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DevelopmentA look at the Firefox 2 Beta 2 browser The beta 2 release of version 2 of the Firefox web browser, aka Bon Echo, has been announced, it is the fifth developer milestone for Firefox 2. This early release is aimed at developers and testers, not end users. The Bon Echo Alpha 2 release was tested here last May.![[Firefox]](/images/ns/firefoxlogo2.png)
New features in Firefox 2 beta 2 include:
The Firefox 2 beta 2 release notes page looks at the new features in more detail and the Bon Echo Planning Center explains what to expect in upcoming Firefox releases. Firefox 2 beta 2 is available for download here. Testers should familiarize themselves with the known issues section of the release notes, as well as the Firefox System Requirements document. Your editor gave this version of Firefox a quick spin, it started up with a few NS_ERROR_FAILURE messages, but continued working anyway. The multiple tab features look useful, in addition to the left and right tab extender buttons, there is also a down arrow that shows a list of all of the open tabs. All but the currently used tab are now displayed with a lower contrast view. The tab changes to a medium contrast when the mouse move on top, then goes to a high contrast when clicked on, this may take some getting used to. Several times, the left most tab disappeared from the screen after submitting changes on a web entry form, this appears to be a bug. The back and forward buttons are now split, and have an additional down arrow that brings up a list of recently viewed pages. In previous versions of Firefox, this was all done with the single arrow buttons. Additionally, there is a similar down arrow next to the current URL display. This appears to your editor as the addition of unnecessary features and screen clutter, remember this old axiom: simpler is better. All of the errors encountered in the Bon Echo Alpha One release appear to have been fixed. Firefox 2 appears to be getting more stable, although it is probably best to wait for the official release before relying on it for critical work.
System Applications Audio Projects Speex 1.2 beta 1 released Version 1.2 beta 1 of Speex, a speech CODEC, is out. "This new release brings many significant improvements. The quality has been improved, both at the encoder level and the decoder level. These include enhancer improvements (now on by default), input/output high-pass filters, as well as fixing minor regressions in previous 1.1.x releases. A strange and rare instability problem with pure sinusoids has also been fixed. On top of that, memory use has been greatly reduced, especially for fixed-point and narrowband. The fixed-point narrowband encoder+decoder memory use has been cut by more than half, making it possible to fit both in less than 6 kB of RAM. In general, CPU requirement had gone down, especially for the fixed-point port."
Database Software MySQL 5.0.24a has been released Version 5.0.24a of MySQL is available. "This is a minor release to fix a few bugs, and a possible security flaw."
Interoperability Samba 3.0.23c available Version 3.0.23c of Samba has been announced. "This is the version that production Samba servers should be running for all current bug-fixes. Please read the changes in the Release Notes for details on new features and difference in behavior from previous releases."
Mail Software Archiveopteryx 1.10 released Version 1.10 of Archiveopteryx has been announced. "Archiveopteryx (formerly Oryx Mailstore) is a mail archive server that stores normalized mail in a PostgreSQL database, and serves it using IMAP/POP. It has now been used in production for several months, and is available both on commercial terms and as open source. This release comes sooner than planned, because we feel the deployment of privilege separation is important enough to justify it."
bogofilter 1.1.1 released Stable version 1.1.1 of Bogofilter, a spam filter, is out. "Version 1.1.1 improved on 1.1.0 with a minor token parsing fix, a new Italian FAQ, and cleaned up formatting for the English and French FAQs."
Desktop Applications Desktop Environments GNOME 2.16 released GNOME 2.16 is out. Click below for the announcement, or see the GNOME 2.16 page for the release notes, download information, and more.
Gnome 2.17 schedule announced The first draft of the GNOME 2.17 release schedule has been announced. "what's worth to mention? the release cycle will have 27 weeks - christmas and new year's day are on monday, guess we don't want a tarballs due on these holidays. also, API/ABI/Feature freeze and UI freeze will not be the same date again."
