Development

MJPEG Tools for working with Video on Linux

MJPEG Tools is a set of tools for working with video under Linux.

Some of the video operations that can be performed by MJPEG Tools include:

• Recording of video streams.
• Editing video data.
• Compression of video data.
• Pulling sound and video from pre-recorded files.
• Joining of video and audio files into a single file.
• Transitioning from one video stream to another.
• Scaling from one video encoding to another.
• Performance of video frame rate conversion.
• Support for variable bit-rate multiplexing.
• Creation of video CDs.

A partial list of standards supported by MJPEG Tools includes:

• Input from PAL and NTSC video inputs.
• Capture from AVI and Quicktime formatted video.
• MPEG 1 and 2 video encoding.
• Support for stereo audio.
• Output to VCD, SVCD, DVD, and DIVX media.
• Support for the ALSA and OSS/Free sound drivers.

The MJPEG HOWTO and FAQ documents show how the tools are used to perform a wide variety of operations, and the type of hardware that is required for useful performance.

Some still-frame examples show a few examples of the quality that can be achieved from the captured video.

Version 1.6.2 of MJPEG Tools was recently announced, change information is in the source code.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

ALSA 1.0.2c released

Version 1.02c of the ALSA sound driver is out. The change notice says: "More fixes for compilation problems".

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Ogg Traffic

The February 9, 2004 edition of Ogg Traffic is out with the latest Ogg Vorbis audio compression software news.

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Planet CCRMA Changes

The latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include support for the Fedora Core distribution, new versions of Libsndfile, and several Common Lisp Music components.

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Database Software

PostgreSQL Weekly News

The PostgreSQL Weekly News for February 9, 2004 is available. "There are a number of updates for proposed features for 7.5, but first let's take a look through the list of changes committed to code this past week."

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Embedded Systems

BusyBox 1.0.0-pre7 released

BusyBox version 1.0.0-pre7 has been released. "There was a bug in -pre6 that broke argument parsing for a number of applets, since a variable was not being zeroed out properly. This release is primarily intended to fix that one problem. In addition, this release fixes several other problems, including a rewrite by mjn3 of the code for parsing the busybox.conf file used for suid handling, some shell updates from vodz, and a scattering of other small fixes."

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Mail Software

Siesta Mailing List Manager

Simon Wistow looks at Siesta, a Perl-based mailing list manager program. "By some quirk of fate Greg McCarroll, Richard, and I were all simultaneously 'resting' between jobs. Being fun-loving, crazy people we decided that the most constructive use of time was to congregate at Greg's, drink his booze, and watch Kevin Smith films. Instead, we wrote a mailing list manager. Well, I say "instead", but we managed to do the other stuff too, which explains the Jay-and-Bob-themed test suite."

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Printing

LPRng 3.8.25 released

Version 3.8.25 of the LPRng print system has been released. Change information is in the source code.

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Telecom

Linux Untethered

Brian Jepson writes about successes and failures involving Linux and wireless modems. "I had a data connection up not long ago with my Merlin G100 for 1 hour and 45 minutes, and experienced 5.2 Kilobytes per second (just over 40kbps) on a sustained download of an 8-megabyte compressed file. I used to go out of my mind when I tried that with a Bluetooth connection on either my Nokia 3650 or Sony Ericsson T68i. But I still swear by Bluetooth for things like sync, remote control, or transferring applications, ring tones, or wallpaper."

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Web Site Development

Introducing LAMP Tuning Techniques (O'ReillyNet)

Adam Pedersen shows how to tune LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python) applications on O'Reilly. "I'm getting to know far more about servers than I ever wanted to, after hundreds of hours of Google research trying to squeeze/beat performance out of Apache. I do have 15 years programming experience in other areas, and I've reached the conclusion that the only experts in Apache/Linux are the programmers who wrote (and poorly documented) all this stuff. So I've gathered everything I could learn after countless hours of frustration and I'm writing this up in return for the immense amount of help I've received from the documentation of others."

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Client and server-side templating with Velocity (IBM developerWorks)

Sing Li writes about the Velocity template processor on IBM's developerWorks. "Velocity is a versatile, open source templating solution that can be used standalone in report generation/data transformation applications, or as a view component in MVC model frameworks. In this article, Sing Li introduces Velocity and reveals how you can integrate its template-processing capabilities into your own client-side standalone application, server-side Web application, or Web services."

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Tiki 1.8 -Polaris- released (SourceForge)

Version 1.8 of Tiki, a web wiki, is available. "Main new features and enhancements: - Databases suported: MySql, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase; - Switch from PEAR::DB to adodb; - Mapserver; - Integrator: Integrate other applications in tiki; - New database independent search engine (use the "search_new" module); - Enhancements in installer, articles, forums, newsletters and wiki, including some new plugins and modules;"

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Documentation

Documenting your project using the Eclipse help system (IBM developerWorks)

Arthur Barr shows how to use Eclipse for documentation purposes. "The Eclipse Platform, which provides a very powerful IDE, includes its own help system based on an XML table-of-contents referencing HTML files. What isn't immediately obvious is that you don't have to write Eclipse plug-ins to use it. Any project can use a cut-down version of the platform to provide professional, easy-to-use, and searchable documentation."

