACTIVE flag which is used to mark non-interactive sleeps. It should be set alongside TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE or TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE in cases where the fact that a process is sleeping does not provide any information on whether it is interactive or not. Its initial use is for processes waiting on pipe buffers; the idea is to keep batch tasks using pipes (such as kernel compiles) from looking more interactive than they are. Ingo Molnar's spinlock consolidation patch has gone in. This change should not affect much outside of the spinlock implementation, but it effects some major cleanups inside. There have been a number of simplifications and enhancements applied to the spinlock debugging code in particular. On the networking side, there is a new function for allocating sk_buff structures:
struct sk_buff *alloc_skb_fclone(unsigned int size,
unsigned int priority);
This function is meant to be used for SKBs which are expected to be cloned over their life cycle. It actually allocates a pair of sk_buff structures, with the idea that the second can be used at skb_clone() time without having to perform another memory allocation. Some reference count tricks are used to know when the whole assembly can be freed. The net_device structure has long contained a get_wireless_stats() method, used by wireless network drivers. A previous update of the wireless extensions API moved that method over to the iw_handler_def structure, but still continued to use the older form when present. Wireless extensions 19 maintains that compatibility a little longer, but now issues a warning when a driver uses the older API. The block layer API has seen some enhancements. There is a pair of new functions for creating I/O requests out of kernel buffers:
struct bio *bio_map_kern(request_queue_t *q, void *data, unsigned int len,
unsigned int gfp_mask);
struct request *blk_rq_map_kern(request_queue_t *q, int rw, void *kbuf,
unsigned int len, unsigned int gfp_mask)
The first will create a BIO structure out of the given kernel buffer (which should not be space obtained with vmalloc()). The second takes the additional step of queueing the request onto the given request queue. There is also a new blk_rq_map_user_iov() which is intended to work with the sg_iovec structures used in the SCSI layer. As of this writing, the discussion of removing devfs has started up again. That may not happen for 2.6.14, but it would be surprising, at this point, if the devfs API lasted into 2.6.15.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Page editor: Forrest Cook Distributions News and Editorials UserLinux: AutopsyUserLinux has been for all practical purposes dead for months now. The most immediate points of failure and a brief history were covered in last week's edition of LWN. There were no messages on the UserLinux list for over 30 days, ending when the thread titled "Anyone still alive" was started on September 3rd. UserLinux today is a non-issue and of little worth other than to learn from. I spent a notable amount of time on this project, writing the Mission Statement and other key components. Though UserLinux has failed, at least I gained some worthwhile experience. As with other failures, there are things to be learned from an autopsy after death. Points of failure for UserLinuxInability to deliver productThe immediate cause of death was an inability to deliver software. Today
there still is no real delivered product, over three months after the
release of Debian Sarge. A common claim was that UserLinux would have a
release out about a day after the Debian Sarge release and when
this didn't happen, confidence decreased for the project.
Untimely delay of Debian Sarge releaseThere was an artificial delay in the move towards the initial 1.0 release
and this had a notable, but non-fatal effect on the project. This was not
the ultimate cause of death, however, and delivering as promised a short
time after the Debian Sarge release would have livened the project back
up.
Lack of roadmapsThe "when it is ready" mantra is not sufficient for a lot of people. They
want an estimated schedule to look at and an idea of where things are
headed. Even if one is looking at third party development, or in the case
of UserLinux, there is an overlap of developers between the project and
Debian, confidence goes up if time estimates are made. People are used to
roadmaps and popular projects such as Mozilla Firefox (roadmap) and OpenOffice.org
(Roadmap) use
roadmaps as do many commercial software vendors. Yes, roadmaps are often inaccurate, but like weather forecasts,
people like an idea of what is going to happen in the future, even if
the forecast
is imperfect. It helps in planning, which is especially nice if
a migration is being considered. Given that an area of interest for
UserLinux was to encourage migration from Microsoft platforms,
roadmaps would have been very beneficial.
Late on departmentalizing into teamsThere was no serious effort to divide the project into teams until about 10 months after the project started. The lack of teams encouraged problems with naming and engineering focus. NamingNot much went right with the name. The name was a nonproductive distraction to the project that was never fixed.
Overall Team Lesson: Departmentalization should have been done earlier. Teams help keep people focused on where their strengths are. IT ProblemsMultiple downtimes for the list seriously hurt participation, as did an
obnoxious amount of spamming on the wiki that could have been handled much
better and more swiftly.
Group mentality baggageUsing KDE as a desktop environment alone or with GNOME was not in the best interest of the project for a variety of reasons, but some would propose that not including both desktop environments was unfair to the developers of both environments. Here is an example from the mailing list: I think we (ok, not especially me, but the people involved in UserLinux)
don't have the right to prefer one of the two big DE projects over the
other.
Wrong. The real injustice is to force feed extra software with the
associated bulk, security risk, and training because one group of people
thinks that if their software isn't force-fed needlessly on users there is
some injustice occurring. Of course, the real injustice is not looking out
for the best interest of the people using the software. Put the people
using the software first. The focus on a developers-first attitude was
particularly disturbing to me. More recent announcements like the
Subversion team recommending against use of Subversion for the Linux
Kernel development team show this is not a universal problem for all free software. Outside of KDE, UserLinux really didn't have many of these problems. My introduction to KDE, outside of running KDE occasionally as a desktop environment, was people on the list speaking out for KDE like in the example above.
