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DevelopmentThe Linux Brochure ProjectThe first stable version (1.0.0) of the Linux Brochure Project, an application that is used for the generation of Brochures, has been announced.
Our overall goal is simple; document essential Linux information on the two sides of a single letter-sized sheet of paper which is Z-folded into six mini-pages of a brochure that LUGs and other Linux organizations can use for publicity. The LBP data and scripts required to build the brochure are released under the GPL which means the information collected and organized here cannot be hijacked by proprietary interests.
The project was conceived by a small group of developers working with the Victoria Linux Users Group (VLUG). The group needed to build and maintain a Linux Information Brochure, and decided to package and release their efforts. The LBP is composed of a collection of existing open-source packages: "The software consists of LaTeX and pdfLaTeX scripts; Sketch input files; and a Makefile to keep the brochure build organized." The project documentation also mentions the use of ps2eps, pstops from the ps-utils package, and montage from the ImageMagick suite. In other words, LBP is an example of a solution to a specific task that is built from a collection of general purpose open-source tools. A few example brochures exist, more are apparently on the way. The Linux Brochure Project has been released under the GPL, the code is available here.
System Applications Audio Projects Ogg TrafficThe September 30, 2003 edition of Ogg Traffic is out with the latest Ogg Vorbis audio compression software news. "The bad news is that Vorbis 1.0.1 is being held hostage by Win32 build problems, but the good news is that Monty is already bravely charging ahead to work on Vorbis 1.1."
Planet CCRMA newsThe latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio application packaging project include new versions of Anjuta, Libzvt, and Snd.
Database Software MetaCoretex DB Security ScannerThe initial public release of MetaCoretex, a database capable security scanner, has been released.
PostgreSQL Beta4 Tag'd and Bundle'd ...The Beta 4 release of PostgreSQL 7.4 is available. "This release, depending on the bug reports received, will most likely flow into our first Release Candidate by end of next week, so we encourage every(and any)one that can to download and test her, so that our first Release Candidate can be as clean as possible ..."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe October 8, 2003 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is out with the week's PostgreSQL database news.
SwingSet 0.5.0-alpha releasedVersion 0.5.0-alpha of SwingSet, a Java toolkit that makes the Java Swing components database-aware, has been released. For more information, see this NewsForge review. Thanks to Brian E. Pangburn.
ZODB 3.2 release candidate 1Version 3.2 rc 1 of ZODB, the Zope Object DataBase, has been released. This version features improved performance, a new ZEO authentication protocol and configuration language, bug fixes and documentation updates.
Mail Software New milter mail filtersThe milter.org site has an announcement for new versions of the milter-sender, milter-spamc, and milter-date mail filters for sendmail."milter-sender has a new -M option that will probably replace FullCallback and -m, better support for virtual users under Cyrus IMAP, and several fixes." "milter-spamc has a new -A and -R options. The -R option is of significant interest since it patches Sendmail 8.12.10 to support a new type of libmilter return code: " "milter-date likewise has a new -R that uses the same patch from milter-spamc."
Networking Tools Big Sister NUT UPS monitoring module released (SourceForge)A new UPS monitoring module is available for the Big Sister SNMP aware network and system monitor. "The "nut" module monitors uninterruptable power supplies under control of the NUT (Network UPS Tools) free software suite. It sends alerts on power breakages, overload and battery problems. The longterm graphing may point you to battery aging problems."
Purify 0.1 releasedThe initial release of Purify has been announced. Apparently, IBM also has a project with the same name, so the search is on for a new name. "Purify is a graphical tool used to make the management of PureFTPd a little easier. It uses the GTK+2.x widgets for its GUI and thus are not dependent on a specific desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE. It is, however, designed with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines in mind so it should integrate nicely with at least GNOME."
Web Site Development Bricolage 1.6.6 ReleasedVersion 1.6.6 of Bricolage, a web site content management and publishing system, has been released. "This maintenance release addresses a number issues discovered since the release of version 1.6.5."
