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DevelopmentUse Rakarrack for Electric Guitar EffectsRakarrack is a new GUI-based application that can turn a Linux machine into a collection of audio effects for use in the making of music. The developers include Josep Andreu, Daniel Vidal and Hernán Ordiales with help from other individuals. Rakarrack version 0.1.2 was recently announced, it appears to be the first public release. From the project's web page: ![[Rakarrac]](/images/ns/rakarrack.png)
Rakarrack is a guitar effects processor for GNU / Linux simple and easy to use but it contains features that make it unique in this field of applications. It contains 10 effects: Linear Equalizer, Parametric Equalizer, Compressor, Distorsion, Overdrive, Echo, Chorus, Phaser, Flanger and Reverb. It integrates a tuner and a MIDI converter (experimental). It can also be handled by an external MIDI controller. The settings designed by the user can be stored in presets and these presets can be used to create banks of effects.
The README file in the source code has some information on the motivation behind the project: "This app born after an informal conversation about effects for guitar over GNU/linux. The major part of this apps are discontinued or simply not have new versions after few years. Josep Andreu say on the IRC chat "I can made an app based on the effects set hid[d]en on code of ZynAddSubFX (by Paul Nasca Octavian). Some time after here is the result of our work..." The project screen shots show the GUI layout and various color schemes. Compared to a typical hardware audio processor, the GUI has big advantages over the usual LCD display that most effect units have. One need not hunt around a pushbutton-controlled memory to view and change the many adjustable parameters and the system disk provides nearly unlimited configuration storage possibilities. To hear Rakarrac in action, listen to the demo by Carlos Pino (ogg format). One might wonder if audio effects processors will soon follow mobile phones, TiVo-like video recorders and consumer-based audio recorders in the transition from proprietary operating systems to Linux-based embedded systems. Such a system could be put together with a small Linux-compatible embedded platform, an LCD interface such as LCDproc (with the aforementioned UI limitations), keyboard and audio interfaces and some DSP software similar to Rakarrac. In the mean time, if you have a need for a versatile hardware effector and can spare some CPU cycles, Rakarrac may be an effective solution. The software is available for download here.
System Applications Database Software PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe May 18, 2008 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Device Drivers ALE Server: 1.2.2 Released (SourceForge)Version 1.2.2 of ALE Server, an RFID-EPC compliant RFID middleware package, has been announced. "The staff at logicAlloy is pleased to announce a new release of ALE Server, our open source RFID middleware. This new version has bug fixes related to the default password and linux distributions."
DNS Software Unbound 1.0 releasedSome projects send out an email to announce a release; others opt for press releases. Here is the press release for Unbound 1.0, a new, BSD-licensed domain name server intended to compete with Bind. "Although BIND has been the de facto choice for DNS servers since the 1980s, a desire to seek an alternative server that excels in security, performance and ease of use prompted an effort to develop an open source DNS implementation. Unbound is the result of that effort."
Interoperability Samba Mashup ReportEdition number two of the Samba Mashup Report has been announced. "Table of Contents: 1. Samba 3.2.0 Moves closer to Release 2. Bug fix release for Samba 3.0 in the works 3. Developer Interests - Volker Lendecke 4. Samba at Connectathon 5. Samba4 - Fact or Fantasy? 6. Call for submissions and summaries"
Networking Tools nfsreplay: version 0.0.2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.0.2 of nfsreplay has been announced. "nfsreplay is a tool to replay Network File System traffic. It can be used for server and client benchmarking under a wide range of workloads. It allows temporal and spatial scaling of the original trace."