GNOME Software Announcements The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software Announcements The following new KDE software has been announced this week:
KDE Commit-Digest (KDE.News) KDE.News has announced the September 3, 2006 edition of the KDE Commit-Digest. "In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Kickoff, the experimental application menu alternative developed by SuSE, is imported into KDE SVN. Import of the work to support SVG scalable tilesets in KMahjongg. KViewShell gets support for LZW compressed fax files. Strigi gets support for the D-Bus Inter-Process Communication service, KBFX, a prospective element of Plasma, gets full support for Strigi. Kaffeine gets DVB plugin support. Amarok sees fundamental changes in a key statistics technology, along with a name change of the technology to "Amarok File Tracking (AFT)". Development of SafeSite, a network-aware phishing protection service proceeds. Interface changes in KTorrent."
KOffice: Summer of Code students deliver the goods (KDE.News) KDE.News covers KOffice contributions from the 2006 Summer of Code. "Under the KDE umbrella, the KOffice project took part in the 2006 Summer of Code with four participants. And not only that, but the Dutch Programmeerzomer, sponsored by Finalist, also selected a KOffice project. The summer is over, the season of mists and long hacking nights has arrived and the question that's obviously in everyones mind is, have these five delivered? -- and, more importantly, will Gabor, Alfredo, Emanuele, Thomas and Fredrik continue hacking on KOffice?"
First Konqueror Bug Triage Day (KDE.News) KDE.News covers the first Konqueror Bug Day. "The aim was to either confirm or close as many unconfirmed Konqueror bugs as possible, known as bug triage. About 150 bugs were dealt with."
Xfce 4.4 Release Candidate 1 (4.3.99.1) released Version 4.4 Release Candidate 1 (aka 4.3.99.1) of the Xfce lightweight desktop environment is out. "This release fixes a lot of bugs that were present in the second beta release, but also introduces new features, like the trash support in Thunar and xfdesktop. Besides that, this release also includes Xarchiver 0.4.0."
Electronics gEDA 20060824 announced Version 20060824 of gEDA, a collection of electronic CAD tools, has been announced, along with version 20060825 of the gEDA Suite installer CD ISO image. gEDA changes include: "Numerous bug-fixes, usability and documentation improvements from an every-growing band of contributors."
Fonts and Images Linux Libertine 2.1.9 released Version 2.1.9 of the Linux Libertine open font set is available.
GUI Packages Trolltech Releases Second Preview of Qt for Java (KDE.News) KDE.News looks at Qt Jambi. "Trolltech has released a second preview of Qt Jambi - a prototype version of Qt that allows Java programmers to use the popular cross-platform development framework. This release incorporates the feedback of over 1700 beta testers, and features new additions like Web Start functionality, improved integration with Eclipse and single JAR file deployment for Qt Jambi-based applications."
Music Applications MMA Beta 0.23 now available The Beta 0.23 release of MMA, Musical MIDI Accompaniment, is out. "Included in this release: A number of minor bugfixes; new RNDSEED command; a number of new and improved library files."
Office Suites OpenOffice.org Newsletter The August, 2006 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with the latest OO.o office suite articles and events.
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly News The September 5, 2006 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Python Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! The August 30, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! The September 6, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! The September 5, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
XML XML Schemas 1.1 (Structures) new working draft (O'Reilly) Rick Jelliffe looks at XML Schemas 1.1 on O'Reilly. "Of course, I am most interested in the new assert element. It is based on the assert element from my Schematron schema language; Eddie Robertsson created some XSLT stylesheets for embedding assertions in XML Schemas, and it has proved quite popular and useful. And certainly the ability to constrain types rather than names is useful, for XML Schemas. They have done the right thing by defining a larger version of XPath that can be used, though the draft seems quite fuzzy about whether to use XPath 1 or XPath 2: I cannot image that will not get sorted out though. As with key/keyref and uniqueness, I think their assertions could be translated in Schematron readily enough."
Miscellaneous Catching up with Unicode 5.0 (O'Reilly) Rick Jelliffe in Articles discusses the release of Unicode 5.0 on O'Reilly. "Unicode 5.0 was released a week ago: congratulations to all concerned. Unicode now has about 99,000 characters defined, though many of the improvements in Unicode 5.0 are related to how to use characters (their properties or display algorithms) rather than additions. There are only 1369 new characters compared to Unicode 4.1; and no milestone for implementations such as Unicode 3.1 in 2001 when the number of characters broke the 16-bit range."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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