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DevelopmentThe Equinox Desktop Environment approaches version 2.0The Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is a lightweight alternative to GNOME and KDE that aims to be used on embedded systems and older desktop machines. Equinox shares the lightweight desktop environment space with FVWM, LXDE and Xfce. The project has been around since at least 2005 and the code is licensed under the GPLv2. Equinox is built on top of FLTK, the Fast Light ToolKit and follows the freedesktop.org standards. The EDE FAQ mentions that EDE had been using the eFLTK fork of the never-released FLTK 2.0, and has since switched back to using the stable FLTK 1.x series. From the about document:
EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is simple and fast desktop environment with familiar look and feel. EDE uses FLTK toolkit for GUI presentation and UNIX philosophy for it's design.
With UNIX philosophy, EDE splits each component in separate executable entity that do one job and do it good. This makes EDE very easy to alter on user needs or requirements.
EDE is light and fast. It uses C++ carefully yielding fast startup, low memory usage and great portability. Also, we care not only about how EDE runs, but how much time is needed to compile it.
This facts makes EDE a perfect desktop environment for older computers and embedded devices. But, you can use it on your everyday hardware too.
![[Equinox Desktop Environment]](/images/ns/EDELogo.png)
Digging through the project's news listings shows that EDE has been ported to the Mandriva, Ubuntu, and STX live CD Linux distributions and also OpenBSD and Minix 3. EDE also runs on sXb, a Slackware distribution for the Xbox platform. The screenshots give a look at various versions of EDE on a number of platforms. The project's Recent Changes document shows that all of the current work is being performed by developer Sanel Zukan. Version 2.0 Beta of EDE was announced on October 8, 2009. The release has been coming for around three years. The Change Log has an overview of what's new: "EDE 2.0 Beta is the latest release of EDE desktop. This release brings a lot of improvements and introduces some new cool features and programs. Please note how this release is still a beta, going toward brand new and redesigned 2.0 release." The release announcement also sheds some light on the structure of EDE, with the following components undergoing improvements: the EDE Library, Panel, Desktop, Dialog Helper, Bug Report Tool, Crash Handler, Mount notifier and Launcher. Whether the Linux world needs another lightweight Linux desktop environment remains to be seen. The project's success will likely remain tied to the efforts of its main developer, and its adoption into widely-used Linux distributions and embedded projects.
System Applications Audio Projects Music Player Daemon 0.15.5 releasedVersion 0.15.5 of Music Player Daemon has been announced. "This release improves stability by fixing one hang and a few memory leaks."
Database Software PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe October 18, 2009 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
SQLite 3.6.19 releasedVersion 3.6.19 of the SQLite DBMS has been announced. "Changes associated with this release include the following: * Added support for foreign key constraints. Foreign key constraints are disabled by default. Use the foreign_keys pragma to turn them on. * Generalized the IS and IS NOT operators to take arbitrary expressions on their right-hand side. * The TCL Interface has been enhanced to use the Non-Recursive Engine (NRE) interface to the TCL interpreter when linked against TCL 8.6 or later. * Fix a bug introduced in 3.6.18 that can lead to a segfault when an attempt is made to write on a read-only database."
SQLObject 0.12.0 releasedVersion 0.12.0 of SQLObject has been announced, this is the first stable release of branch 0.12. "SQLObject is an object-relational mapper. Your database tables are described as classes, and rows are instances of those classes. SQLObject is meant to be easy to use and quick to get started with."
Interoperability Samba 3.3.9 is availableVersion 3.3.9 of Samba has been announced. "This is the latest stable release of the Samba 3.3 series". More information is available in the release notes.
Mail Software Exim 4.70 prerelease announcedPrerelease version 4.70 of Exim, a mail transfer agent, has been announced. "The release of Exim 4.70 is on the horizon. A lot of stuff has accumulated in CVS since January 2008. Since we want to give the current code some wider exposure, please accept this invitation to test a 4.70 pre-release." (Thanks to Neil Youngman).
