Development

The OpenOffice Installation Project

The OpenOffice office suite project has announced a new initiative, known as the OpenOffice Installation Project. The project aims to address some of the deficiencies of the current installation system.

The project aims to make installation of OpenOffice follow the systems native installer for the user's Linux distribution. This sounds like a very good idea, since the majority of applications on most distributions are installed as packages, and packaging the code should allow it to be correctly integrated into the chosen distribution.

Package support is being planned for several commercial UNIX varients, RedHat Linux, Windows, OS X, Debian Linux, FreeBSD, and as generic tar.gz files.

Your development page editor recently made several attempts at installing OpenOffice on a new Debian system. The first attempt involved following the instructions found on the OpenOffice.org in Debian site, which recommended doing:

apt-get install openoffice.org

That attempt failed to find the package at all, even after pointing the /etc/apt/sources.list file to several different sources and OS versions. I will admit to being a very new Debian user, although I've been using UNIX and Linux for a long time.

Ultimately, it was necessary to download the enormous tar.gz file from the OpenOffice site. I had to uncompress the file, and run the install script to get the files plugged into the system. I then had to further install the software from a user account, which nicely duplicated a huge tree of already-copied files into my home directory. Not pretty, although it did eventually produce a working program.

Once OpenOffice was actually installed, it took a fair amount of digging around to figure out that the command to run OpenOffice was soffice, not openoffice or OpenOffice. This is, no doubt, a relic from StarOffice, the project from which OpenOffice was derived.

Clearly, an effort to make installation of OpenOffice easier will greatly expand the OpenOffice user base. The installation experience as it currently exists, will likely scare off many potential users. This is a project that is past-due, it may even be critical for the long-term success of OpenOffice.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

applications using jack

AlsaModularSynth and JACK Rack have been added to the JACK Audio Connection Kit's list of applications. JACK allows multiple audio applications to simultaneously share the same sound card.

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Database Software

SAP DB Beta Version 7.4.03.07

A new beta version of the SAP DB database and accompanying documentation is available. Change information is in the code.

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Education

Linux in Education Report

Issue #83 of the Linux in Education Report is out. Topics include European Schools Projects Finland, SchoolNet Namibia, Sun's aim to oust MSOffice from UK schools, the Northwest Educational Technology Consortium, the National Meeting of Free and Open Source Software, and a bunch of new educational software releases.

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Electronics

a VHDL front-end for GCC

A VHDL front-end for GCC, known as GHDL, has been announced. "GHDL has been developped on a GNU/Linux x86 system, and only this configuration has been tested (porting to other processor or system should not be an hard task, but there are system dependent files in the run time)." Thanks to Andi Kleen.

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Printing

LinuxPrinting.org news

LinuxPrinting.org lists some new changes to the Foomatic printer support database. New stuff includes an option setting bug fix, new converters for plain text printing, a bug fix for custom paper size support, and a fix for the Lexmark Z31 printer support.

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Science

Open source in the biosciences (IBM developerWorks)

Cameron Laird looks at the use of open-source software in the bioscience and bioinformatics fields. "Bioinformatics and the use of open source in the biosciences are both still in the take-off phase. There's a lot of growth ahead of us. Here are a few of the technical software developments that will matter most in bioinformatics over the next year."

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Web Site Development

NemeinNavBar library released

The initial public release NemeinNavBar, a URL parsing and navigation bar system for Midgard, is available.

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Zope Members News

The most recent headlines on the Zope Members News include: New York ZUG - November 21, 2002, ZAnnot 0.3 released, File System Cache Manager 0.1, DZUG-Meeting: Call For Papers, File system storage version of MSWordDocument, Austrian Government Deploys Zope, CMF in Portal to Public Services, NeoBoard 1.1 alpha 2 released, and Turkish Zope Hosting.

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Standards

lsb-runtime-1.2.3-1 for IA32

Version 1.2.3-1 of the binary lsb-runtime test suite for the IA32 platform has been released. This is a maintenance release.

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

Ardour changes

The latest changes to the Ardour multi-track audio recording program include new meter and tempo editing, mix templates, and changes to undo/redo to support branching.