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Miscellaneous

GNOME System Tools 0.32.0 is out! (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.32.0 of GNOME System Tools has been announced. "A new GNOME System Tools release is out! The g-s-t are cross-platform configuration utilities for unix/linux, among lots of other good stuff, this new release has been mostly dedicated to some UI polishing, fixing a BE/FE communication bug and adding support for PLD 1.1 and 1.99".

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

Audacity 1.2.0-pre4 released

Version 1.2.0-pre4 of Audacity, an audio editor, is out. "This version fixes many minor bugs found in Audacity 1.2.0-pre3. This is a "release candidate" version. If no new bugs are found, we will release the new stable version 1.2.0 later this month."

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WaveSurfer 1.6.2 released

Version 1.6.2 of the WaveSurfer audio editor has been released. See the Change History document for details.

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Desktop Environments

GNOME Desktop & Developer platform 2.4.2 released (GnomeDesktop)

GNOME version 2.4.2 has been announced. "On behalf of the GNOME foundation, the release team and all the various maintainers, documenters, translators and bughunters I have the honor of announcing a new point release from the stable series of 2.4.x releases of the GNOME Desktop and developer platform."

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GNOME Summary

The GNOME Summary is out for February 1-7, 2004. Take a look for the latest GNOME desktop news. "This weeks GNOME summary contains news about the new Sound Juicer release, "Vino", the Solutions Linux Gnome Exhibit in Paris, and major changes to jhbuild."

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Release: gTask v0.1 (GnomeDesktop)

The initial release of gTask has been announced. "gTask is a daemon and client library that allows programs to communicate the progress of certain long running operations (ie downloading files, printing, etc) to a central daemon. This is the first stable release of the core and user interface libraries."

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KDE-CVS-Digest (KDE.News)

The February 6, 2004 KDE-CVS-Digest is available. Here's the intro: "KStars now has constellation lines. Gwenview is now a KPart, for embedded use in Konqueror. Plus many bug fixes and improvements in KMail and Konqueror."

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Desktop Publishing

CL-PDF 2.1 and cl-typesetting 0.70 released

Two new Lisp-based PDF packages have been announced. "CL-PDF is a Common Lisp library for generating documents in Adobe Acrobat format. It is a standalone library that does not need any Adobe or third-party tools."

"cl-typesetting is a complete typesetting system written in Common Lisp, and it is based on CL-PDF for the direct generation of PDF documents. It is intended as an alternative to the TeX typesetting system."

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Electronics

Gnucap 0.34 released

Version 0.34 of Gnucap, a circuit analysis program, is out. "This is primarily a bug fix and compatibility release."

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XCircuit 3.2.7 (development) available

Development version 3.2.7 of the XCircuit electronic schematic drawing package is out. "XCircuit-3.2 is the development version of XCircuit. Current work includes the integration of automatic schematic capture (ASG) with Stephen Frezza of Gannon University, and the addition of comprehensive "undo" and "redo" functions. This should keep us occupied for a while."

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Financial Applications

GNUe Traffic

The February 4, 2004 edition of GNUe Traffic is out with the latest GNU Enterprise news. ""

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Games

WorldForge Weekly News

The February 6, 2004 edition of the WorldForge Weekly News is out with the latest development news from the WorldForge game project.

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GUI Packages

New FLTK Software

The latest new software releases for FLTK, the Fast Light Toolkit, include new versions of the Table widget, TesselSphere, IFLTK from the Colorado Eiffel Users Group, and SPTK.

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The Tk Canvas Widget (Linux Journal)

Derek Fountain introduces the Tk Canvas Widget in the Linux Journal. "The canvas widget in the Tk graphical user interface toolkit is a free software tool used to present graphical data. Like the Tk text widget, which I discussed in my previous article, the canvas widget is accessible from most modern scripting languages, including Tcl, Perl and Python. It provides those languages with a best of breed facility for structured graphics work."

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Interoperability

Samba 3.0.2 Available for Download

Samba 3.0.2 is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the version that all production Samba servers should be running to take advantage of all current bug fixes.

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Vstserver 0.3.1 released

Version 0.3.1 of vstserver is out. "Vstserver is a program that must be running when using programs using vstlib. Vstlib is a library that can be used by programs to run windows vst audio plugins under i386linux/i386freebsd/i386solaris/i386etc."

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Wine Traffic

The February 3, 2003 edition of Wine Traffic has been published and features a WineConf 2004 Summary.

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Mail Clients

Two Critical Bugs in KMail 1.6 Detected (KDE.News)

Two critical bugs have been found in KMail 1.6. One is related to POP filters and the other to spam filtering and both cause mail loss. They are fixed in CVS and patches are linked on the KDE 3.2 Info Page.

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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 Released (MozillaZine)

Version 0.5 of the Mozilla Thunderbird email and newsgroup application has been released. "This release features Palm address book synchronisation, IMAP performance improvements, better LDAP support, enhanced Netscape 4.x migration, spell check/dictionary improvements, and many other bug fixes and minor tweaks."