Putty Terminal Deployer: initial release (SourceForge)The initial release of Putty Terminal Deployer has been announced. "PuTTY Terminal Deployer allows dynamic PuTTY secure shell (SSH) logins to multiple Linux servers. Host, IP addresses and AES encrypted/Base64 encoded passwords are read from a configuration file. All GUI labels are created dynamically from this info."
pyftpdlib 0.4.0 releasedVersion 0.4.0 of pyftpdlib has been announced. "Python FTP server library provides an high-level portable interface to easily write asynchronous FTP servers with Python. Based on asyncore framework pyftpdlib is currently the most complete RFC-959 FTP server implementation available for Python programming language. This new version, aside from fixing some bugs, includes two new features: - IPv6 support (as described in RFC-2428). - The possibility to assume the id of real users when using system dependent authorizers."
Peer to Peer DistrPeer: Version 0.0.2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.0.2 of DistrPeer has been announced. "DistrPeer is a client to p2p network without any hubs and trackers, in other words, fully decentralized. Each file before sharing is encoded and splitted for keeping in several computers what provide redundant and distributed storing of files."
Web Site Development Django security fix releasedA new security fix release of the Django web platform has been announced. "The Django administration application will, when accessed by a user who is not sufficiently authenticated, display a login form and ask the user to provide the necessary credentials before displaying the requested page. This form will be submitted to the URL the user attempted to access, by supplying the current request path as the value of the form's "action" attribute. The value of the request path was not being escaped, creating an opportunity for a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack by leading a user to a URL which contained URL-encoded HTML and/or JavaScript in the request path."
Miscellaneous OpenPanel: 0.9.2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.9.2 of OpenPanel has been announced. "OpenPanel is a remote server administration and configuration system for Unix-based systems. It offers both an AJAX Web interface and a CLI which allow you to manage users, domains, email, and other hosting-related services. Added configurable AXFR restrictions for DNS. Fixed handling of MySQL users, hosts and privileges. Fixed handling of Postfix aliases and catch-all forwards. Cleaned up lots of post-installation issues and stray dependencies."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications NASPRO 0.1.0 releasedVersion 0.1.0 of NASPRO has been announced. "NASPRO is a free, powerful, reusable, modular, real-time capable, thread-safe, scalable, standard-agnostic, cross-platform framework for digital signal processing, especially focused on sound processing. Its main aim is to give audio application developers a full-featured, yet scalable, high-performance and integrated tool to make use of virtually any external sound processing component (including, but not limited to, LADSPA/DSSI, LV2, VST, AudioUnits and DirectX plugins) via a single, fully transparent and platform-independent API."
Desktop Environments GNOME 2.23.2 releasedVersion 2.23.2 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released. "We start the 2.23 development cycle only a few weeks ago, and some results are already appearing here and there. By results, I mean new features, new bugs fixes, and also cool new bugs :-) I'd love to see even more new bugs -- reporting them would help me with my bugzilla points, but it seems GNOME contributors have this habit of keeping things stable. Oh, well."
GARNOME 2.23.2 releasedVersion 2.23.2 of GARNOME, the bleeding edge GNOME distribution, is out. "The "Music for the Maases" release. Hope you enjoy the ride. We are pleased to announce the release of GARNOME 2.23.2 Desktop and Developer Platform. This is the second development release on our trip to GNOME 2.24, which will be out in September."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Desktop Publishing pdfposter 0.4 announcedVersion 0.4 of pdfposter is available. "``Pdfposter`` can be used to create a large poster by building it from mult[i]ple pages and/or printing it on large media. It expects as input a PDF file, normally printing on a single page. The output is again a PDF file, maybe containing multiple pages together building the poster. The input page will be scaled to obtain the desired size. This is much like ``poster`` does for Postscript files, but working with PDF."
Interoperability Wine 1.0-rc1 releasedVersion 1.0-rc1 of Wine has been announced. Changes include: Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.