Lessons:
Things done rightConceptThe concept of a non-commercial distribution with a limited set of software accompanied by certifications and ISV support is superb. The ultimate failure was in delivery. Some of the other ailments above could have possibly been solved over time. The idea was not the failure, it was the implementation. Specialized work teamsDepartmentalizing is a good idea even though it was accomplished too late and not sufficiently strong. Mark ProtectionThe Mark Protection Policy is an excellent idea. UserLinux software packages should have been named with separation from the UserLinux name earlier than they were, and the Policy itself should have been written better, but the idea is excellent. I strongly recommend Mark Protection for free software projects. Non-software organizations have learned the value of this from abuses many years ago, and it is about time free software did too. Mozilla's Firefox has protections in place today which is encouraging. Abuses like what has occurred with Debian's open use mark, as mentioned in the UserLinux Mark Protection Policy, need to be stopped. InternationalizationIt is most impressive how people from throughout the world will translate something of interest if given the chance to contribute. For example, the UserLinux Mission Statement is available in over 10 languages. In retrospect, this was the most delightful surprise from working on this project. Mission StatementThis helped people focus on the task at hand and helped explain the purpose of the project quickly to people who would hopefully consider migrating to UserLinux in the future. The road aheadUbuntu has largely grown into the simple, effective distribution UserLinux hoped to be. UserLinux is currently hoping for resurrection. This seems unlikely. The largest differences between UserLinux and Ubuntu are how they are funded and how the groups behind each distribution are designed to function. Beyond that, provided Ubuntu remains a streamlined distribution, remains free, includes a notable ISV support network, and provides a reasonable certification program. Ubuntu will largely deliver on the UserLinux Mission Statement: Provide businesses with freely available, high quality Linux operating
systems accompanied by certifications, service, and support options
designed to encourage productivity and security while reducing overall
costs.
Time will tell if Canonical will have commercial success with Ubuntu. They already have made successful inroads into the early adopter market. If they can cross the chasm into the early mainstream desktop market adoption, they should be quite successful delivering custom OEM install packages, certification services, and high-end customization and support services. Key areas for success will be getting large OEM PC manufacturers to create serious offerings with Ubuntu, establishing standards and tests for certifications, and getting a network of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) behind Ubuntu Linux. This will not be an easy task, but it is doable.
New Releases Ubuntu 5.10 ("Breezy") preview releasedThe Ubuntu 5.10 preview release is available; it can be had in both installable and live CD forms. Additions include GNOME 2.12, some new administrative tools, installation onto LVM volumes, the OCFS2 and GFS filesystems, the 2.6.12.5 kernel, further improved laptop support, and more. Once again, they will mail you a copy of the final release (when available) if you ask. For KDE users, the Kubuntu 5.10 preview is also available.
Announcing the Preview Release of edubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)Edubuntu joins the Ubuntu and Kubuntu releases with a Breezy Badger preview. "Edubuntu is being developed as a version of the Ubuntu operating system, which is suitable for classroom use. The aim is that an educator with limited technical knowledge and skill will be able to set up a computer lab, or establish an on-line learning environment, in an hour or less, and then administer that environment without having to become a fully-fledged Linux geek. This is our first step towards that goal."
Announcing Foresight Desktop Linux 0.9 (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop has an announcement for version 0.9 of the Foresight distribution. "Foresight takes another major step forward towards usability and functionality with the first release of the 0.9 series, and having the distinction of being the first distro to offer you Gnome 2.12! Featuring a refined look and improvements in just about every area, this is one hot tamale of a release!"
Vidalinux release VLOS 1.2.1 RC1 and 1.3.0 Alpha0 with gnome-2.12 (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop reports the latest releases from VLOS. There's a release candidate for VLOS 1.2.1 and the first pre-alpha version of the upcoming VLOS 1.3. VLOS 1.3 final is currently scheduled for release in January 2006.
Distribution News Debian adds security support for testingThe Debian Security Team has announced the beginning of "full security support" for the "testing" distribution. Testing users may want to join the new announcements list (or watch LWN); there is also a new apt repository for testing security updates. Some 13 updates to testing have already been released. Click below for the details.
Removing non-free documentation from Debian mainSome time ago the Debian developers decided to remove documentation from the main archive if it not meet Debian Free Software Guidelines. In order to release Sarge, this was postponed... until now. Click below to see the current plan to keep non-free documentation out of the main Etch archive.
The name of Ubuntu's Breezy+1With the Breezy Badger nearly ready for its stable release, it is now time to pick a name for next Ubuntu release. Click below for some information on the UbuntuBelowZero conference, and how Ubuntu 6.04 came to be known as The Dapper Drake.
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly NewsThe Debian Weekly News for September 13, 2005 is out. This week's edition covers the new layout for the bug tracking system, an article by Ian Murdock, the formation of the Debian UK Society, a calculation of the value of Debian, security support for the testing distribution, team maintenance of packages, and several other topics.
Fedora Weekly NewsThe Fedora Weekly News issue number 13 looks at the Firefox IDN buffer overflow security issue, a warning to Fedora.us FC3 APT users, meeting minutes for Fedora Marketing, Red Hat contributions, and several other topics.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of September 12, 2005 is out. Topics in this edition include major package updates for Apache, tips and tricks for tweaking kernel options, new developers, and more.
