Development

The New Generation of Foomatic

LinuxPrinting.org mentions the release of version 3.0.0 of the Foomatic printer compatibility database. This is the first stable version in the 3.0 series. Foomatic is used for defining printer and printer driver capabilities, it works with the following print spoolers: CUPS, PPD, LPD, LPRng, GNUlpr, PDQ, and PPR. It also supports printer operation without a print spooler.

Some of the important changes in Foomatic version 3.0.0 include:

• One filter, foomatic-rip, works with all spoolers.
• Standard PPD files are now used for all spoolers.
• Full Adobe Compliance for Foomatic generated PPD files.
• Support for manufacturer supplied PPD files.
• Foomatic-rip adheres to Adobe's DSC (Document Structuring Conventions).
• Support for custom page sizes on all spoolers.
• Option settings can be applied to individual pages.
• Support for pre-configured quality levels with "PrintoutMode".
• Much more.

The announcement lists all of the changes in detail. In all, this release looks like a good step toward organizing Foomatic into a simpler and better organized system. Linux and Unix printing are somewhat embarassingly behind the times, hopefully the efforts of the Foomatic team will help to improve this situation.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

Alsa 0.9.3 released

A new version of the Alsa sound driver has been released. The change summary says: "Moved firmware code from vxpocket and hdsp driver to alsa-tools."

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JACK 0.70.4 released

Version 0.70.4 of JACK, the JACK Audio Connection Kit, is available. Changes include bug fixes, the addition of a new port metering API, and more.

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Ogg Traffic

The April 29, 2003 edition of Ogg Traffic is out with Ogg Vorbis audio compression software news. Discussion topics include: Appending an Ogg file to another, Emmett Plant leaves Xiph.org, Independent Label considers going Vorbis, Theora support coming to Xine, and Xiph.org News Feed.

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Education

Linux in education report #95

Issue #95 of the Linux in education report is out. Topics include multiple display management with ZASS, the April Schoolforge meeting logs, a Schoolforge wiki, a free and open source solar system text, the Radio Gutenberg project, free software in education in India, the SchoolTool administration infrastructure project, the WordNet on-line lexical reference system, and more.

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Mail Software

Milter news

The milter.org site has an article on Sendmail Performance Using Milter, and mentions new releases of Milter-Sender and Spamilter.

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Networking Tools

Moodss 17.1 released

Version 17.1 of Moodss, a modular multi-platform monitoring application, has been released.

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Printing

Common UNIX Printing System 1.1.19rc4 available

Version 1.1.19rc4 of CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System, is available. A number of bugs have been fixed, see the release notes for more information.

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Web Site Development

Silva 0.9.1.3 released

Version 0.9.1.3 of Silva has been announced. "Silva is a Zope-based web application designed for the creation and management of structured, textual content. Silva allows users to enter new documents as well as edit existing documents using a web interface." This release features many bug fixes.

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TextIndexNG 2.0 a1 released

Version 2.0 alpha of TextIndexNG has been released. "TextIndexNG is the new fulltext index for Zope and is the most feature-complete solution for fulltext indexing under Zope."

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MySQL User Folder 0.9.1 released

Version 0.9.1 of mysqlUserFolder has been released. "This version is second candidate for 1.0 release - no major changes are planned. Version 0.9.1 brings some "small" improvements and bugfixes".

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Miscellaneous

GNOME System Tools 0.25.0 is out! (GnomeDesktop)

Gnomedesktop.org has an announcement for version 0.25.0 of GNOME System Tools. The GNOME System Tools are a set of cross-platform configuration utilities for Linux and other Unix systems. Internally they are divided in frontends and backends. The frontend knows nothing about the underlying system and provides the same user interface across the different types of systems. The backend knows how to read and write the configuration information."

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

Ardour News

There is some new news from the Ardour multi-track audio recording project: "There's been more going on that you could possibly guess. This list just highlights a few of the most recent items:

• complete redesign of transport mechanism
• editor window mixer strip displays selected track
• better thread-safety throughout
• multi-channel import
• per-mixer-strip hide + width buttons

PLUS Release Date Announced"

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Sound Juicer 0.2.1 is out (GnomeDesktop)

Gnomedesktop.org mentions the release of Sound Juicer 0.2.1. "Sound Juicer is a CD-Ripping tool that aims to provide a clean interface and automatic file tagging."