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Desktop Environments

FootNotes

Headlines on the GNOME desktop FootNotes site include: Yarnobs-0.2 released, GnuCash 1.7.3 beta, Gnumeric 1.1.12, Dropline GNOME Desktop 1.2.2, Mozilla gtk2 port progress update, An Inside look at Abiword Development, GNOME 2.1.2 available for FreeBSD, Rhythmbox 0.4 is out, Robin Rowe Interview, GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.1.2: ''Life Preserver'', GNOME Summary for 2nd to 9th November, Evolution 1.2 available!, Sawfish 1.2 released, and an OpenOffice.org Project Update.

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KDE.News

This week's headlines on KDE.News include: Quickies: Boson, K3b, KDE-Forum.de, and OfB.biz: Geramik Reduces KDE/GNOME Style Differences.

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Games

Announcing Durabuild 0.0.9 (World Forge)

World Forge games has an announcement for Durabild version 0.0.9. "zzorn has released Durabuild 0.0.9. Durabuild is a python program for building html versions of Worlds documents from CVS for web deployment and LaTeX post processing."

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Boson 0.7 released

Game lovers may want to check out the new release of Boson. "Boson is an OpenGL real-time strategy game, with the feeling of Command&Conquer(tm) or StarCraft(tm). It is designed to run on Unix (Linux) computers, and is built on top of the KDE, Qt and kdegames libraries. A minimum of two players is required, since there is no artificial intelligence yet."

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Interoperability

Kernel Cousin Wine

Issue #144 of Kernel Cousin Wine is out. Topics include: WineX 2.2.1, TransGaming Highlights, New Wine FAQ, Updated To-Do List, Fun Projects, Preliminary Supported Applications List, Cabextract Offered to Wine, MPlayer Supports Sorenson SVQ3, Better OpenGL Separation, Filesystem Change Notifications, Wine Visual Basic Compatibility, and Screenshots-R-Us.

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #118 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out with the latest AbiWord word processor development news. "Great week for news! First, Mark is already tagging pre-releases for 1.0.4! If you want to know what's different, visit the Release HackDown And if you're in the gtk2 world and are just dying to test out the next developer's release, feel free to keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming 1.1.2. You may have noticed 1.1.1 didn't really go anywhere (not even in links on SourceForge), but 1.1.2 will be very pleasing, especially printing with XFT (i.e. it's there now!)."

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Gnumeric 1.1.12 released

Version 1.1.12 of the Gnumeric spreadsheet has been released. "This release marks the start of the run up to the next stable release. While there are still some big pieces left to arrive, much of the 1.2 checklist is complete and we're starting to audit things."

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Web Browsers

mozillaZine

The latest mozillaZine topics include: Mitchell Baker Joins OSAF Staff, Spell Checker for 1.2 and Trunk Builds, MozTweak 1.2 Beta Released, Minotaur Update, Project Documentation Updates, Linux Kernel Bugzilla Database Launched, Mozilla 1.2 Status, and Junk Mail Classification Turned On in Trunk Builds.

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The November 12-19, 2002 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include exuberant ctags for ocaml, Aqua (non-X) labltk on Mac OS 10, The need for opcode GRAB?, and Even at compile time 2*2=4!.

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The Caml Hump

This week, the new software on The Caml Hump includes OCaml-HTTPA, a "library inspired from perl's HTTP::Daemon that permits to write simple HTTP daemons in OCaml."

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Java

EJB Inheritance, Part 3

Emmanuel Proulx continues his series on EJB Inheritance with Part 3. "A session bean's life revolves around pure business logic. Implementing session bean inheritance is nowhere near as hard as it is with entity beans. Home interfaces are plain, containing no tricky business logic. The problems we had with entity beans were regarding access or lifecycle of the bean, not the actual bean invocation. There were issues also regarding the mapping of in-memory objects to database tables. These problems are gone in the case of session beans."

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Developer's introduction to JAX-RPC, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks)

IBM's developerWorks has an article on JAX-RPC. "The Java APIs for XML-Based Remote Procedure Call (JAX-RPC) are an important step forward in the quest for Web services interoperability. In this first of two articles, Joshy Joseph takes you to the heart of that interoperability effort: the JAX-RPC type-mapping system. You'll learn how XML types are translated into Java types to ensure a smooth exchange of data between Web service clients and Java-based applications."

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Learning the New Jakarta Struts 1.1, Part 2

Sue Spielman finishes her two part series on Jakarta Struts 1.1 on O'Reilly. "The whole point of having nested tags is that the tags can relate to each other and describe the structure of the model they're managing. The assumptions made by the tags simplify the necessary coding. Struts 1.0 developers can heave a sigh of relief knowing that they won't have to mangle code any longer to render a display of a list within a list."

