Development

Coming soon: GNOME 2.4

The second beta release of the GNOME 2.4 desktop is now available; see the announcement on FootNotes for download information. Given that the real 2.4 release is intended to happen in early September, it seems like a good idea to have a look at what this release will bring. It would appear, however, that the GNOME folks have been too busy hacking to put together a comprehensive document on what's been done in the 2.3 development series. So the best place to look is this writeup by Sayamindu Dasgupta, who played around with the 2.3.5 release for a bit.

One enhancement in 2.4 will be a new set of system administration tools. There have been a number of attempts at graphical adminstration tools for Linux over the years; with mixed success. Combining the numerous utilities, configuration files, and setup schemes into a unified interface is a hard problem. It is good to see that work is continuing in this area, however. Eventually somebody will get it right.

A good step in that direction is the new "change screen resolution" dialog. Linux doesn't require constant tweaking of the display settings the way certain other desktop operating systems seem to, but it's still a good idea to make it easy when the need arises.

On the browser front, Galeon is gone. Epiphany is now the browser bundled with GNOME. Some quick tests here in LWN labs (where Galeon has long ruled supreme) show that Epiphany pretty much works as expected; it is a reasonable, functioning browser. But we'll probably keep Galeon around for a while yet.

Accessibility is an important theme with 2.4; the "gnopernicus" screen reader has been improved and fixed up. There's a new set of "assistive technology" preferences which control which accessibility tools are started up at the beginning of a session. And, to help keep people from needing assistance in the future, GNOME now includes the obnoxious "time to take a typing break" nagging utility.

There's many other additions, of course; gedit has syntax highlighting, nautilus is improved, etc. See the writeup for more information. Or, better, download the beta and help shake out the last bugs so that 2.4 can be a truly stable release.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

JACK 0.80.0 released

Version 0.80.0 of the JACK Audio Connection Kit is available. Changes include improved portability, a new transport API, support for asymmetric sound cards, and more.

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Database Software

PostgreSQL Weekly News

The August 28, 2003 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News has been published. Take a look for the latest PostgreSQL database news.

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Education

Moodle 1.1 is now available! (SourceForge)

Version 1.1 of Moodle has been released. "Moodle 1.1, the best system for managing and conducting online courses, is now available. Highlights include: A completely new packaging system for backup, transfer and restore of courses."

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Printing

Ghostscript releases

AFPL Ghostscript (i.e. the one with a "not quite entirely free" license) 8.11 has been released; this is the first stable release since 8.00. Improved font rendering is the most significant new feature this time around.

The second release candidate of ESP Ghostscript 7.07.1 is available. ESP Ghostscript is the "Easy Software Products" version, which has been patched to work well with the CUPS print system.

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

KGuitar Release 0.4.9 (SourceForge)

Version 0.4.9 of KGuitar is available. "KGuitar aims to develop a free, full-featured guitarist helper program, focusing on tabulature editing and MIDI synthesizers support." This version adds support for KDE 3.0.

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Ecasound 2.3.0

Ecasound 2.3.0 has been released. It includes a number of important bug fixes, JACK 0.80 support, and numerous other enhancements; see the announcement for details.

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Desktop Environments

KDE Traffic #62

Issue #62 of KDE Traffic is online. The KDE.News summary says: "A whole lot of news in this one, including some discussion on the new KPrefs, GConf2, quick tab access in Konqueror, a lot of KOffice news (beta 3 feature freeze, better support for Word 6 and Word 95), and mention of the new pim.kde.org design. Thanks Russell!"

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August 29 KDE-CVS-Digest

The August 29 KDE-CVS-Digest is available. "Some new applications: Knot, a service location server, Kickme, a lightweight dcop messenger and event viewer, kio-ldap kioslave, KWifiManager, for monitoring wireless cards, the new Plastik widget style, an snmp plugin for Ksim. ARts adds Media Application Server output support."

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GNOME Network 1.99.1 released (GnomeDesktop)

As seen on FootNotes: version 1.99.1 of the GNOME Network package - a set of network-oriented tools - has been released. This is a development release, and thus may not be for everybody.

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Graphics

GIMP 1.3.19 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 1.3.19 of the Gimp has been announced. "GIMP is now very close to a 2.0 prerelease, so your testing efforts are particularly appreciated." The announcement lists the changes in detail.

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Interoperability

Samba-3.0.0 RC2 available for download

The second release candidate of Samba 3.0.0 is available. See the release notes for change information.

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Mail Clients

Balsa 2.0.14 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 2.0.14 of Balsa, and email client for GNOME, is available. New features include message wrapping improvements, delsp draft support, experimental LDAP write support, and bug fixes.

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Mahogany 0.65 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.65 of Mahogany, an email client, has been released. "All existing users should upgrade to this version, it adds many new features (real Drafts folder with automatic messages saving in case of crash; TLS and PGP/GPG support; many, many UI enhancements) and fixes tons of bugs."