Telecom Nokia Sponsors KOffice Development for Mobile Devices (KDE.News)KDE.News has an interview with Suresh Chande. "At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer. The improvements in KOffice have largely been in the libraries, on top of which a Maemo-specific GUI was written. KOffice became faster and more stable, and the various file import filters have been greatly improved. This includes the beginnings of MS Office 2007 import support. Thanks to this work the KOffice document viewer for Maemo will be able to properly read files created with a wider range of office applications, and all other users of KOffice 2.x will benefit."
Web Site Development Midgard 8.09.6 releasedVersion 8.09.6 of the Midgard web content management system has been announced. "The Midgard Project has released the sixth maintenance release of Midgard 8.09 Ragnaroek LTS. Ragnaroek LTS is a Long Term Support version of the free software content management framework. The 8.09.6 "AmsterGard" release focuses on API stability and provides improved Midgard installer."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ecasound 2.7.0 releasedVersion 2.7.0 of Ecasound, an audio processing utility, has been announced. This is the 10th anniversary of the project. "Initial Open Sound Control (OSC) interface for parameter control has been added. New '-chorder' and '-eadb' options, and 'cop-get' interactive mode command, have been added. Optional build time support has been added for using liboil to optimize inner loops, giving a small performance boost to many common use-scenarios. Various bugs fixed in JACK support, mp3 output and option parsing. Fixes to build problems in Mac OS X."
Desktop Environments GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
X11R7.5 Release Candidate 1 announcedVersion 7.5 RC 1 of X11 has been announced. "At this point, only some final bug fixes and documentation updates are expected between now and the final release of X11R7.5, including final releases of several modules for which release candidates are included in this set (including xorg-server 1.7.1, xorg-docs 1.5.0, and a couple driver modules)."
Xorg Software AnnouncementsThe following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
Music Applications ifn parser tools for csound 1.05 releasedVersion 1.05 of ifn parser tools for csound has been announced. "Ifn parser tools includes a number of csound tools that are useful[] within an ide along with a ifn renumbering tool that helps with numbering unencapsulated instruments in csound. The current version includes an ifn renumber, an ifn locater, a depreceated csound command locater and a pfield counter."
Office Suites OpenOffice.org 3.2 Beta releasedVersion 3.2 Beta of OpenOffice.org has been announced. "The OpenOffice.org Community is proud to announce the availability of a beta release of its upcoming 3.2 version. This first preview is for everyone interested in the new features and enhancements of the final 3.2 release, expected in December."
OpenOffice.org development switches to MercurialThe OpenOffice.org project has announced plans to switch to the Mercurial source code management system. "We have chosen Mercurial out of the three major open source DSCM tools available (Git, Bazaar and Mercurial) because we believe that its combination of ease of use, flexibility and performance fits best with the overall OOo needs. We are well aware that a slightly different emphasis on the selection criteria might well have led to a choice of Git or Bazaar, which are both very capable DSCMs as well."
Digital Photography UFRaw 0.16 releasedVersion 0.16 of UFRaw has been announced. "I'm pleased to announce the release of UFRaw-0.16. The major new feature of this release is 100% zoom. Yet I must warn you all that what you are seeing is not the final implementation. The current implementation is a bit slow and setting the zoom level to 100% will freeze the user interface for a few seconds. By the next version of UFRaw this should be fixed. Other interesting new features include image rotation by arbitrary angle and adjustment of color lightness by hue. In addition 39 new cameras are supported (see list below)."
