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DevelopmentThe Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 1 web browserThe first developer preview release of the Firefox 2 browser has been announced: "Bon Echo Alpha 1 is a developer preview release of our next generation Firefox browser and it is being made available for testing purposes only. Bon Echo Alpha 1 is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox 1.x should not use Bon Echo Alpha 1."
The release notes are somewhat preliminary, changes include:
There have been some changes to the Firefox extensions and themes that may cause some compatibility problems with older additions, this is an area of active development. There are a few known Issues involving user interface changes and the history and bookmarks manager that are known to cause problems. This release is by definition, not ready for widespread use. Your editor will not be using it for production work until it is a bit closer to stable status. That notwithstanding, this new release appears to function well when visiting a variety of web sites, and seems to work as a browser should.
System Applications Audio Projects Rivendell v0.9.67 announcedVersion 0.9.67 of Rivendell, a radio station automation system, is out with a number of new capabilities.
Database Software Glom Beta 2 (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org looks at the latest release of Glom. "Glom Beta 2 has been released, with important bug fixes and new features. This is the last beta before 1.0. Glom allows normal people to design databases and their user interfaces."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe March 19, 2006 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL database articles and resources.
Embedded Systems Rockbox release scheduleA new Rockbox release schedule has been posted. Rockbox is an open-source firmware replacement for a variety of digital audio players.
Interoperability Samba Coverity Bugs Down to ZeroThe Samba project has fixed a large number of security bugs that were discovered by Coverity. "The initial scan reported 216 potential bugs in Samba. In a week and a half, Samba Team developers have fixed all reported bugs. These changes will be applied to the next 3.0.x release."
LDAP Software LAT 1.0.3 releasedVersion 1.0.3 of LAT, the LDAP Administration Tool, has been released. "This is a bugfix release for the stable branch."
Libraries QewExtensibleDialogs Library Introduction (KDE.News)KDE.News mentions an introductory article on QewExtensibleDialogs. "QewExtensibleDialogs is a plugin library for Qt Designer. It provides dialogs that can be nested with no limits and provides centralised control for accepting or rejecting the whole stack. Jose Cuadrea introduces his library in an article which describes the use cases, the general design pattern and his Qt implementation."
Networking Tools Zenoss Project announcedThe Zenoss Project has been officially announced. "Zenoss is Python/Zope-based, network/systems monitoring application that has been in development since 2002. The goal of Zenoss is to "Simplify Systems Management" with a Python, open source alternative to the big commercial management suites (e.g. IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, etc.). Zenoss also strives to go beyond Nagios and OpenNMS with improved architecture, scalability, ease and breadth."
Security Sussen 0.17 releasedVersion 0.17 of Sussen is out with several new features. "Sussen is a tool that checks for vulnerabilities and configuration issues on computer systems. It is based on the Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language."
Web Site Development mnoGoSearch 3.2.38 releasedVersion 3.2.38 of mnoGoSearch, a web site search engine, is out with bug fixes and other improvements. See the change history document for details.
Zope NewsThe March 1-15, 2006 edition of the Zope News covers the latest developments on the Zope web development platform.
Web Services Sun Announces Update to Java Web Services Developer PackSun Microsystems, Inc. has announced a new version of its Java Web Services Developer Pack. "Sun Microsystems Inc., the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today announced it has released the Java Web Services Developer Pack 2.0 (Java WSDP), which features advanced web service technologies scheduled for inclusion in next-generation versions of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). In addition, Sun is providing this enhanced web services development for Web Services with the NetBeans(TM) 5.0 IDE -- bundled with the Sun Java System Application Server -- to enable developers to speedily implement, debug and deploy web services."
Desktop Applications Animation Software DANCE v030606 releasedVersion 030606 of DANCE, the Dynamic Animation and Control Environment, has been announced. "DANCE is a portable, open, plug-in based, object-oriented software package for physics-based character animation. DANCE is free for non-commerical use and runs on both Windows and Linux. DANCE is written using FLTK 2.0."
Audio Applications Rhythmbox Breakdown #3 (GnomeDesktop)Issue #3 of Rhythmbox Breakdown has been published. "Rhythmbox Breakdown is the weekly (ha! last posted four months ago) summary of what's been happening in the world of Rhythmbox. For those who use cvs and follow the rhythmbox-devel mailing list, it will provide a summary of what's been happening and things that haven't been discussed on the list. For those who don't, it will let you know all the juicy new features (and crack) that we've been up to."