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters

The November 11-17 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out. Topics include Non-ASCII in POD, Test::* modules change, Assertions in Perl, CPAN::MakeMaker, Version bug, and more.

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This week on Perl 6 (Dr. Dobb's)

This week on Perl 6 for November 3-10, 2002 is out. Topics include: The Myth of Fingerprints, on_exit not portable, Should Memory be Washed?, string_set Is Back, Unifying Invocant and Topic-Naming Syntax, UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, Supercomma!, The Interminable Operator Thread, FMTWYENTK about :=, Junctions and Laziness, Primitive vs. Object Types, perl6-documentation was born, Meanwhile, in perl-documentation, Who's who in Perl 6?, and more.

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Object Oriented Exception Handling in Perl

Arun Udaya Shankar covers Perl exception handling on O'Reilly. "The main goal of this article is to discuss in detail about exception handling in Perl and how to implement it using Error.pm. On our way, we'll be touching upon the advantages of using exception-handling over traditional error-handling mechanisms, exception handling with eval {}, problems with eval {} and the functionalities available in Fatal.pm. But by and large, our focus we'll be on using Error.pm for exception handling."

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary

Topics on this week's PHP Weekly Summary include: Compiling with LCC, snaps.php.net, 4.3 branched, Manual translations, Errors with URLs, Log() with bases, Squashing bugs for 4.3.0, Changelog bugs, CLI without .ini, Improved string speeds, GD filters, Session survey, Range() enhancement, and Birdstep (Velocis) support.

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PHP 4.3.0RC1 released

Version 4.3.0RC1 of PHP is available. The release blurb on PHP.net says: "This is the first release candidate and should have a very low number of problems and/or bugs. Nevertheless, please download and test it as much as possible on real-life applications to uncover remaining issues."

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Python

Python-dev Summary

The latest Python-dev Summary, covering activity through November 15, is out. It looks at the process of becoming a Python contributor, the Snake Farm, "metaclass insanity," and numerous other topics.

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The Daily Python-URL

This week's Daily Python-URL article topics include: Mnet, the open-source successor to MojoNation, Cooperative multithreading with generators and signal handling, Proper XML output in Python, Python - language of choice for EAI, Python Journal 3(1), Variety is the Spyce of Python, and more.

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Ruby

The Ruby Garden

New topics on the Ruby Garden include Move "timeout" method into its own class, and Should Ruby have static typing?.

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The Ruby Weekly News

Topics on this week's Ruby Weekly News include New signs of life [Cardinal], RubyConf 2002 FreeRIDE slides, Enumerable#zip, Sydney RUG, RUG mailing lists, and Ruby NEWS maintainers [wanted]. New Ruby software includes rdep, YAML.rb 0.47, FXRuby 1.0.16, Radical 0.5, and ncurses-ruby 0.6.

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Scheme

Scheme Weekly News

The November 18, 2002 edition of the Scheme Weekly News is out with the latest Scheme development news.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The November 19, 2002 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out with lots of Tcl information.

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XML

Proper XML Output in Python

Uche Ogbuji delves into the production of XML output from Python on O'Reilly. "First, I consider ways of producing XML output in Python, which might make you wonder what's wrong with good old print? Indeed programmers often use simple print statements in order to generate XML. But this approach is not without hazards, and it's good to be aware of them. It's even better to learn about tools that can help you avoid the hazards."

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Normalizing XML, Part 1 (O'Reilly)

Will Provost writes about XML normalization on O'Reilly. "As regular readers of the XML Schema Clinic likely know, I tend to view the world of XML through object-oriented glasses. For this installment, though, we're reaching out to the relational data folks, switching lenses for one eye at least. The goal is to see what relational concepts we can usefully apply to XML. Can the normal forms that guide database design be applied meaningfully to XML document design?"

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RDF, What's It Good For? (O'Reilly)

Kendall Grant Clark covers RDF on O'Reilly's XML.com. "The Resource Description Framework is still among the most interesting of W3C technologies. But it's got persistent troubles, including having had its reputation beaten up unfairly as a result of the many and often nasty fights about RSS."

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Miscellaneous

nocrew's PDP-10 stuff

For those of you who collect old computers, a group known as nocrew has been porting GNU software to the pdp10 computer platform. Thanks to Lars Brinkhoff.

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Page editor: Forrest Cook
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