Development

The Gaim Instant Messaging Client

GnomeDesktop has an announcement for version 0.60 of Gaim, a multi-platform internet messaging client. "Almost 10 months in the making, Gaim 0.60 is finally released, and I'm confident it's the best IM client ever released"

As is common in the open-source world, another version, number 0.61, came out shortly afterward with fixes for some newly discovered bugs. The ChangeLog file lists the changes in both versions.

Gaim is described as multi-protocol and multi-platform, it runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. Gaim runs under GNOME and KDE, and features new GTK2 support. Gaim supports a wide range of chat protocols: AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks. In addition, multiple protocols are supported sumultaneously.

As with most GUI-based software, the screenshots go a long way in illustrating the capabilities of the software.

See the Gaim FAQ for help with installation and use as well as a description of current and future features. Gaim may be downloaded here.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

Demolition pre-release

A pre-release of Demolition, a destruction testing tool for LADSPA plugins, has been released. "If you write LADSPA plugins, or if you maintain a LADSPA host and don't think much of the quality of some plugins, this tool is for you. Please run out and grab it."

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Database Software

MySQL 4.1.0 released

MySQL 4.1.0 - the first MySQL 4.1 alpha release - is now available. It includes a number of new features: subqueries, derived tables, extended INSERT syntax, unicode support, OpenGIS support, protocol improvements, and more.

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The April 2, 2003 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is out with the latest PostgreSQL database development information. "Another fun-filled week in PostgreSQL land has passed. It was relatively qui[e]t compared to the activity of the last few weeks, but the steady progression toward 7.4 does continue."

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Education

Linux in Education Report

Issue #93 of the Linux in Education Report is out. Topics include South African open source learning centers, reconditioned computers for California schools, the TykeLinux distro, free software in Indian schools, a resolution for open-source software at SUNY, forming local Schoolforge groups, the NoMachine (NX) compressed X protocol, and more.

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Mail Software

SquirrelMail 1.4.0 released (SourceForge)

Version 1.4.0 of SquirrelMail has been released. "SquirrelMail is a PHP4-based Web email client. It includes built-in pure PHP support for IMAP and SMTP, and renders all pages in pure HTML 4.0 for maximum compatibility across browsers. It also has MIME support, folder manipulation, etc. Today, after a very long wait, the first stable child of the past development series, 1.4.0, has seen the light! It includes enhancements for stability, performance and compatibility, plus new features and many bugfixes."

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Web Site Development

IssueTrackerProduct-0.5.0b is finally out! (ZopeMembers)

A new version of IssueTrackerProduct is available. "The biggest feature-add is the inbound email feature which lets you define one or many email addresses dedicated to fetch incoming issues. Unlike similar software in this genre this is easy to administer." See the CHANGES.txt document for details.

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mnoGoSearch 3.2.9 search engine released

Version 3.2.9 of the mnoGoSearch web site search engine has been released. See the Change Log for details.

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YaBB SE 1.5.1 is out

YaBB SE 1.5.1 final has been announced. "YaBB SE is a PHP/MySQL port of the popular forum software YaBB (yet another bulletin board). Incorporating the same intuitive user interface, and several of the most popular modifications from YaBB's Boardmod program. After an extensive period of public beta testing, YaBB SE 1.5.1 final is out!"

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ZopeMag Issue 4 is now available! (ZopeMembers)

Issue #4 of a publication known as ZopeMag is available online. "The first of two free articles for this quarter, a Product Review of icoya, is now online. Every issue has at least two free articles -- so if your not a subscriber check out the previous editions."

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PABlog 1.3 (ZopeMembers)

Zope Members has an announcement for version 1.3 of PABlog. "The latest and greatest release of the blog tool for CMF. Archiving is derived from CMFCalendar, installer script and documentation make setup a breeze (I think)."

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Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites

Henrik Gemal shows how to use Mozilla for web site debugging. "Mozilla is a great tool to use in developing web sites and web applications. Not as a development tool itself, like an editor, but as a testing and debugging tool. In this article I will describe some very cool features in Mozilla which will enable you to quickly find and debug errors in your web site and web applications."

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Apache::VMonitor (O'Reilly)

Stas Bekman writes about Apache::VMonitor, a mod_perl utility that allows system status monitoring via the web. "It's important to be able to monitor your production system's health. You want to monitor the memory and file system utilization, the system load, how much memory the processes use, whether you are running out of swap space, and so on."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

MusE release 0.6.0pre8 available

Release 0.6.0pre8 of MusE, the Linux Music Editor MIDI sequencer, has been released. "0.6.0pre8 has in addition to many bug fixes some usability enhancements."

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Desktop Environments

KDE-CVS-Digest for April 4, 2003

The April 4, 2003 KDE-CVS-Digest is out. This edition covers: "Continuous improvements to the development tools, with Quanta, Kate and Kdevelop getting optimizations and bug fixes. New and improved filters in Koffice, the large rewrite of Kig is finished, and work on new themes and theme engine."

