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DevelopmentThe Elisa Media Center project Elisa Media Center is a cross-platform (Windows Vista, XP, and Linux, eventually Mac) media management project that is sponsored by Fluendo. The company is also known for its sponsorship of the GStreamer multimedia framework. The Elisa project's home page explains:
Elisa is an open source cross-platform Media Center featuring an intuitive interface with a professional look and feel which can be easily used with a standard TV remote control. Elisa is designed to be easily extensible through plugins. It relies on Python and
Twisted as core technologies.
Elisa can manage movies, photographs, and music. It can work with media from locally connected peripherals, other machines on the LAN and the Internet. The software includes support for IR remotes and touchscreens. Elisa uses a modular design with support for plugins which give the system access to various media sites and other information. A fairly out of date feature list explains the capabilities in more detail. A good way to see the capabilities of the software is to take a look at the flashy demo video and screenshots. Following on heels of the recently announced version 0.5.1 (the initial public 0.5 series release), version 0.5.2, entitled "Good news everyone" was announced this week:
The main outlines of this release are:
- The integration of a media scanner that indexes one's music collection
and allows one to browse it by Artists/Albums, with automatic albums'
covers and artists' photos retrieval;
- The localization of the UI. Thanks to contributions from the community
Elisa is currently fully translated in Spanish, Catalan, French,
Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese.
![[Elisa Media Center]](/images/ns/elisalogo.png)
The Elisa source code is available for download, packaged versions for Ubuntu and Debian should appear soon.
System Applications Database Software Drizzle: a lighter MySQL MySQL founder Michael Widenius announces the launch of the Drizzle project. "Drizzle is a smaller, slimmer and (hopefully) faster version of MySQL; Features that the broad Drizzle community does not want or need are now removed or in the process of being removed (This includes stored procedures, views, triggers, grants, some non-pluggable storage engines and more)." It also, apparently, is intended to be developed in a more community-oriented manner, "A bit like Fedora does to RedHat."
Elixir 0.6.0 released Version 0.6.0 of Elixir has been announced. "Elixir is a declarative layer on top of the SQLAlchemy library. It is a fairly thin wrapper, which provides the ability to create simple Python classes that map directly to relational database tables (this pattern is often referred to as the Active Record design pattern), providing many of the benefits of traditional databases without losing the convenience of Python objects."
PostgreSQL Weekly News The July 20, 2008 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Filesystem Utilities Allmydata.org 1.2 released Version 1.2 of Allmydata.org, a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem, has been announced. "The Hack Tahoe! contest has already paid off in finding a subtle flaw in our crypto scheme."
pam_mount: 0.43 release (SourceForge) Version 0.43 of pam_mount has been announced. "pam_mount is a Pluggable Authentication Module that can mount volumes for a user session (login). Supports mounting local filesystems of any kind the normal mount utility supports, with extra code to better support CIFS, FUSE, various crypto, and more. davfs support got removed, fsck patches been incorported and the documentation has been updated."
TestDisk and PhotoRec 6.10 released Version 6.10 of TestDisk & PhotoRec is out. "TestDisk & PhotoRec 6.10 comes with severals improvements: - Report disk manufacturer and model under Windows and Linux (Only Linux was supported in 6.9) - Under Linux, /dev/mapper/* and /dev/md? are now listed with the harddisks. - Now both OS and compiler versions are recorded in the log file. This new TestDisk version can - undelete files and directories for FAT filesystem, - undelete files for ext2 filesystem, - copy files from ext2/ext3 partitions. These feature was already available for FAT and NTFS."
Security WSFuzzer: Version 1.9.3 is out (SourceForge) Version 1.9.3 of WSFuzzer has been announced. "WSFuzzer is a fuzzing penetration testing tool used against HTTP SOAP based web services. It tests numerous aspects (input validation, XML Parser, etc) of the SOAP target. It is only to be used against targets that have granted permission to be tested. 1.9.3 brings some new features to the existing set. See the release notes for the details. Most of the new features were inspired by suggestions from Paco Hope, many thx to him for that."
Web Site Development Blosxom: 2.1.0 released (SourceForge) Version 2.1.0 of Blosxom has been announced, it has some new capabilities and bug fixes. "Blosxom is a lightweight yet feature-packed weblog application designed from the ground up with simplicity, usability, and interoperability in mind."