Music Applications jack-keyboard 2.5 announcedVersion 2.5 of jack-keyboard is available. "The biggest change is switching from hand-written makefiles to autotools. This should make packagers' life easier. jack-keyboard is a virtual MIDI keyboard - a program that allows you to send JACK MIDI events (play ;-) using your PC keyboard."
jack-smf-utils 1.0 releasedVersion 1.0 jack-smf-utils of has been announced. "Jack-smf-utils is a set of two command line utilities - jack-smf-player and jack-smf-recorder - whose purpose is to play and record MIDI streams from/to Standard Midi Files (i.e. the files with .mid extension) using JACK MIDI."
ll-plugins 0.2.0 releasedVersion 0.2.0 of ll-plugins, a collection of LV2 plugins, has been announced. "The plugins are reasonably simple and could be used as examples or starting points for hackers who want to write LV2 plugins based on the frameworks in the lv2-c++-tools package. There are synths, event processors, simple audio and control manipulators and GUI-based plugins."
New release of NtEd - 0.23.0Version 0.23.0 of NtEd, a musical score editor, is out. "New in NtEd 0.23.0: A unique MIDI IMPORT function: - recognizes triplets - distributes the MIDI tracks onto multiple voices per staff"
Science Modular toolkit for Data Processing 2.3 announcedVersion 2.3 of the Modular toolkit for Data Processing (MDP) has been announced, it includes new capabilities and bug fixes. "[MDP] is a Python data processing framework. Implemented algorithms include: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Slow Feature Analysis (SFA), Independent Slow Feature Analysis (ISFA), Growing Neural Gas (GNG), Factor Analysis, Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA), Gaussian Classifiers, and Restricted Boltzmann Machines."
Web Browsers Firefox 3 Release Candidate availableThe first release candidate for Firefox 3 is now available, with many new features and performance improvements. "This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso." Click below for more details.
Languages and Tools C GCC 4.2.4 ReleasedVersion 4.2.4 of GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection, has been announced. "GCC 4.2.4 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.3 relative to previous GCC releases."
GCC 4.3.1 Status ReportThe May 19, 2008 edition of the GCC 4.3.1 Status Report has been published. "The GCC 4.3 branch is open for commits under normal release branch rules. GCC 4.3.1 is still not ready for release as the x86 direction flag issue (36079) needs to be resolved. We have reached consensus to add a new flag -mcld to allow to work around the kernel bug and to add a configure option to enable/disable this by default. The patch from Uros is implementing the -mcld parts but lacks the configure option part for which no patch exists yet."
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe May 20, 2008 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Java OpenSwing: 1.6 released (SourceForge)Version 1.6 of OpenSwing has been announced, it includes many new capabilities and some bug fixes. "OpenSwing is a component library that provides a rich set of advanced graphics components and a framework for developing java applications based on Swing front-end. It can be applied both to rich client applications and Rich Internet Applications."
Lisp CMUCL 19e releasedVersion 19e of CMU Common Lisp has been announced. "This version fixes several ANSI compliance issue, and includes several more enhancements and bug fixes."
GNU CLISP 2.45 releasedVersion 2.45of GNU CLISP has been announced. "This version adds just-in-time compilation of closures, pre-opening of shared libraries, foreign pointer introspection, access to versioned library symbols, new Gray stream functions, and fixes many bugs. CLISP is one of the most popular and actively maintained open-source Common Lisp implementations."
Perl Parrot 0.6.2 releasedVersion 0.6.2 of Parrot has been announced. "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.2 "Reverse Sublimation." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages."
This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)The May 4-10, 2008 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out with the latest Perl 5 news.
Python Pyrex 0.9.8.2 announcedVersion 0.9.8.2 of Pyrex, a language for writing Python extension modules, is available. "A block of external functions can now be declared nogil at once. cdef extern from "somewhere.h" nogil: ... Also some minor nogil-related bugs have been fixed."
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and linksThe May 19, 2008 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
IDEs eric 4.1.4 releasedVersion 4.1.4 of eric, an IDE for Python and Ruby, is out. "It includes a fix for an API change of Qt 4.4, that caused eric4 to crash. Please update immediately."
Libraries Urwid 0.9.8.2 releasedVersion 0.9.8.2 of Urwid, a console UI library for Python, is out. "This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs that have been found in 0.9.8.1."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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