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Medical Applications

OpenEMR with new Practice Management and Reporting Features (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews looks at the latest version of OpenEMR, a medical record system. "OpenEMR now incorporates PostCalendar from PostNuke, and phpMyAdmin for reporting. Create a report with phpMyAdmin, save it and create a web link for the report."

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Multimedia

Release: GStreamer 0.7.4 ''Wooden Slugs'' (GnomeDesktop)

A new development release of the GStreamer streaming-media framework has been announced. "The goal of this release series is to stabilize towards a 0.8 release series which will be part of the GNOME 2.6 releases and hopefully eventually KDE 4.x."

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Rhythmbox 0.70 Released (GnomeDesktop)

Rhythmbox 0.70, a music player, is out. "This is the first release in the Rhythmbox development series, featuring numerous new features thanks to new developments in the latest development release of Gstreamer."

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Music Applications

lakai 0.1 released

The initial release of lakai, a Linux utility for communicating with an Akai S2000 sampler, is out. "Right now, everything is just shell-based, no GUI yet, and the tools are rather rudimentary, the source is ugly and sprinkled with TODOs and printf's etc. pp., but at least it WorksForMe(tm)."

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liblrdf v0.3.5 released

Version 0.3.5 of liblrdf is available.

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Office Suites

OpenOffice.org developers digest

Week 5, 2004 of the OpenOffice.org developers digest has been published.

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Digital Photography

Building Panoramic Images in The GIMP (Linux Journal)

Andrew Burton shows how to use the GIMP to combine multiple photographs into a panoramic image on Linux Journal. "There are two ways to use The GIMP to create a panoramic photo, easy and hard. The hard way is to set up layers out of the different photos, edit filter and layer masks, mess about with transparency and layer them together, manually. The easy way is to use Pandora. Pandora is a plugin for The GIMP that takes photos and tries to match the edges of the photos together, using a best guess at where one photo ends and the next begins."

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Video Applications

xawdecode [xdTV] 1.9.0 (SourceForge)

xawdecode version 1.9.0 is available. "Featuring: Better Lirc support for remotes: new eventmap support added, new xawdecode_cmd commands added; Better methods to schedule records with At and Cron, xdTV can now record AVI files without any codec installed, xdTV become a simple Xvid / uncompressed AVI player, xawdecode TV server and Client : Streaming possibilities through HTTP, and a lot of updates and fixes".

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Languages and Tools

Caml

Caml Weekly News

The February 10, 2004 Caml Weekly News is available with the week's Caml language news.

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Java

Using JUnit With Eclipse IDE (O'ReillyNet)

Alexander Prohorenko and Olexiy Prohorenko explore JUnit on O'Reilly. "This article is going to introduce you to JUnit, a tool for project testing and debugging. After introducing the theory of test-driven development, we'll move on to a step-by-step explanation of how you can create your JUnit tests with the help of the popular Eclipse IDE. We'll show how something as simple as a Hello World program can be exposed to a JUnit test."

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Eye on performance: Exceptions to exceptions (IBM developerWorks)

Jack Shirazi and Kirk Pepperdine explain performance tuning for Java exceptions on IBM's developerWorks. "Java performance enthusiasts Jack Shirazi and Kirk Pepperdine, Director and CTO of JavaPerformanceTuning.com, follow performance discussions all over the Internet to see what's troubling developers. In this month's stop at the JavaRanch, they counter the campfire stories about exceptions with a detailed look at the story behind the story."

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Perl

Perl 5.005_04 RC1 (use Perl)

Version 5.005_04 RC1 of Perl has been announced. Change information is in the source code.

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The January 26 - February 8, 2004 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is available. "This week, a very special summary indeed, because it actually covers two weeks. Two quiet weeks, that is. Read below for new proposals to the Perl 5 language, to its packaging, and for selected bugs and fixes."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The February 1, 2004 edition of This week on Perl 6 is out with the latest Perl 6 discussions.

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for February 10, 2004

The PHP Weekly Summary for February 10, 2004 is out. Topics include: Enable bcmath by default, HTTP digest authentication in PHP 5, PHP on Netware, SOAP extension, PHP 5.0.0 RC1.

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Python

When Pythons Attack (O'ReillyNet)

Mark Lutz gives some advice to Python programmers on O'Reilly. "Mark Lutz, coauthor of the recently released Learning Python, 2nd Edition, offers tips, gleaned from his first-hand experience as a Python trainer, on the most common programming and coding mistakes that new Python programmers make. For seasoned Python programmers, Mark offers tips on working with Python's larger features, such as datatypes, functions, modules, and classes."

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out for February 11, 2004. Take a look for lots of links to new Tcl/Tk articles.

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XML

An Introduction to FOAF (O'Reilly)

Leigh Dodds introduces FOAF on O'Reilly. "The FOAF ("Friend of a Friend") project is a community driven effort to define an RDF vocabulary for expressing metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data."

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Miscellaneous

Kodos 2.4.0 Released

Version 2.4.0 of Kodos, a Python-based regular expression tool, is out. "The widget used for the "Group" tab has been changed to allow for the proper display of matches that span multiple lines."

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