DistroWatch WeeklyThe DistroWatch Weekly for September 12, 2005 is out. "Last week was an exciting one - besides GNOME 2.12 and the first beta release of Firefox 1.5, four major Linux distributions have been sprinting towards the finishing line, with the brand new Slackware Linux 10.2 release now imminent and the other three following within the next few weeks. In the meanwhile, Debian has announced security support for its testing branch, a move that will likely be greeted with much enthusiasm among the Debian users. Also in this week's issue: Microsoft tries to recruit a well-known open source advocate, a brief look at Foresight Linux and a quick review of Linux+ DVD, a popular European Linux magazine."
Package updates Fedora updatesUpdates for Fedora Core 4: slib (use _datadir), umb-scheme (fix conflict with slib), psmisc (fix buffer overflow in fuser), glib2 (update to 2.6.6), gtk2 (new upstream version), file (upgrade to file-4.15), subversion (update to 1.2.3), util-linux (enable util-linux-2.12p-sfdisk-fgets.patch), e2fsprogs (new version 1.38 and bug fixes), selinux-policy-targeted (bug fixes), vte (various fixes), slib (various updates), xdelta (ported to glib-2), tvtime (update to 1.0.1), evolution-data-server (add patches), dhcp (bug fixes).Updates for Fedora Core 3: e2fsprogs (new version 1.38 and bug fixes), unzip (fix TOCTOU issue), vte (various fixes), xdelta (ported to glib-2).
Slackware updatesSlackware 10.2 is nearly ready, but there have been quite a few fixes and upgrades this week. Click below for this week's changelog entries.
Trustix Secure Linux TSL-2005-0046Trustix has bug fixes available for am-utils, apache-ant, devlabel, distcache, diffstat, dvd+rw-tools, enscript, initscripts, kernel, mrtg, net-tools and rpm.
Distribution reviews Review: aLinux 12.5 (Linux.com)Linux.com reviews aLinux v12.5. "It's been a long time since I've been this disappointed by a GNU/Linux distribution. The project's Web site set me up to believe that this was a professionally designed desktop operating environment, but it ended up being anything but. It was hard to install, hard to configure, didn't work properly on one of the test machines, and the default applications were poorly chosen. I wasn't prompted to set up a root password or any user accounts, no boot loader was installed, and networking was left unconfigured."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development (De)Compress Audio Files with FLACFLAC, the Free Lossless Audio CODEC, is an audio application that is used for compressing and de-compressing audio files. FLAC is being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation. FLAC is similar in functionality to shorten, another lossless audio compression utility. FLAC contrasts with popular lossy compression schemes such as Vorbis and MP3. The FLAC comparison document contains a lot of useful information on FLAC and other encoder/decoder systems.![[FLAC]](/images/ns/flac.png)
The FLAC software includes the flac command line utility, the metaflac command-line metadata editor, a library of reference encoders and decoders, and input plugins for music players. Some of the FLAC source code has been released under a variant of the BSD license, and the rest is licensed under the GPL. The FLAC format is open, as explained by the FLAC license document: "The FLAC and Ogg FLAC formats themselves, and their specifications, are fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance). They are free for commercial or noncommercial use." The FLAC features include:
The features documentation has an amusing take on FLAC's copy protection: "Another way to look at it is that since copy protection is futile, it really carries no information, so you might say FLAC already losslessly compresses all possible copy protection information down to zero bits!" Details on the inner workings of FLAC can be found in the project documentation. FLAC is used by a long list of hardware vendors, organizations and web sites. The software runs on a wide variety of platforms. The current release of FLAC is version 1.1.2, it was released last February. If you surf any of the numerous free (not to be confused with pirate) music sites, chances are you will need a copy of FLAC. You can download a copy here.
System Applications Database Software MySQL 4.0.26 has been releasedVersion 4.0.26 of the MySQL database is available, it features bug fixes.
MySQL 5.0.12-beta has been releasedVersion 5.0.12-beta of the MySQL database has been announced. "This is the eighth published Beta release in the 5.0 series. All attention will continue to be focused on fixing bugs and stabilizing 5.0 for later production release."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe September 11, 2005 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest new PostgreSQL database articles and events.
SchemaSpy 1.6.0 released (SourceForge)Version 1.6.0 of SchemaSpy, a database utility written in Java, has been announced. "SchemaSpy analyzes schema metadata, letting you click through the hierarchy of tables' parent/child relationships either graphically or through tables. It works with just about any RDBMS given an appropriate JDBC driver. SchemaSpy also identifies common schema anomalies." Changes include display of graphical relationships using Information Engineering (IE) notation, improved dot execution detection, and dot version information.
Libraries FreeImage 3.8.0 released (SourceForge)Version 3.8.0 of FreeImage, a library that supports several popular image formats, is available. "Release 3.8.0 brings new unicode functions, better support for 16- and 48-bit conversion, and improved internal code: the library has been updated with the new zlib (1.2.3) and libtiff (3.7.3) libraries. FreeImage is also distributed with a brand new VB6/VBA wrapper. Lastly, many bugs occuring with unusual image types have been fixed. "
liblo 0.22 announcedVersion 0.22 of Liblo, an Open Sound Control protocol library, is out with bug fixes, a new method, and more.
Lapack++ 2.4.0 released (SourceForge)Version 2.4.0 of Lapack++, a library for high performance linear algebra computations, is available. "In the current release, several problems with the LaIndex matrix index class have been fixed, including the renaming of ambiguous LaIndex methods. Additionally, the matrix assignments for matrices with non-unit stride has been fixed, and the documentation has been improved."
Security The Tor GUI competitionThe folks behind the Tor project have announced a contest to see who can design the best graphical interface for Tor. Judges for the contest include Bruce Schneier, Simson Garfinkel, and Edward Tufte. Interested people need to make their initial submission (in the form of sketches, at least) by the end of October. The one thing that is not clear is what the winners will actually get beyond the glory of victory. (LWN looked at Tor last June).