HarvestMan 1.2 releasedVersion 1.2 of HarvestMan, a Python-based web crawler, is available.
Introducing mod_python (O'ReillyNet)Gregory Trubetskoy introduces mod_python on O'Reilly. "mod_python is an Apache module that gives Python programmers full access to the Apache API. If that's not enough, it can speed up your Python web programming substantially."
Miscellaneous The first stable Xen releaseThe first stable release of the Xen "virtual machine monitor" has been announced. Xen is an x86 emulation system that allows the running of multiple operating systems simultaneously; it serves a function similar to, for example, VMWare or Bochs. The project's developers claim just "a few percent" overhead, however, making Xen rather faster than the alternatives. There is a Linux 2.4.22 kernel running over Xen now; FreeBSD and Windows XP are in the works. Click below for the announcement, or see the Xen web page for more information.
Desktop Applications Audio Applications jackEQ 0.3.3 releasedVersion 0.3.3 of jackEQ, an audio equalizer for the JACK audio system, has been announced. "This is just to let those who are interested know that I just commited some fixes which greatly improve the sound quality in jackEQ and allow the crossfaders to be fully functional including mute and all fader options. Apart from being able to internally assign jack i/os I feel this version qualifies for professional mixing use."
WaveSurfer 1.5.4 releasedVersion 1.5.4 of WaveSurfer, an audio editing package, is out. The changes include a menu reorganization, help system improvements, and more.
Desktop Environments XFree86 4.4.0 Release ScheduleThe release plans have been published for version 4.4.0 of the XFree86 window system.
KDE Under The MicroscopeKDE.News covers a couple of studies done on the KDE project. "While the KDE project continues to research and develop the ideal desktop environment, the KDE community and development processes itself have been researched and examined by two different efforts: Christian Reinhardt of University of Innsbruck chose to study KDE for his "Collaborative Knowledge Creation in Virtual Communities of Practice" Master's thesis." The article also contains excerpts from another study of the KDE project.
Wallpaper Tray 0.4.0 Released (GnomeDesktop)Version 0.4.0 of Wallpaper Tray, a wallpaper manager, is available for GNOME.
KDE-CVS-DigestThe October 3, 2003 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest is online. Here's the content summary: "Quanta gets a table editor. KSvg improves with new gradient algorithms. KStars implements suggestions from the KGUS, aka K Girlfriend Usability Study. Many bugfixes in KMail, KHTML and elsewhere."
KDE TrafficKDE Traffic has come out in two parts this week. The KDE.News summary for part 1 says: "This issue covers KDE 3.2, KDE 3.1.4, apidox, KMail, audiocd, db-aware applications, giving KDE a flak jacket, Jabber, JPEG, and more."The part 2 summary says: "This traffic contains news on KPovModeler, the kdesupport module, Konqueror (what issue would be complete without it?), KMail, KPaint and last but not least, giant pink fluffy bunnies. OK, nix the bunnies, but it's still a decent issue."
Desktop Publishing Conglomerate 0.7.5 releasedConglomerate version 0.7.5 ("Now you see it, now you don't") has been released. Conglomerate is an XML editor which we reviewed just over a month ago. This version is still considered to be unstable, but it does address one of the major issues we had with 0.7: Conglomerate now has an "undo" feature. A number of other improvements have gone in as well; see the announcement for details.
Games PCGen 5.3.11 is available (SourceForge)A new version of PCGen, a cross-platform Java-based RPG character generator and maintenance program, has been announced.
Graphics GIMP 1.3.21 released (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org mentions the release of version 1.3.21 of the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. "The GIMP developers have released a new development snapshot, version 1.3.21 aka the path to excellence release. Among numerous bug-fixes, this release features an improved path tool with SVG import/export and much nicer path stroking based on libart2."
Mail Clients Mozilla Gains Support for Adding and Editing vCards (MozillaZine)MozillaZine reports on new support for vCards in Mozilla Messenger. "A vCard is like a business card attached to your message as a .vcf file."