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CAD

PythonCAD Release Six available

Release number six of PythonCAD has been released. "The sixth release at long last adds the ability to store text in a drawing. The text handling is in its earliest stages of development, but now it is there. There is a new Polyline entity available to use in a drawing now. A Polyline is essentially the same thing as a connected set of segments, with the segments joined at the endpoint of one to another. The ability to mirror objects around an arbitrarily angled construction line has been added in this release as well."

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Desktop Environments

X.Org - X Window - IPV6 Proposed Enhancements - Public Review

The Members of X.Org have announced the availability for Public Review of the proposed enhancements to the X Window System for the support of IPV6.

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The May 2, 2003 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is out. The topic summary includes: "Fixes to Khelpcenter. Scripting interface for Kstars. Kmail editing improvements and bug fixes. Beginnings of Postgresql support for Kexi. More work on screensavers and desktop locking."

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KDE Traffic #49

Issue #49 of KDE Traffic is available. Topics include a kde-look newsflash, Exchange support for KMail?, Move KRename to KDE CVS, Removal of KEdit, Kmyfirewall maintainer resurfaces!, KDE Developer's Conference, KDE 3.1.2, What happened to the KOffice icon contest?, Finally ... a chilean KDE website, and KChart Evolution. Probably.

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Interoperability

Wine Traffic #168

Issue #168 of Wine Traffic has been published. Topics include: CrossOver Plug-in 1.2.1, WineX 3 Review 2, MacOS X Work, Running Borland's Free Compiler (bcc), Updated Valgrind Instructions, New Server Specs, and Updated CVS Utilities.

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News #142

Issue #142 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out. "We get some updated information about the State of Bidi from the Executor and Chief of Bidi for Abiword, Tomas Frydrych. At the same time, the Mail Merge plugin is officially reaches full functionalilty, while the Open Text Summarization tool makes its big debut in Abiword's CVS. Speaking of premiers in the CVS, we now have THREE tutorials for the first time Abiword user, thanks to a technical writing course and too many people lacking communications skills and tutorials for their MUAs (that's a joke, but it will make sense to you in a bit). By the way, 1.9.1 is coming out, today."

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Evolution 1.3.3 Preview available

Version 1.3.3 Preview of Evolution, a personal and workgroup information management application, has been released. The release notes say: "The plan for Evolution 1.3 is to not add any new major features compared to Evolution 1.2. The aim of the upcoming stable release is to just provide the same functionality as Evolution 1.2, but with better integration with the GNOME 2 desktop, as well as to take advantage of the features of the new platform, such as better font support. Of course, a bunch of 1.2 bugs have also been fixed during the process of porting Evolution to GNOME 2."

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Fisterra: Open Source ERP (GnomeDesktop)

Gnomedesktop.org covers the first release of fisterra, an open-source Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP). "It currently supports invoicing, stock and payment management, POS (Point-Of-Sale), distributed work and offline replication. It uses Gnome technologies and PostgreSQL."

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GNUe Traffic #78

Issue #78 of GNUe Traffic is available. Threads include: Multi-language Forms, HTML and Curses User Interfaces for GNUe, and a GNUe Overview.

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LyX Development News

The May 4, 2003 LyX Development News is out. Topics include: CJK LyX 1.3.0 for Qt, Configurable toolbars and the new icons, New menu layout, Recent developments, The humanities of LyX, and Bugwatch.

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LyX 1.3.2 is released

Version 1.3.2 of LyX is available. Changes include spellchecker code overhaul, Qt frontend bug fixes, and improved UI translations.

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StarDict 2.0.0 released (GnomeDesktop)

Gnomedesktop.org has an announcement for version 2.0.0 of StarDict. "StarDict is an international dictionary written for the GNOME environment. It [has] powerful features such as "Glob-style pattern matching", "Scan selection word", "Fuzzy query" and etc".

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Web Browsers

Epiphany 0.6.0 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.6.0 of the Epiphany browser has been announced, with a long list of changes. "Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the mozilla rendering engine. The name meaning: "An intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking""

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Mozilla status update

The May 2, 2003 Mozilla status update has been published. Check it out for the latest Mozilla browser development news.