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Multimedia

GStreamer ''Mother Theresa'' 0.6.3 (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.6.3 of GStreamer, an open-source extendable multimedia framework, has been announced. "This, along with the merge of netRhythmbox into Rhythmbox is excellent news for the open-source community. With the development of Totem, sound-juicer, and gnome multimedia support GStreamer is getting to be nearing a point where it can be used for everyday media playing. The Pipeline Editor is also becoming quite stable."

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Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News #159

The August 31 edition of the AbiWord Weekly News is out; it includes a call for assistance with the Windows port along with the usual summary of AbiWord development themes and activities.

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Web Browsers

Linky 2.0.0 Released (MozillaZine)

Version 2.0.0 of Linky has been announced. "Linky is an add-on for the Mozilla Application Suite and Mozilla Firebird that adds extra link-related items to the standard page context menu. It allows users to perform tasks such as opening all links on a page in new tabs or copying selected links to the clipboard."

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Mozilla 1.5 beta released

Mozilla 1.5 beta is out. A number of fixes and enhancements have gone in since the 1.5 alpha release; see the release notes for details.

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Miscellaneous

A new gDesklets site

gDesklets is a GNOME architecture for desktop applets. A new site has popped up at gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org to support desklet development. Have a look for the latest release from the desklet hackers.

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Languages and Tools

C++

QuantLib 0.3.3 released (SourceForge)

QuantLib 0.3.3 (a financial modeling library) has been released. "Major additions of this release are an extensive test suite, a partial port to the new Pricing Engine framework, and the support of low-discrepancy Monte Carlo simulation."

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Java

JGraph 3.0 released

Version 3.0 of the JGraph "powerful, lightweight, feature-rich, and thoroughly documented open-source graph component" for Java has been released. It is accompanied by the JGraphPad diagram editor.

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Lisp

SBCL 0.8.3 released

Steel Bank Common Lisp version 0.8.3 is out. "This version, which now also builds on MacOS X, features new optimizations, improved compiler validation, support for automatic dowload and installation of code from CCLAN, the SB-THREAD:INTERRUPT-THREAD function and the usual bug fixes."

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CL-GD 0.14 released

Version 0.14 of CL-GD - a Common Lisp library for dynamic image creation - has been released. This is the first public release of CL-GD, which is built on top of the classic "GD" graphics library.

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Macho 0.2 released

Macho is a web archiving system for electronic mail, written in Lisp. Version 0.2 has just been released, with new support for better quoting highlighting, an improved message parser, and improved performance.

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Perl

This Week on perl5-porters

This week on perl5-porters for August 31 is out, with looks at the Cwd module, base.pm, next and dynamic labels, Spambench, and more.

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Code Review Ladder Mailing List (use Perl)

use Perl has an announcement from Simon Cozens on the creation of the Perl code ladder review mailing list. The idea is to create a forum where Perl code can be reviewed by interested hackers before being submitted to CPAN or whatever else may be its eventual destination. With luck, the list will lead to a higher-quality CPAN in the future.

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Esperanto Translation Mailing List Created (use Perl)

usePerl notes the creation of a mailing list to support the Esperanto translation, which, it seems, beat out Swedish_Chef to be the official YAPC::Europe language.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for September 1, 2003

The PHP Weekly Summary for September 1, 2003 is out. Topics include: 4.3.3 ships, Servlet SAPI, phpize broken, libxml2, and Zend Engine optimizations.

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PHP Security, Part 2 (O'ReillyNet)

John Coggeshall continues his O'Reilly series on PHP security with part two. "Welcome back to PHP Foundations. In my previous article, I continued my mini-series on best practices in PHP by introducing you to some of the ways that security can be compromised in your PHP scripts. This article continues that discussion with more examples of potential security holes and the tools and methods you can use to help plug them. Today I'll start by talking about one of the more critical potential security holes in PHP development writing scripts that make calls to the underlying operating system."

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Python

This week's Python-URL

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for September 1 is out with the latest from the Python development community.

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Cleese - an operating system in Python

"And now for something completely different..." Cleese is a project to write a new operating system entirely in Python - or, at least, as much as possible. The project is young, but it has recently released "HalfPy," a stripped-down version of the Python interpreter, and a bootloader setup that works within Bochs.

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Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for September 1 is available, with the usual summary of happenings in the Tcl/Tk development community.

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Debuggers

Learning the JavaScript debugger Venkman (st.com)

Svend Tofte has put together a tutorial on Venkman, a JavaScript Debugger that is integrated into the Mozilla browser. "Realizing that most people who program JavaScript are not programmers, and thus might not be familiar with debuggers in general, I wanted to make a visual guide, that together with a bunch of screenshots and files, would explain how to use Venkman. For while a debugger is usually an arcana piece of software, most webdevelopers couldn't care less about, using Venkman can improve your productivity, by finding the bugs faster."

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