Office Suites OpenOffice.org NewsletterThe October OpenOffice.org newsletter is out; it looks at the 1.1 release, the new Community Council, the QA project, and a vast number of other topics. "45,0% of the respondents in a German online survey (Computerwoche) say that their company will switch to StarOffice or OpenOffice.org instead of Office 2003."
Web Browsers Epiphany 1.0.1 released (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for version 1.0.1 of the Epiphany web browser for GNOME. "This new release features numerous bugfixes and support for mozilla 1.4.1 and 1.6a."
Minutes of the mozdev Admin MeetingThe minutes have been posted from the October 6, 2003 Mozdev admin meeting. Topics include: abandoned projects, backups, non-profit status, admin tools, spam, and integrated projects.
Word Processors AbiWord Weekly NewsIssue #164 of the AbiWord Weekly News is available. "This week's concept is flow control, specifically, writing over images and around tables, gold stars if you can guess how that affects the development our favourite presentation programme, criawips! Win32 still suffers without aide. Marc brings us the fine world sweet, sweet SVG rendering (with screenshot!). And, why you should worry about Fedora (unless your an archeologist). Plusse, have you ever seen me write in another linguie? Well, here's proof that you're hallucinating!"
Miscellaneous Arkpandora TTF - The MS Webfonts Replacement (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org mentions the availability of the Arkpandora font set. "Many people are still getting (by whatever means) the core MS fonts for their Linux Desktop. This project is meant to be as a replacement for some of these main fonts. They have been designed to match similarly with the fonts they replace."
Languages and Tools C Manipulating Fixed-Width Integer Data Types (O'ReillyNet)Michael Barr writes about fixed data size issues and the ISO C99 standard on O'Reilly. "In the process of manipulating memory-mapped I/O registers, embedded programmers who use C or C++ often require fixed-size integer data types that aren't provided by the language standards. Here's a new look at this old problem, complete with a final solution to the issue of naming fixed-width integer data types."
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe September 30 - October 7, 2003 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with another week of Caml language news, links, and projects.
The Caml Light / OCaml HumpNew Caml language software on The Caml Light / OCaml Hump includes the CamlTemplate template processor library, a ViM extension for parsing .annot files, and OX for integration of XML into Objective-Caml.
Java IRClib 1.01 (SourceForge)Version 1.0.1 of IRClib has been announced. "IRClib is a Java library for IRC client applications." This is a bug-fix release.
Advanced DAO programming (IBM developerWorks)Sean C. Sullivan illustrates the use of Data Access Object patterns on IBM's developerWorks. "J2EE developers use the Data Access Object (DAO) design pattern to separate low-level data access logic from high-level business logic. Implementing the DAO pattern involves more than just writing data access code. In this article, Java developer Sean C. Sullivan discusses three often overlooked aspects of DAO programming: transaction demarcation, exception handling, and logging."
Lucene Intro (O'Reilly)Erik Hatcher introduces Jakarta Lucene, a Java-based text search engine. "Lucene is a high-performance, scalable, search engine technology. Both indexing and searching features make up the Lucene API. The first part of this article takes you through an example of using Lucene to index all the text files in a directory and its subdirectories. Before proceeding to examples of analysis and searching, we'll take a brief detour to discuss the format of the index directory."
Lisp SBCL 0.8.4 releasedVersion 0.8.4 of Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) has been released.
Perl This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)The September 29 - October 6, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters has been published. Topics include: a few Perl 5.8.1 bugs, hidden dependencies, a bleadperl snapshot, documentation patches, 64 bit configurations, and more.
Identifying Audio Files with MusicBrainz (O'Reilly)Paul Mison shows how to access the MusicBrainz audio CD database with Perl. "During 1999 and 2000, however, the CDDB (after its acquisition by Gracenote) moved from an open position (with GPLed downloads of its data files) to a proprietary one. During this time it stopped access to clients speaking the first version of the CDDB protocol, and instead moved to licensing -- at some cost -- CDDB2 clients, and stopped offering downloads of its data. However, a few projects started up, taking advantage of the data that had been freely available until this point. One of these was FreeDB, which quickly established an open replacement for the CDDB. The other is MusicBrainz, which is much more interesting."