CAD Thirtieth release of PythonCAD now availableRelease 30 of PythonCAD, a scriptable drafting program, is out. "The thirtieth PythonCAD release addresses a number of issues that appeared in the rewritten entity transfer code made available in the previous release. By once again rewriting the entity transfer code, the problems found in the last release have been fixed and additionally a number of latent problems for handling undo/redo operations on Dimension entities were addressed. In addition to the reworked entity transfer code, a number of internal code enhancements appear in this release. The use of the 'weakref' module has been eliminated, and a number of other bug fixes and improvements have been applied to the code."
Calendar Software Lightning 0.1 Released (MozillaZine)MozillaZine covers the release of Lightning 0.1. "This is a major milestone on the road to an integrated calendar for users of the award-winning mail-client Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5. Thanks go to all developers, testers and other supporters of the project."
Desktop Environments GNOME 2.14 is outIt's official: GNOME 2.14 has been released. Click below for the announcement, or see the release notes for details on all the new the GNOME hackers have come up with this time around.
GARNOME 2.14.0 Released (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org covers the release of GARNOME 2.14.0. "It includes updates and fixes after the GNOME 2.14.0 freeze, together with a host of third-party GNOME packages, Bindings and the Mono(tm) Platform -- this release is the first of a new stable GNOME branch and ships with the latest and greatest releases."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Electronics kicad 2006-03-21 releasedRelease 2006-03-21 of Kicad, a printed circuit CAD program for KDE, is out with bug fixes and improved Spanish translations.
KJWaves Version 1.0.6 releasedVersion 1.0.6 of KJWaves has been released. "KJWaves was written to be a cross-platform SPICE tool in pure Java. It aids in viewing, modifying, and simulating SPICE CIRCUIT files. Output from SPICE3 (ngspice) can be read and displayed. Resulting graphs may be printed and saved."
Games New PyGame gamesThe PyGame site has some new Python-based games including Lijnen 0.0.0.1 - a color-lines clone, Lady Python 0.0.1 - a snake game, Star Pynguin 0.45 - an asteroids style game and more.
Graphics Xara releases sources for GPL'd Xara LXpiptas reports on the KDEdeveloper blog, that Xara Xtreme will soon be available for Linux and subject to the GPL. "The vector graphics package Xara Xtreme so far was only available for Windows. Back in October, the Xara company announced the porting of its flagship product to Linux and Mac OS X. Not only that -- the complete source code should become available, and subject to the GPL license. But at the time they consoled hopes for an immediate release to a later date." (Thanks to Kurt Pfeifle)
GUI Packages wxWidgets 2.6.3 Release Candidate 2 announcedRelease Candidate 2 of wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI toolkit, is out. Some of the changes include: enhanced GTK+ 2 support, XRC resource system compiled as standard replacement build system, Bakefile, better integration with STL, sizer improvements, new Gnome printing features, ODBC enhancements, wxTaskBarIcon support on Mac OS X and Linux, arbitrary shapes for top-level windows, flicker reduction on Windows, better theme support, alpha channels for images, many API enhancements and bug fixes.
Interoperability Wine 0.9.10 releasedVersion 0.9.10 of Wine has been announced. Changes include: Improved ESD audio driver, More Web browser improvements in mshtml and wininet, Direct3D fixes and preparation for ddraw code migration, Explorer process now managing the desktop window and Lots of bug fixes.
Medical Applications MirthProject.org (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews looks at the Mirth Project. "The goal of the Mirth Project is to develop Mirth, an open source cross-platform HL7 interface engine that enables bi-directional sending of HL7 messages between systems and applications over multiple transports. By utilizing an enterprise service bus framework and a channel-based architecture, Mirth allows messages to be filtered, transformed, and routed based on user-defined rules."
Music Applications Freecycle 0.6alpha is outVersion 0.6 alpha of Freecycle, a beat slicer, is available. "This new release replaces the PortAudio and PortMidi support with Alsa and alsaseq. PortAudio and PortMidi are still supported on systems without alsa. As a minor feature, Freecycle now provides the "Bark scale" for spectrogram plotting, which enhances the visibility of the audio wave in the frequency domain. Some bugfixes and minor optimisation as always.."
MusE 0.8 releasedVersion 0.8 of MusE, a MIDI sequencing application, is available. "MusE 0.8 was originally intended to be called 0.7.2 but for various reasons (featuritis, time, and because 'I wanna!') we decided to call it 0.8. This is most likely the last release in the old series, next up is the much rewritten 1.0. This release contains a number of new features lots of stability and usability improvements. All users are encouraged to upgrade."