Web Site Development Campsite 2.3.1 ReleasedVersion 2.3.1 of Campsite, an open-source multilingual content management system, is available with numerous bug fixes and a couple of new features.
CL-WIKI 0.0.5 releasedVersion 0.0.5 of CL-WIKI, a Wiki engine for Common Lisp, is out. "This version features locking for CL-EMB, changes to configuration files, a new start script for CMUCL, new Wiki codes, and more."
Gallery 2.0 Released!Version 2.0 of Gallery, a web-based photo album application, has been released. "While Gallery 2 is a very feature complete photo management system, it still lacks a few of the features found in Gallery 1. However, Gallery 2's modular design will let us quickly catch up and provide you with everything that you need."
Magnolia 2.1 released (SourceForge)Version 2.1 of Magnolia has been released. "Magnolia is a free, open source, Java based, J2EE deployable Enterprise Content-Management System (CMS) supporting the JCR API (JSR-170). It has an easy to use WebBrowser Interface, a clear API and a useful custom tag library for easy templating in JSP and Servlets. Magnolia Organization has released the open source, JSR-170 based Magnolia 2.1, sporting a number of bug fixes and enhancements."
Midgard 1.7.1 releasedVersion 1.7.1 of the Midgard Open Source Content Management System is available. "Midgard's 1.7 branch is a major overhaul of the whole Content Management System. Besides the stable and mature Content Management features of first generation Midgard, it also ships a preview version of second generation Midgard capabilities, allowing developers to have a glimpse at the new day of Midgard2. 1.7.1 is a maintenance release and includes bug fixes and some new features."
Silva 1.3 releasedVersion 1.3 of Silva, a content management system, has been announced. This release adds a number of new features and some bug fixes.
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ardour 0.9beta30 releasedA new release of Ardour, a multi-track audio editing application, is out. The release status page says: "a metric ton of changes over 0.9beta29".
ReZound 0.12.1 beta releasedVersion 0.12.1 beta of ReZound, a graphical audio file editor, has been announced. "This release is mainly meant to address gcc4 issues and fix a few minor bugs."
Business Applications Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open Source Project Beta LaunchZimbra has launched an open-source collaboration suite. "Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology. Currently, this technology is available as a beta version. At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will insure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems."
Desktop Environments GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Quickies: Qt4 Tutorials, KDE 3.5 Alpha Review, Kontact Introduction (KDE.News)KDE.News presents a Quickies roundup of articles on various KDE applications. "The Qt 4 Resource Centre has tutorials for A Zoomable Picture Viewer and Spying on Signals. This KDE 3.5 Alpha review shows us some new features coming soon. Alternative KDE file manager Krusader found themselves new web hosting. Linux.com introduces us to Kontact. Real-time 3D strategy game Boson made a new release with extra smooth graphics and multiplayer support..."
Desktop Publishing Scribus 1.2.3 ReleasedVersion 1.2.3 of Scribus, a desktop publishing application, has been announced. "The 1.2.3 release is focused on minor enhancements, bugfixes and additional documentation."
wxPdfDocument 0.5 released (SourceForge)Version 0.5 of wxPdfDocument has been announced. "wxPdfDocument allows wxWidgets applications to generate PDF documents. The code is a port of FPDF - a free PHP class for generating PDF files - to C++ using the wxWidgets library. Several add-on PHP scripts found on the FPDF web site are incorporated into wxPdfDocument. Embedding of PNG, JPEG, GIF and WMF images is supported."
Fonts and Images Open Clip Art Library Release 0.17Release 0.17 of the Open Clip Art Library, a collection of images, is available. This release passes the 5000 image mark and includes a new Clip Art Browser, among other changes.
Games Bygfoot Football Manager 1.9.1 is released (SourceForge)Version 1.9.1 of Bygfoot Football (Soccer) Manager has been released. "This release fixes a couple of bugs and adds minor feature enhancements, such as Youth Academy, Sponsorship money and Memorable matches."
MetalMech 0.2.3 released (SourceForge)Version 0.2.3 of Metal Mech is out with bug fixes. "Metal Mech is a Web-based mass multiplayer game of battle between robots and space exploration. It is a game of strategy, economics, role-playing, and combat. Each player can handle their own war robot and battle against other players to be the Emperor of the Universe. Players battle against each other for resources, energy, money, buildings, and more."
Graphics Crystal Space New Pseudo-Stable Release (SourceForge)A new Pseudo-Stable Release of Crystal Space has been announced, it features bug fixes. "Crystal Space is a portable Open Source 3D engine which lots of features. It fully supports OpenGL and uses various OpenGL features like stencil shadows, vertex and fragment shaders (shaders through ARB extensions and CG), and others."
GUI Packages SPTK 3.0 announcedVersion 3.0 of SPTK, the Simply Powerful Toolkit, has been announced. "The new version, SPTK 3.0, is quite different from SPTK before 2.4. All the favorite classes CString, CStringList, CStringMap, etc.. are replaced with std::string, std::vector, std::map and relatives. So, if you are going to migrate your old SPTK applications to the new one, it's going to take you a while."
SwiXAT 0.4.5 released (SourceForge)Version 0.4.5 of SwiXAT, a Swing-based authoring tool for the quick and easy development of graphical UI Java applications, is available. "This new version adds the support for EventListeners tags for java.awt.event, java.beans and javax.swing.event; the support for JFileChooser's FileFilter was added; the optional TreeCellRenderer tag was added for JTrees. Finally, the user's guide has been updated with the documentation about the new features."