PHP Apply probability models to Web data using PHP (IBM developerWorks)Paul Meagher explains probability modeling on IBM's developerWorks. "To help developers learn to fit the benefits of probability modeling into Web application development, Paul Meagher introduces you to basic concepts, techniques, and PHP-based tools that define the area of probability modeling and probability distributions. He demonstrates how to develop univariate probability models in PHP; discusses how to fit empirical data distributions to a theoretical probability distribution; and showcases an important tool for all this -- the Probability Distributions Library (PDL)."
PHP Weekly Summary for October 5, 2003The PHP Weekly Summary for October 5, 2003 is out. Topics include: 4.3.4 RC 1, error message length, array_merge_replace, array_merge_recursive, SAPI input filter.
Modular PHP Development with FastTemplate (O'Reilly)Daniel Solin writes about FastTemplate on O'Reilly. "I don't know about you, but all these documents about dividing web programming into logic, presentation, and content always irritate me. Most of them miss an important point: often at least three people develop a web page--the programmer (i.e, the PHP or Perl guru), the web designer who provides the presentation (the HTML designer), and the content developer (perhaps a marketing person). If you're working for a multilingual company, you probably have to make the pages available in several different languages as well, with one marketing person responsible for each language. Most documentation on this subject tends to forget, or at least doesn't bother to notice, either the web designer or the marketing person."
Python Python 2.3.2 (final) releasedThe final release of Python 2.3.2 is available. "Python 2.3.2 is a bug-fix release, to repair a couple of build problems and packaging errors in Python 2.3.1."
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for October 2, 2003 is available, with weekly news and links for the Python community.
Python Glossary WikiA new Python glossary wiki is being assembled. "This is a Wiki used to collect terms for a Python glossary. For the time being, simply edit this page and add your definitions. Once it's got enough terms, I'll add a glossary section to the appropriate piece(s) of Python documentation (perhaps at the back of the Language Reference Manual)."
Dive Into Python 4.3Version 4.3 of Mark Pilgrim's online Python book Dive Into Python is online. "This book is still being written. The first three chapters are a solid overview of Python programming. Chapters covering HTML processing, XML processing, and unit testing are complete, and a chapter covering regression testing is in progress." See the book's revision history for a list of new contents.
Tcl/Tk This week's Tcl-URLDr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for October 6 is out with the usual collection of happenings in the Tcl/Tk development community.
Cross Compilers Alpha Release 2.90 of GDC for 68HC11/68HC12For those of you who are interested in developing microprocessor applications under Linux, release number 2.90 Alpha of the GNU Development Chain for 68HC11 & 68HC12 is available. "It is based on Binutils 2.14, Gcc 3.3.1, Gdb 5.2.1 and Newlib 1.11.0."
Debuggers GDB 6.0 releasedVersion 6.0 of the GNU debugger (GDB) has been released. The project website has still not been updated as of this writing, but the announcement can be found in the download area. There's a lot of new stuff in this release, including Objective C support, "useable" Java support, the ability to work with the new Native POSIX Threads and thread-local storage, the ability to separate executables and debugging symbol information, and much more. (Thanks to Marko Myllynen).
Editors Leo 4.0 beta 2 released (SourceForge)Version 4.0 beta 2 of Leo has been announced. Leo is a Python scriptable cross-platform programmer's editor, browser, data organizer, and project manager. This release includes quite a few bug fixes.
Miscellaneous Corejava Release 1.1.1 (SourceForge)Version 1.1.1 of Corejava has been released with some minor improvements and bug fixes. "It contains Java source code for Z annotated syntax trees, reading and writing XML files etc." Z is the Z specification language, see the Community Z Tools (CZT) site for more information.
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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