Comments (2 posted)

XFree86 teleconference minutes posted

The minutes of the teleconference referred to by Keith Packard in this week's interview are now available on the net. The main conclusion that the participants came to was to recommend that the XFree86 board make a public statement about what changes, if any, it is willing to consider to resolve the project governance issues.

Here's a response from XFree86 president David Dawes: "I don't know why you're all wasting your time talking about this stuff when there's nothing stopping you from just going ahead and creating your own project."

(Thanks to Dan Carpenter).

Comments (8 posted)

Evolution 1.2.4 is out (GnomeDesktop)

Version 1.2.4 of Evolution, an integrated mail, calendar, and addressbook application for the GNOME environment, has been announced. "This release adds support for Kerberos 5 authentication using the GSSAPI, although currently only our SuSE 8.1 build has this compile-time option enabled."

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Graphics

GSview 4.4 available

Version 4.4 of GSview, a PostScript viewer, has been announced. "This is a bug fix release to handle some interworking issues with Ghostscript 8.00, but also includes new translations for Catalan, Russian and Slovak."

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Interoperability

Wine Traffic #164

Issue #164 of Wine Traffic is out with the following topics: Interviews, Reviews, Other News, Wine & RedHat 9.0, Compiling With gcc 2.96, Duplicated Include Parameters?, and How to Just Access a Windows DLL.

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Vstserver 0.2.6 released

Version 0.2.6 of Vstserver has been released. "Vstlib is a library that can be used by programs to run windows vst audio plugins under linux/freebsd/i386solaris/etc." This version works with the 8.4.2003cvs version of wine.

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News

Issue #138 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out. "Johan moves the QNX dialogues to the Photon Application Builder set, but the screenshots are still slated for "later." But if it's screenshots you want, there's been an update to the Nautilus View Controller from Dom, who followed a topic at Footnotes. Jordi also would like to who off the page number dialogue, thus proving that your editor cares about Windows too. All in all, this has really been about squishing bugs for the advent of AbiWord II: The Wrath of Dom."

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GNUe Traffic #75

Edition #75 of GNUe Traffic is out with the latest GNU Enterprise news. Topics include: First release of GNUe Small Business, Problems with locale settings in PostgreSQL with GNUe, gnue.conf settings for Application Server, GNUe and the original GNU General Ledger project, and New pre-releases available for testing.

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LyX Development News

The April 3, 2003 edition of the LyX Development News is available. Topics include: LyX 1.3.1 released, A native Win32 port, Deleting empty paragraphs, Recent developments, and more.

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OpenOffice.org SDK, Final Release

The OpenOffice.org community announced the final release of the OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 SDK. This release provides independent software vendors, system integrators and enterprise developers with the key set of tools and documentation needed to extend and integrate the OpenOffice.org productivity suite.

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Scripting Framework Early Developer Release 0.2

Version 0.2 of the Scripting Framework for OpenOffice.org has been announced.

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Web Browsers

Independent Status Reports (MozillaZine)

The latest Mozilla Independent Status Reports are available. "The latest set of status reports includes updates from eXPatCOM, XEDE, DailyComics, BBSzilla, NeedleSearch and Mnenhy."

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Minutes of mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine presents the minutes from the March 26, 2003 Mozilla staff meeting. "Issues discussed include Mitchell Baker's visit to Germany, Scott Collins' visit to Carnegie Mellon University, Mozilla 1.3.1, Mozilla 1.4 Alpha, the Gecko Runtime Environment, Mozilla talks at the Open Government Conference and Sun's module requests."

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Miscellaneous

KStars: A Desktop Planetarium for KDE

A new snapshot of KStars, a "desktop planetarium", has been announced. "Recently featured in Linux Magazine, KStars displays an accurate representation of the night sky as seen from any location on Earth, on any date, including all of 40 000 stars, 13 000 deep-sky objects, all planets, the Sun and Moon, and 2500 comets and asteroids. KStars has an intuitive interface that makes it easy for anyone to explore the night sky."

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Helix Community Updates #4

The fourth edition of the Helix Community Updates is available. "Welcome to the first newsletter since the release of all three major components of the Helix DNA family of projects. Of course, things haven't stood still since then; there's been a lot of activity as we work on stabilizing the code and preparing for shipping products based on the code."

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Plea to GNOME/GTK+ Devs: Save Agnubis and Guppi (GnomeDesktop)

Gnome Desktop has a plea for developers to help out with the Agnubis and Guppi projects. "Agnubis is the GNOME Presentation Program comparable to such programs as Microsoft PowerPoint or Corel Present."

"Guppi is a GNOME-based framework for graphing and interactive data analysis."

Comments (1 posted)

Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The April 8, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include Our shrinking Humps, C++ embedded ocaml and shared libraries, Wanted - General Purpose "Glue Logic" Data-Structures, and dynamic HTML pages.

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Java

Java 1.4.2 beta released (GnomeDesktop)

The GnomeDesktop site mentions the release of Java version 1.4.2 from Sun. "The Java version we mentioned the other day with support for GTK+ and Window Manager themes is out in its first beta release. Be sure to get it and get your Java apps to look like they belong in your GNOME desktop."