Mail Clients Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 Released (MozillaZine)Version 1.5 Beta 1 of Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client, has been announced. "This is the first beta release of the next major Thunderbird update and is aimed at testers, and extension/theme authors. The final release of Thunderbird 1.5, which will be widely promoted to end-users, is scheduled for later this year along with Firefox 1.5. "New features include an improved software update system, spell check as you type, phishing detection, podcasting, deleting attachments, reply and forward actions for mail filters, Kerberos authentication, auto save as draft, and many security enchancements.""
Medical Applications FreeMED 0.8.0 and REMITT 0.3 announced (LinuxMedNews)Version 0.8.0 of the FreeMED electronic medical record and practice management system has been announced, along with a new version of REMITT, an electronic billing package. Changes to FreeMed include multiple screen layouts and configurations, a new accounts receivable system, a claims manager for tracking payments from insurance companies, configurable patient notifications featuring compatibility with REMITT 0.3, advanced access control list support, a new fax system, and more.
Music Applications multimidicast 1.0 announcedVersion 1.0 of multimidicast has been announced. "I have released the first version of yet another MIDI over network/ethernet software. My version uses the Alsa sequencer interface to provide 20 ports for read/write access. Data is sent with UDP multicast datagrams so sending/receiving is subscription and configureless. As a bonus this software interoperates with a windows software called ipMIDI, so you can mix windows/linux MIDI setups."
swh-plugins 0.4.14 releasedRelease 0.4.14 of swh-plugins, a set of audio plugin effects, is available. It features gcc4 compatibility and bug fixes.
Office Suites OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 releasedVersion 1.1.5 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is out. "OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 introduces import support for documents, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format. The OpenDocument format is an XML based international office document standard approved by OASIS, the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. XML based, the OpenDocument format enables the free exchange of data between compliant software packages."
Science wxMaxima 0.6.2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.6.2 of wxMaxima has been announced. "wxMaxima is a cross-platform graphical front-end for the computer algebra system Maxima based on wxWidgets. It provides nice display of mathematical output and easy access to Maxima functions through menus and dialogs."
Web Browsers Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released (MozillaZine)MozillaZine reports that the first Firefox 1.5 beta is out. "New features include an improved software update system, faster Back and Forward navigation, a feature for clearing private browsing data, drag-and-drop reordering of browser tabs, a redesigned Options/Preferences window and better popup blocking. Web standards support is also improved, with support for Scalable Vector Graphics, JavaScript 1.6 and more CSS."
Developing Firefox Extensions with GNU/Linux (ars technica)Ryan Paul, Ian Smith-Heisters and Kris Kowal have written a guide on writing Firefox Extensions. "In this edition of Linux.Ars, Kris will teach you how to use command line build tools to construct a complete Firefox extension, I will teach you how to add context menu items to Nautilus using the Nautilus Actions extension, and Ian introduces an LDAP utility called Luma."
SeaMonkey 1.0 Alpha Release Candidates Available (MozillaZine)MozillaZine has announced the availability of Alpha release candidates for SeaMonkey, a web browser, e-mail and newsgroup client suite.
Word Processors AbiWord-2.3.6 Beta 3 Released (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org has the announcement for AbiWord-2.3.6 Beta 3. "The AbiWord team is happy to announce AbiWord v2.3.6 for your stress-testing pleasure. This release is virtually identical to what will become AbiWord 2.4, but still contains some bugs that we'd like to see squashed over the next few days."
Miscellaneous FRET version 0.0.5 Released (SourceForge)Version 0.0.5 of FRET, a command line tool for dentifying data structures and patterns in files, has been announced. "FRET, the file format analysis tool, has taken another step forward with the release of version 0.0.5. This bug-fix release has resolved some issues that were identified since the last release."
Joone 1.2.1 released (SourceForge)Version 1.2.1 of Joone, a neural net framework for creating, trainnig and testing artificial neural networks, is out. Changes include support for the Groovy language, a new logarithmic transformation capability, the ability to save data as XML, and bug fixes.
RoadMap 1.0.11 releasedVersion 1.0.11 of RoadMap, a car navigation system for Linux and the Pocket PC, is out. "This release includes a lot of bug fixes, and some major new features."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe September 13, 2005 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the latest Caml language articles.
Haskell Haskell Weekly NewsThe September 13, 2005 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is online with the latest Haskell news. Topics covered this week include several new releases, GHC 6.4.1 plans, and discussions about monads and functional programming.
Java Building J2EE Projects with Maven (O'ReillyNet)Vincent Massol works with J2EE applications under Maven on O'Reilly "Using the example of a Petstore app, Massol shows you how to generate J2EE artifacts (EJB JARs, WARs, EARs) with Maven. He is coauthor of Maven: A Developer's Notebook."
Lisp GNU CLISP 2.35 releasedVersion 2.35 of GNU CLISP has been announced. "Changes in this version are related to socket shutdown, character encoding and case, compiled files, streams and a new translation of user interface messages."
ContextL 0.1 releasedVersion 0.1 of ContextL, a Common Lisp CLOS extension for Context-oriented programming, is out. "This version eliminates a restriction on layered functions method naming, adds WITH-INACTIVE-LAYERS, and removes some unnecessary declarations."