Segue CMS: 1.9.4 Released (SourceForge) Version 1.9.4 of Segue CMS has been announced. "Segue is an open source collaborative content management system designed for e-learning that combines the ease of use of course management systems with the flexibility of weblogs for creating various types of sites including course, news, and journal. This release fixes bugs in local link tokinization to make it more accurate, consistent and thorough."
Miscellaneous OpenSSH 5.1 released OpenSSH 5.1 is out. There's a long list of new features in this release, including an experimental mechanism for displaying host keys as ASCII art. A new SSH usage survey has also been posted; interestingly, it shows OpenSSH usage dropping slightly over the last couple of years.
Desktop Applications Desktop Environments GNOME 2.23.5 released Version 2.23.5 of the GNOME desktop has been announced. "Here's the first release after GUADEC. Istanbul. It was a great place. And some people actually had time to visit the beautiful city. Or to take a turkish bath. Sounds like a cool program, doesn't it? Of course, it was not only about this -- there were tons of interesting discussions, lots of sessions around various topics, etc. But you know what? The GNOME contributors actually managed to continue hacking on their modules. Amazing. Those people never stop. I guess it shows how passionate they are! So they made changes that are now visible in this latest version of GNOME. And if you look closely, you can feel some turkish love in the air around this release! Cool stuff."
GNOME Software Announcements The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE 4.1 release candidate out for testing (KDE.News) A release candidate for KDE 4.1 has been announced. "Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride."
KDE Software Announcements The following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Xorg Software Announcements The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
Games Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.4.1 released (SourceForge) Version 0.4.1 of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has been announced. "Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free rogue-like game of exploration and treasure-hunting. Stone Soup is a continuation of Linley's Dungeon Crawl. It is openly developed and invites participation from the Crawl community. 0.4.1 fixes some serious bugs found and diligently reported by various players for 0.4."
GUI Packages wxPython 2.8.8.1 released Version 2.8.8.1 of wxPython, a GUI toolkit for Python, has been announced. This release adds some new capabilities and fixes some bugs.
Music Applications Qtractor 0.2.0 is out Version 0.2.0 of Qtractor has been announced, it includes several new features and bug fixes. "Qtractor is an audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application written in C++ with the Qt4 framework."
Office Suites KOffice Releases Ninth Alpha of KOffice 2.0 (KDE.News) KDE.News looks at new developments to the KOffice 2.0 office suite. "With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work."
Web Browsers Firefox 3.0.1 released Version 3.0.1 of the Firefox web browser has been announced. "As part of Mozilla Corporation's ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com/. We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release."
Miscellaneous LWN Comment Features Update fancyLWNComments is a Greasemonkey script that makes comment threads a bit more pleasant. It has been updated to work with the recent site changes at LWN.
Chandler Desktop 1.0-rc1 released Version 1.0-rc1 of Chandler Desktop has been announced. "The Chandler Project is an open source, standards-based information manager designed for personal use and small group collaboration." See the blog posting for release details.
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly News The July 22, 2008 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Python Python 2.6b2 and 3.0b2 released Versions 2.6b2 and 3.0b2 of Python have been announced. "Please note that these are beta releases, and as such are not suitable for production environments. We continue to strive for a high degree of quality, and these releases are intended to freeze the feature set for Python 2.6 and 3.0. From now until the planned final releases in October 2008, we will be fixing known problems and stabilizing these new Python versions. You can help by downloading and testing them, providing feedback and hopefully helping to fix bugs. You can also use these releases to determine how changes in 2.6 and 3.0 might impact you."
Version Control GIT 1.5.6.4 released Version 1.5.6.4 of the GIT distributed version control system has been announced, it features a number of bug fixes.
Miscellaneous once:radix: version 1.0 released (SourceForge) Version 1.0 of once:radix has been announced. "once:radix is a Rapid Application Development system for Intranet and eXtranet environments. Create advanced database-driven web applications that require no expertise in the underlying technologies. Just point and click with pixel-perfect precision. once:radix - the world's first browser-based Rapid Application Development platform for Intranet and eXtranet environments - was released at OSCON 2007. After 12 months of intensive development, once:technologies celebrates the first anniversary of its launch with the release of once:radix version 1.0."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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