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Lynx 2.8.5dev.15 released

Version 2.8.5dev.15 of Lynx, a text-mode browser, has been released. The change information is available in the code.

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The May 6, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with the latest Caml language news. Topics include: Dynamic HTML: DTD validation with phantom types, memoization and CPS, comparison with C performance, recursive modules, and GCaml.

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Java

Charming Jython (IBM developerWorks)

Uche Ogbuji writes about Jython on IBM's developerWorks. "Jython, the 100% Pure Java implementation of the Python programming language, combines the advantages of Python and the Java virtual machine and library and serves as a handy complement to the Java platform. In this article, software consultant and frequent developerWorks contributor Uche Ogbuji introduces Jython 2.1 to Java developers by contrasting and comparing the way Python and the Java language create classes and how they use the interpreter. Uche illustrates the differences by providing samples of Java library access, as well as the Jython interpreter shell and code files."

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Lisp

ECL 0.9 released

Version 0.9 of ECL (Embeddable Common-Lisp) is available. "This version remembers by default function definitions from the interpreter, adds a function for creating totally empty files, allows customization of the directory for temporary files used by the compiler, provides minor optimizations, improves ANSI compliance and fixes several bugs."

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The April 28 - 4 May 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out. "This week summary doesn't feature very exceptional bug fixes, or utterly important information, or pearls of the most pleasant sense of humor of the perl5-porters. Does this mean that it's completely non-interesting ? Read it and judge by yourself : shortcuts, ACLs, meta-information, and a couple of cows."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The April 27, 2003 edition of This week on Perl 6 has been published. Check it out for the latest Perl 6 development news.

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May Perl Journal out

The May Perl Journal is available to TPJ subscribers, with articles about Web Localization & Perl; Data Manipulation & Perl Command-Line Options; Google and Perl; and more.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary

The May 5, 2003 PHP Weekly Summary is out. Topics include: "comments and execution speed, DOMXML speed issues, ODBTP project and extension, Why ZTS?, Deprecating stdio, PHP 4.3.2 RC 2 released, *= operator, replacing expat with libxml2, Memory handling in PHP."

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Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! (May 5, 2003)

The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! with news and links for the week of May 5, 2003 is available. This week Michael Chermside explains why subclassing tuple needs two-stage initialization; Jeff Epler explains why "for line in sys.stdin" doesn't stop on the first ctrl-d; and much more.

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XML

Developing E-Business Interactions with JAXM (O'ReillyNet)

Nikhil Patil writes about JAXM on O'Reilly. "RPC-style web services are getting a lot of press, but sometimes transferring a document is more important than calling a remote procedure. Nikhil Patil explores JAXM, the Java API for XML Messaging, which allows document-style web services."

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Web-based XML Editing with W3C XML Schema and XSLT (O'Reilly)

Ali Mesbah writes about XML Editing with W3C XML Schema and XSLT on O'Reilly. "This article describes a technique in which an XML instance document can be edited through an automatically created form-based GUI, based on the schema of the instance document. The whole cycle of GUI creation (using XSLT), editing, and updating (using XUpdate) XML instances is presented here."

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Style stylesheets to extend XSLT, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks)

Read about extending XSLT with stylesheets in an article by Joseph Kesselman on IBM's developerWorks. "XSLT isn't just about styling documents for presentation. It's actually a very general-purpose document transformation processor. And as Joe demonstrates in this two-part series, stylesheets are themselves documents, so XSLT can be used as a portable preprocessor to automatically enhance the behavior of a stylesheet."

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Miscellaneous

Mono 0.24 ships

Version 0.24 of Mono, an open-source implementation of the .NET Development Framework, has been released. "We have released Mono 0.24 which includes our new code generation engine." See the release notes for more information.

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Put virtual filesystems to work (IBM developerWorks)

Cameron Laird talks about virtual filesystems on IBM's developerWorks. "The idea behind a VFS is simple: it represents as a filesystem something that is not a filesystem. Filesystem here means a "conventional Linux-like filesystem": a tree or hierarchy of directly accessible directories and (ordinary) files. The concept should intrigue anyone working with Linux, of course, simply because so much of Linux's own character comes from the representation of devices, tables, and other objects within the UNIX filesystem. UNIX is founded on the principle that everything, or at least plenty of things, are files; VFS generalizes this to view as much as possible as a filesystem."

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