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JML 3.7 released

Version 3.7 of The Java Modeling Language (JML) has been released. "This release of JML has many improvements over the earlier (3.6) release."

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Informa 0.2.6 released (SourceForge)

SourceForge has an announcement for the release of Informa 0.2.6. "The Informa RSS Library provides a convenient Java API for handling news channels and metadata about them. Different syntax formats (like RSS 0.91 and 1.0 RDF) for channels are supported. It is planned to also support channel information descriptions. This release improves the flexibilty of channel parsing, the channel format defintion and contains also some bug fixes."

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Securing Linux for Java services (IBM developerWorks)

Dennis M. Sosnoski talks about Tomcat security issues on IBM's developerWorks. "In this article, I review the advantages of the Java platform for server applications, then look at the issues involved in simply and safely deploying Java services on Linux. As a practical example, I'll cover the details of setting up the Apache Software Foundation's widely used Tomcat Java servlet engine for standalone operation. "

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Top 12 Reasons to Write Unit Tests (O'Reilly)

Eric M. Burke and Brian M. Coyner make the case for writing unit tests. "A concise code example is better than many paragraphs of documentation. We see this time after time in our consulting work. Far too often, teams produce boilerplate documents that are of little practical value. When programmers need to learn an API, they search for code examples. Tests are among the best code examples because they are concise snippets of code that exercise public APIs."

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Project management: Maven makes it easy (IBM developerWorks)

Charles Chan compares Maven to Ant on IBM's developerWorks. "Even though Ant acts as the de facto standard for building Java programs, in many ways the tool falls short for project management tasks. In contrast, Maven, a high-level project management tool from the Apache Jakarta project, provides everything that Ant offers plus more. Java developer Charles Chan introduces Maven's features and walks you through a complete Maven project setup."

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Lisp

OpenMCL 0.13.5 released

OpenMCL 0.13.5 is available. "This maintenance release provides new debugging commands, a fix to a FORMAT directive, and checks for CPU data cache line size."

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CL-BibTeX 0.4 released

Version 0.4 of CL-BibTeX is available. "CL-BibTex is a replacement written in Common Lisp of the BibTeX bibliography database tool. It allows users to format bibliographic entries using Lisp programs rather than the stack language of BibTeX style files."

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The March 30 - April 6, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out. "Patches, crashes, hashes and stash caches, these are a few of my favorite things. If you like them, too, this week's P5P summary is for you !"

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The Perl Foundation - Survey and Proposal Forms (use Perl)

The Perl Foundation has announced its first survey and project proposal form. Help TPF establish the Perl community's funding priorities for 2003 by participating in this survey.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary

Topics on this week's PHP Weekly Summary include: GD from 2.0.12, standards, var_dump(), ZE2, socket vulnerability, PHP 5 Reflection RFC, ext/xml updated, PECL extensions for Windows, DOMXML function, and openssl_sign() patch.

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Ten Security Checks for PHP, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

Part two of the O'Reilly article on PHP security checks is available. "The same global access that makes web apps useful means that you have to keep on top of security. Though it's easy to create sites in PHP, it's not immune to sloppy coding. Clancy Malcolm explains how to recognize and fix five potential security holes with PHP in the second of two articles."

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Python

Python-dev summary

The Python-dev summary for the second half of March is now available. It looks at PyCon, the continuing "lists v. tuples" discussion, capability-mediated modules, and several other topics.

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This week's Python-URL

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for April 9 is available. It looks at a proposed ":=" operator which would have no default semantics, along with several other topics.

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Ruby

The Ruby Weekly News

Topics on this week's Ruby Weekly News include: J->E translation of Matz's Japan /. interview, Inherit vs. include, and Standardized package installation procedure.

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Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for April 8 is out with the latest from the Tcl/Tk development community.

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XML

XML development with Eclipse (IBM developerWorks)

Pawel Leszek illustrates the use of the Eclipse platform with XML. "This article gives you an overview of how the Eclipse Platform supports XML (Extensible Markup Language) development. Eclipse does not support XML code editing right out of the box. However, because Eclipse is a platform-independent framework for building developer tools, you can add support for new languages relatively easily."

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Conditional Execution (O'Reilly)

Bob DuCharme introduces xsl:if on O'Reilly. "Most programming languages provide some means of conditional execution, which allows a program to execute an instruction or block of instructions only if a particular condition is true. Many programming languages do this with if statements; the XSLT equivalent is the xsl:if instruction."

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Miscellaneous

ROBODoc 4.0.0 released (SourceForge)

Version 4.0.0 of ROBODoc is available. "ROBODoc is a documentation tool. It extracts the documentation from commentheaders in the sourcecode and formats it in HTML, RTF, TeX, or ASCII. Works with C, Tcl, FORTRAN, and any other language that supports remarks."

Comments (none posted)

Regina REXX 3.1 released (SourceForge)

Version 3.1 of the Regina REXX Interpreter is available. "This release makes Regina 100% compliant with the 1996 ANSI Standard for Rexx. The documentation has also been updated and is now available online in HTML and PDF, and dowloadable in HTML, PDF and OpenOffice Writer formats."

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