Peer to Peer ANts beta 1.4.8 announced (SourceForge)Beta version 1.4.8 of ANts, a cross-platform peer-to-peer application, has been announced. "ANts now has a full LAN integration. Clients running on a same LAN are now able to find each other (multicast) and ANts can be used as an easy tool to share informations in a network. The built-in indexer (Lucene) let you index your documents and share them with your colleauges."
Web Browsers Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)MozillaZine has announced the availability of the minutes from the March 13, 2006 mozilla.org staff meeting. "Issues discussed include openness and communication, upcoming releases including Firefox 1.0.8, Firefox 1.5.0.2 and Firefox 2 Alpha 1, addons.mozilla.org updates, Foundation updates and newgroups propogation to Google Groups."
Miscellaneous Azureus 2.4.0.2 released (SourceForge)Version 2.4.0.2 of Azureus, a cross-platform java BitTorrent client, has been announced. "This release is primarily bugfixes and performance improvements, including: Encryption bug fix, Faster crash recovery hashing Fixed startup when config files corrupted, Data transfer from slow peers improved".
GPA 0.7.3 releasedVersion 0.7.3 of GPA has been released. "GPA is a graphical frontend for the GNU Privacy Guard. GPA can be used to encrypt, decrypt, and sign files, to verify signatures and to manage the private and public keys. This is a development release. Please be careful when using it on production keys."
No GPLv2-only projects on SavannahSavannah is a SourceForge-like repository site run by the GNU project. Debian developer Francesco Poli recently tried to host a project there, but was turned down. The reason: the license used is version 2 (only) of the GPL. As can be seen on the project page, GPLv2 is no longer considered to be an acceptable license.
Languages and Tools Caml Camomile 0.6.5 releasedVersion 0.6.5 of Camomile has been announced. "Camomile is a comprehensive Unicode library for OCaml. Camomile provides Unicode character type, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 strings, conversion to/from about 200 encodings, collation and locale-sensitive case mappings, and more. The library is currently designed for Unicode Standard 3.2."
Caml Weekly NewsThe March 14-21, 2006 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Java JBoss Seam (O'ReillyNet)Thomas Heute describes JBoss Seam on O'Reilly. "Many frameworks are perfectly sensible and well-designed on their own, but don't work particularly well when you try to combine them. Combining, for example, JSF and EJB 3.0 requires a lot of glue code, and adding another framework like JBoss BPM confuses things further. JBoss Seam is designed to provide common context for frameworks to share objects. Project leader Thomas Heute introduces Seam and what you can do with it."
Python Urwid 0.9.2 releasedVersion 0.92 of Urwid, a Console UI Library for Python, is available. "This release includes preliminary mouse support, a new input testing example program and a couple bug fixes. If you are interested in mouse support please try the input test example program and let me know if it works properly in your environment."
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The March 17, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The March 20, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Ruby Welcome to The Gemcutter's Workshop (Linux Journal)Linux Journal starts a new column on Ruby. "These last couple of weeks have seen the release of some great tools to help Rubyists develop programs following Test-First principles, and I'll discuss three of them later in this article. But first, some thought-provoking e-mail and blog posts have appeared recently in the Ruby community, and I'd like to take a closer look at some of them here."
Ruby Weekly NewsThe March 19th, 2006 edition of the Ruby Weekly News looks at the latest discussions from the ruby-talk mailing list.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The March, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The March 21, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
IDEs Compuware and the Eclipse Foundation Announce Tools Services Framework ProjectCompuware Corporation and the Eclipse Foundation have announced Project Corona, a Tools Services Framework. "Corona is a server-side framework that enables Eclipse-based tools to collaborate, sharing information about projects, applications and events. Project Corona -- or the Tools Services Framework Project, as it is officially called -- has been reviewed by the Eclipse Technology Project Management Committee (PMC) and officially accepted for project creation."
Profilers Valgrind 3.1.1 announcedVersion 3.1.1 of Valgrind, a suite of simulation based debugging and profiling tools, is available. "3.1.1 fixes a bunch of bugs reported in 3.1.0. There is no new functionality."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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![[Firefox]](/images/ns/firefoxlogo.png)
Not being an active member of the Firefox testing community,
your editor ignored the warnings and downloaded a copy.
The