PHP PHP 5.0.5 ReleasedVersion 5.0.5 of PHP has been released. "This version is a maintenance release, that contains numerous bug fixes, including security fixes to vulnerabilities found in the XMLRPC package. All users of PHP 5.0 are encouraged to upgrade to this version." See the Change Log for details.
Python Introducing IPython (NewsForge)Conrad Koziol introduces IPython, an enhanced Interactive Python shell, in a NewsForge article. "Python, an interpretive programming language that combines elegant code with a powerful object-oriented approach and many modules, has been around since the early 1990s. To make Python more productive, Fernando Perez in 2001 began working on IPython, an enhanced interactive Python shell with improvements such as history caching, profiles, object information, and session logging, as a replacement for the default interpreter."
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The September 13, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with the latest Python language articles.
Ruby Ruby Weekly NewsThe September 11th, 2005 edition of the Ruby Weekly News brings you the latest discussions from the ruby-talk mailing list and comp.lang.ruby newsgroup.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The September 14, 2005 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with the latest Tcl/Tk news and resources.
XML Automating Stylesheet Creation (O'Reilly)Bob DuCharme discusses automatic stylesheet creation on O'Reilly. "Since the early days of XSLT, many have asked whether it was possible to automate the creation of XSLT stylesheets. The general idea of filling out a form or dragging some icons around, then clicking a button and seeing a productive stylesheet generated from your input has always appealed to people. However, the problem of generating working XSLT syntax from the result of someone clicking on pull-down menus and radio buttons has not attracted many takers."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden (Groklaw)Groklaw presents an article by Fernanda Weiden that examines the scarcity of female software developers in the open-source software arena. "The gender issue in the Free Software community is a big paradox: we have a community of volunteers teaching the world how to develop technology in a different way, one willing to distribute equal opportunities through free access to the software, and at the same time a community in which more than 50% of the total world population doesn't participate."
Upgrading to Apache 2 (Linux.com)Linux.com has some advice for those who haven't yet gotten around to upgrading to apache2. "Apache 2 offers a number of new features and improvements over the Apache 1.3 series, but the upgrade can seem daunting to those who haven't had much (or any) experience with Apache 2. I recently had to go through an upgrade from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.0 on Debian Sarge, and it's not as difficult as you might think."
Trade Shows and Conferences Embedded Systems Conference Boston Opens TodayCMP Media has posted a press release announcing the first day of the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston. ""Just as celebrities and athletes are globally recognized, the Embedded Systems Conference celebrates the heroes in our community -- rock star engineers who every day, change the way we work, live and play through astounding technological advancements," said Paul Miller, vice president and group publisher of the CMP Media Electronics Group."
Gartner on open source: fair and insightful (NewsForge)NewsForge covers a talk by Gartner Research Vice President Mark Driver at the Gartner Application Development Summit. "He added a word of caution about Mono, however. Microsoft is happy to see Mono and even Java tools today because they protect the company from further charges of monopoly. Driver said it could crush Mono tomorrow with intellectual property warfare if they wanted to do so, but that Microsoft prefers them let them live for now. The killing blow will come from WinFX and the new Vista APIs. He is very pessimistic about Mono being able to maintain its current high degree of compatibility."
The SCO Problem SCO Releases 3Q Results (Groklaw)Groklaw covers the SCO third quarter financial results press release. "The second paragraph says it all: "Revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2005 was $9,353,000 as compared to $11,205,000 for the comparable quarter of the prior year. The decrease in revenue in the third quarter of fiscal year 2005 from the comparable quarter of the prior year was primarily due to continued competitive pressures on the Company's UNIX products and services and a decrease in SCOsource licensing revenue." Oh, and this section of the forward-looking statements disclaimer: "We wish to advise readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from historical results or those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, continued competitive pressure on its operating system products which could impact the profitability of the UNIX business, unforeseen legal costs related to our litigation, our inability to develop new products and services, and our inability to see our litigation through to its conclusion.""
Companies Novell: Vista will drive users to Linux (News.com)News.com covers comments by Novell CEO Jack Messman concerning cost of conversion to the next version of Windows. ""The cost of migrating to Windows XP to Vista will be higher than the cost of migrating to Linux and that will push migrations to Linux," Messman said. Novell says it is making real gains on the desktop in Europe currently and that many organizations are choosing its Linux Desktop product especially in vertical industries that require locked-down clients with limited functionality."
Galaxy remakes Sun's server strategy (News.com)News.com examines Sun's newly announced Galaxy server line, which run AMD Opteron processors. "Sun for years shunned the x86 servers in favor of machines running its own Solaris version of Unix and its own UltraSparc processors. But the server market growth has been with x86 systems running Windows and Linux, and Sun is working hard to make up lost time."
Sun extends olive branch to Red Hat (News.com)News.com reports that Sun Microsystems is talking with Red Hat about RHEL support on Sun's new Galaxy servers. "Sun is being more accommodating toward Linux again--specifically, to Red Hat, whose Enterprise Linux product dominates the Linux market. Sun extended its Red Hat support contract to the new Galaxy servers and invited Red Hat to share some of its spotlight, along with partners Oracle, MySQL and Advanced Micro Devices. "Stay tuned on the Red Hat-Sun relationship," Sun President Jonathan Schwartz said at the Galaxy launch event in New York. "We think there's ample opportunity to work together out there.""
Linux Adoption Gartner: Linux 'five years away from mainstream' use (silicon.com)Silicon.com looks at a Garner report concerning the mainstream use of Linux. "On the desktop, Linux is having a tougher time. Gartner claims the operating system is reaching the point where the costs of migration may exceed the cost benefits in a phase characterised by over-enthusiasm and unrealistic projections which lead to more failures than successes."