Science LabPlot and SciDAVis Collaborate on the Future of Free Scientific Plotting (KDE.News)KDE.News interviews developers of the LabPlot and SciDAVis projects about their collaboration plans. Both projects are GUI plotting tools and plan to work together on back-end code. "The collaboration has stopped short of merging the projects for a few reasons. There are (presently at least) different approaches to the user interface. Alexander notes that 'SciDAVis, being a fork of QtiPlot, provides an Origin like way of doing plotting. LabPlot has a different approach. Both programs have their own user basis. This fact justifies the development of two UIs supporting different workflows'. Knut agrees with this but sees a bigger obstacle in the choice of pure Qt or KDE in the applications: 'SciDAVis is expressly cross-platform, and the practical viability of KDE on Windows and Mac OS X remains to be proven. LabPlot on the other hand puts some emphasis on its integration with KDE'."
Video Applications Bombono DVD 0.5.2 releasedVersion 0.5.2 of Bombono DVD has been announced. "Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. This software allows you to get video on those optical discs without knowing many technical details. The version 0.5.2 is the last stable one from the first program publication and ready to use by general public. The program provides full authoring sequence: making chapters while browsing videos, custom menu creation, authoring and optionally burning on DVD. Also, it features such an interesting feature as re-authoring: one can get video back from DVDs."
Languages and Tools C GCC 4.4.2 releasedVersion 4.4.2 of GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection, has been announced. "This release is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.4.1 relative to previous releases of GCC."
GCC 4.4.2 Status ReportThe October 15, 2009 edition of the GCC 4.4.2 Status Report has been published. "GCC 4.4.2 release tarballs have been uploaded, the 4.4 branch is again open for commits under the usual release branch rules."
Sparse 0.4.2 releasedVersion 0.4.2 of Sparse, a semantic parser for C, has been announced. "As previous discussions on the sparse mailing list, I am the new maintainer of the sparse project. This is my first release for sparse. Thanks Josh Triplett for the previously maintaining the project."
Videos from the LLVM Developers' MeetingThe LLVM Developers' Meeting happened on October 2; videos from many of the talks are now available (in encumbered formats, alas). Covered topics include LLVM backend building, Unladen Swallow, the "Parfait" bug checker, extreme vectorization, Ruby acceleration, and more.
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe October 20, 2009 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Perl Parrot 1.7.0 "African Grey" releasedVersion 1.7.0 of Parrot has been announced, it adds some new capabilities. "On behalf of the entire Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.7.0 "African Grey." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages."
Python Setuptools 0.6c10 releasedVersion 0.6c10 of Setuptools has been announced. "Major updates and fixes include: * Support for SVN 1.6 and Python 2.6 * Fix for the Python 2.6.3 build_ext API change * Support for the most recent Sourceforge download link insanity * Fix for Vista UAC errors running easy_install.exe or other "installer-looking" executables * Fix for errors launching 64-bit Windows Python * Stop crashing on certain types of HTTP error * Stop re-trying URLs that already failed retrieval once * Fixes for various dependency management problems such as looping builds, re-downloading packages already present on sys.path (but not in a registered "site" directory), and randomly preferring local -f packages over local installed packages * Prevent lots of spurious "already imported from another path" warnings (e.g. when pkg_resources is imported late) * Ensure C libraries (as opposed to extensions) are also built when doing bdist_egg".
Setuptools 0.6c11 releasedVersion 0.6c11 of Setuptools has been announced. "It fixes an error when running the "sdist" command on a package with no README, and includes the 64-bit Windows fix that was promised in 0.6c10 but wasn't actually checked in to SVN."
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and linksThe October 15, 2009 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Libraries libfiu 0.13 releasedVersion 0.13 of libfiu has been announced. "libfiu is a C library for fault injection. It provides functions to mark "points of failure" inside your code (the core API), and functions to enable/disable the failure of those points (the control API). It also comes with some tools that can be used to perform fault injection in the POSIX API without having to modify the application's source code, that can help to test failure handling in an easy and reproducible way. This release fixes some portability issues, adds wrappers for strdup()/strndup() and support for simulating incomplete reads and writes, among other minor bug fixes and improvements."
Version Control GIT 1.6.5.1 releasedVersion 1.6.5.1 of the GIT distributed version control system has been announced, it is a maintenance release that addresses a number of bugs.
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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