Interviews The Next 50 Years of Computer Security: An Interview with Alan Cox (O'ReillyNet)Edd Dumbill talks with Alan Cox, who will be speaking at O'Reilly's EuroOSCON. "Alan Cox is well known for his long-standing work on the Linux kernel, but at O'Reilly's EuroOSCON (October 17-20), he will speak about computer security. According to Alan, we're just at the beginning of a long journey into getting security right. Eager for directions and a glimpse of the future, O'Reilly Network interviewed him about his upcoming keynote."
PBS Launches NERDTVThe US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has created a weekly online TV interview show, known as NERDTV. "NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology. Guests like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy or Apple computer inventor Steve Wozniak are household names if your household is nerdy enough, but as historical figures and geniuses in their own right, they have plenty to say to ALL of us. NerdTV is distributed under a Creative Commons license so viewers can legally share the shows with their friends and even edit their own versions." Linus Torvalds will be featured on November 29.
Gates on Google: What, me worry? (News.com)News.com interviews Bill Gates. "Q:Looking at the open-source world, there's this movement away from selling licenses toward selling support. A lot of people are participating in that, and you have been skeptical. Why? Do you think that's fundamentally the wrong model? A:The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night. Should you take some of those extreme views, I think it's easy to say that's not right."
Resources BitTorrent for Linux (Linux.com)Linux.com has an introductory article about BitTorrent. "The BitTorrent protocol implements a hybrid client/server and P2P file transfer mechanism. BitTorrent efficiently distributes large amounts of static data, such as installation ISO images. It can replace protocols such as anonymous FTP, where client authentication is not required. Each BitTorrent client that downloads a file provides additional bandwidth for uploading the file, reducing the load on the initial source. In general BitTorrent downloads proceed more rapidly than FTP downloads."
Writing a Program to Control OpenOffice.org, Part 1 (Linux Journal)The Linux Journal has posted a tutorial on controlling OpenOffice.org remotely. "To accomplish this goal, we will build an application written in C++ that is able to connect to OpenOffice.org, open a spreadsheet and then update, print and close the document. The problems that must be solved in order to build the source code will allow beginners to understand the basic principles of this technology."
Linux In a Windows Network with SAMBA (Really Linux)Really Linux presents a tutorial on implementing SAMBA under Fedora Linux. "Integrating Fedora Linux into a Windows network is reasonable and easy as long as you use the SAMBA utilities. I share every main step necessary to implement such a SAMBA server within a Windows environment. Once integrated a Linux server looks and acts exactly like any other server on a Windows intranet. You will have the ability to drag and drop files, view server contents and directories using Windows File Manager, and even edit files on a Linux server from any Windows desktop."
Reviews Gnome 2.12: On the Road of Evolution (OS News)OS News reviews GNOME 2.12. "It's been a few years since I reviewed Gnome for the last time. Since then, Gnome has matured and made most things right -- except the spatial Nautilus that I personally don't like and the downplay of the Nautilus scripting/plugin engine. But all in all, Gnome is today more powerful, better integrated to the underlying system with DBUS and HAL, looks good, behaves as expected and, most of all, it's simple and clean. In my opinion, the Gnome Desktop is the best X11 desktop system today from the user's point of view when compared to the rest of the DE solutions."
Miscellaneous Mac and Linux users blacklisted from hurricane relief (The Inquirer)The Inquirer reports that FEMA is only allowing users of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to apply for hurricane relief funds. "The now very much criticised US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has stopped Mac and Linux victims of hurricane Katrina from applying for relief. The agency, which is already in hot water for its lack-lustre rescue efforts in New Orleans, has created a web-based service that only works for users of Windows and IE6." There is a work-around for Firefox users, involving the User Agent Switcher extension.
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements Open source developers visit Dutch governmentThe OSS Guru Group visited the Dutch government organization for ICT (ICTU) for their first meeting. "The aim of the OSS Guru Group is to create a sustainable relationship between the Open Source community and an ICTU-project that develops software for the government. The software currently under development entails a redesign of the GBA, i.e. the Population Registry. This software will be based on open source components, and will be deployed on a large scale by approximately 3 Ministries, 500 Municipalities and more than 5000 government agencies." (Thanks to Bart Knubben)
Commercial announcements DigiLore Releases SCORM 2004 Enhancements for the Open Source LMS, MoodleDigiLore, Inc. has announced a new version of Moodle. "DigiLore, Inc. the thought leader in Learning Lifecycle Management(TM) announced today it has released, to the open source community, enhancements to the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS). These developments render Moodle compliant with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative's SCORM 2004 standards."
FSMLabs Showcases Real-time Linux for AMD Dual-Core ProcessorsFSMLabs is demonstrating single-digit microsecond timing in their software while running on 64-bit dual core AMD Opteron processors. "RTLinux for AMD CPUs meets the hard real-time needs for high performance communications, dedicated networking and security systems, instrumentation and control, simulation, imaging, and other demanding embedded deployments."
Keane Wins $54 Million NWS ContractKeane, Inc. has been awarded a contract by the National Weather Service to upgrade the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS). "Keane will develop a vigorous, sustainable architecture and will integrate and maintain the software products developed at the various NWS labs to support AWIPS' real-time processing system. Utilizing advanced technologies, Keane will manage the AWIPS migration to an all-Linux environment built on Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 and support the migration of AWIPS to an open-standards, service-oriented architecture based on a Web services platform."
Novell Selects SugarCRM's Sugar Suite for New Market Start ProgramSugarCRM Inc. has announced a collaboration with Novell. "SugarCRM Inc. today announced a collaboration with Novell. its selection as one of the first open source application partners for Novell's(R) Market Start program, designed to make the low cost and easy back-office integration benefits of open source and open standards-based enterprise applications easily accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. SugarCRM's Sugar Suite is the first customer relationship management (CRM) software to be selected for the program, reflecting the application's status as the market's most successful commercial open source enterprise platform."
Panasonic Launches New Technology Center For Embedded LinuxPanasonic Digital Concepts Center has announced the launch of its new Technology Collaboration Center, with a technology focus on embedded Linux OS applications and middleware solutions.
REAL Software Ships REALbasic 2005 for LinuxREAL Software has announced REALbasic 2005 for Linux. "REALbasic 2005 for Linux is a rapid application development (RAD) environment that enables professional and non-professional programmers alike to quickly create software for Linux." The company has also published a white paper on migrating Visual Basic applications to Linux.
SGI announces DMediaPro DM12 digital media boardSGI has announced a new video board for its 64 bit Linux-based visualization system. "Supporting the 64-bit Linux(R) operating system, the DMediaPro DM12 video board is a professional digital media interface providing up to 2K (8-bit or 10-bit) input and output, with single and dual link HD-SDI capabilities including dual-link output for RGBA (4:4:4:4) or YUVA (4:2:2:4). DM12 includes support of eight channels of digital audio, for embedded audio or configured with AES/EBU interfaces."
VMware Introduces VMware Workstation 5.5VMware, Inc. has announced the release of its VMware Workstation 5.5 desktop virtualization software. New features include 64-bit Guest Support, experimental Two-way Virtual SMP, improved Virtual Machine Importer and command line interfaces, and more.
Xilinx announces Integrated PowerPC and MicroBlaze Development KitXilinx, Inc. has announced a new PowerPC(TM) and MicroBlaze(TM) Development Kit. "The FX12 Edition delivers an integrated platform with hardware, design tools, intellectual property (IP) and reference designs to kick start the development process. Developers can select the processor(s) best suited for the target application and rapidly configure complete systems with a single, easy-to-use kit."
New Books Digital Identity - O'Reilly's Latest ReleaseO'Reilly has published the book Digital Identity by Phillip J. Windley.
php|architect's Pocket PHP ReferenceThe book php|architect's Pocket PHP Reference has been published by php|architect. "All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Canadian Red Cross' Hurricane Katrina's Relief Fund."
Tips and Techniques for Pro Photo Retouchers--O'Reilly's Latest ReleaseO'Reilly has published the book Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio by Glenn Honiball.
Resources PostgreSQL Cheat SheetPeter Freitag has posted a handy PostgreSQL Cheat Sheet that contains examples of numerous database statements.
Contests and Awards The Code Project and Mainsoft Announce 'Race to Linux'The Code Project and Mainsoft Corporation have announced the first Race to Linux contest. "The Race to Linux challenges Visual Studio developers to port existing ASP.NET applications to Linux using their cross-platform tool of choice (e.g. Mono, Grasshopper, PHP, Macromedia, etc.). The Code Project will announce which ASP.NET application needs to run on IBM xSeries Linux at the start of each race. The winners of each of the three races will win an Xbox 360."
Surveys Announcing the 2005 ONJava Reader Survey (O'ReillyNet)O'Reilly has announced the 2005 ONJava Reader Survey. "The 2005 ONJava Reader Survey is now open. This is your opportunity to let us know what you're using, what you're watching and waiting for, and what you'd like to see from ONJava in the future. The survey is about 20 questions long, a mixture of multiple-choice and free-response questions, and will only take a few minutes to complete."
Education and Certification Linux Learning Zone launchedAPNIC Solutions Ltd. has launched the Linux Learning Zone. "Linux Learning Zone provides a number of FREE services to the community as well as optional paid extras. Have a look through the site, play with the free stuff (some of which requires an account - this is free). Should you wish to subscribe to what is essentially a tailored linux training program then please get in contact immediately as that's what we do - using practical and hands-on methods to teach linux on any level. So please contact us immediately and see just how helpful we are!"
Upcoming Events EuroOSCON, AmsterdamThe 2005 O'Reilly European OSCON will be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on October 17-20, 2005.
Gelato to Promote Linux Itanium at Brazil MeetingThe Gelato Federation will hold a meeting in Brazil October 2-5 to advance Linux on the Intel Itanium platform in Latin America.
Linux Installfest workshops in Davis - Saturday, Sept. 17thThe Linux Users' Group of Davis will hold their next Linux Install Workshop in Davis, CA on September 17, 2005.
PyCon 2006 Call for ProposalsA Call for Proposals has gone out for the PyCon 2006 conference. Submissions are due by October 31, 2005.
Events: September 15 - November 10, 2005
Web sites Mozilla Developer Center in Beta (MozillaZine)MozillaZine has announced a beta version of the Mozilla Developer Center "Known as Devmo to its friends, the Mozilla Developer Center is a new site for coders wishing to build upon the Mozilla platform. There's documentation and resources for many groups, including extension authors, Web developers and localisers."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Letters to the editor Re: Tor GUI competition
Hi Jonathan, others,
Re: The Grumpy Editor's guide to personal finance managers (Part I)
> The "Mortgage/Loan Druid" is highly capable, though with some strange
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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