Development

The OpenPKG cross-platform software packaging facility

Version 1.1 of the OpenPKG cross-platform software packaging facility has been announced.

The announcement states:

OpenPKG has been released under an MIT style license.

The aim of the OpenPKG project is to create a software packaging facility that works across a wide variety of Unix flavors. Currently it supports FreeBSD, RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, and Sun Solaris. NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Compaq Tru64 are partially supported.

OpenPKG is based on code from version 4 of RedHat's RPM package manager, organized as a self-contained system so that RPM does not need to be installed in order to use the system. An interesting feature is the way in which OpenPKG handles the modification of system files, changes are recommended, but the administrator has to manually make the changes. This should please security conscious admins, although it sounds like a big slow-down for automated installations across many machines.

Version 1.1 of OpenPKG adds more supported platforms, more packages, more granularity in user and group selection, better security for handling system files, support for package activation via software switche variables, and support for proxy packages, which allow multiple packages to share resources with base packages.

Currently, there are over 200 packages available for OpenPKG, conveniently organized into numerous groups. See the package repository for the list.

OpenPKG appears to be very well documented, here are some pointers:

• Facts and Features
• FAQ
• User Tutorial
• Documentation Page

Systems administrators who deal with multiple versions of Unix should consider using OpenPKG, it looks like the kind of utility that could greatly increase productivity.

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System Applications

Audio Projects

Ogg Traffic for August 20, 2002

The August 20, 2002 edition of Ogg Traffic covers the Ogg Speex file format, using Ogg for doing online voice chat, a VP3 Patch for Xine, OggShell v1.0, WebSiteRobot support for Ogg, and more.

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Database Software

Which Table, Which Column? (O'Reilly)

Jonathan Gennick gives some tips on using designing SQL tables. "Many potential problems lurk when you do not fully qualify column names using either table names or table aliases. In this article, I'm going to focus on just one such problem recently brought to my attention by a perplexed reader."

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Electronics

Gaf development snapshot 20020825

A new development snapshot of Gaf (Gschem and Friends) is available from the gEDA project. This version includes big changes to the underlying attribute definition syntax. See the release notes for the details.

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Networking Tools

Release of iptables-1.2.7a

iptables version 1.2.7a is now available. This release fixes some bugs that were introduced in version 1.2.7.

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Printing

HPIJS 1.2.1 is released! (LinuxPrinting)

LinuxPrinting mentions that version 1.2.1 of the HPIJS PCL printer driver is now available. This release includes improved grayscale performance, paper tray selection, and support for more printers.

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Web Site Development

Connecting middleware to Apache 2.0 (IBM developerWorks)

Uche Ogbuji explains how to use an Apache 2.0 filter module on IBM's developerWorks. "Apache became the most popular Web server in part because of the rich availability of third-party extensions for the server, and because its open architecture made it quite easy to roll your own extensions. Of course, nothing is ever just easy enough, so in developing Apache 2.0, one of the main goals was to improve the Apache API to make it even easier to develop extensions."

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ZEO 2.0 beta 1 released

Version 2.0 beta 1 of the ZEO, the Zope Enterprise Objects, has been released. "ZEO turns the Zope object system into a distributed architecture, allowing multiple processors, machines, and networks to act as one website."

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First Beta of Mod_python 3.0 available

The first beta release of mod_python 3.0 for Apache 2.0 is available.

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Zope Members' News

This week, the Zope Members' News covers Zope performance on Solaris, XMLTransform 0.8, CVSFile 0.8.1, ExternalFile 1.1.0, Wing IDE 1.1.5 final, Ordered List Product version 2.0, and more.

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Desktop Applications

Audio Applications

WaveSurfer version 1.4.3 released

Version 1.4.3 of the WaveSurfer sound visualization and manipulation tool has been released. "The new version of WaveSurfer uses Snack v2.2, which incorporates code from the ESPS speech analysis library. ESPS was recently licensed to the Centre for Speech Technology by Microsoft and AT&T, with the aim to make it available to speech researchers again." See the changes document for the full story.

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Desktop Environments

KDE 3.1 Beta 1: Hot off the Servers

KDE.News has an announcement for KDE 3.1 Beta 1. "This release, which marks the second testing release of the KDE 3.1 branch, offers many improvements and bug fixes over KDE 3.0.x. New features include improved OpenPGP handling in KMail, handy tooltips that provide details of files in Konqueror quickly, and even new ways to be less productive thanks to four new games."

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KC KDE #43 is available

Issue #43 of Kernel Cousin KDE is available. "featuring everything from KDE 3.1's new look, the future of multimedia in KDE, a refitted Konqi, math app news, mouse news, and much more."

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Office Applications

Release of GnuCash 1.6.8

GnuCash version 1.6.8 has been announced. Several project compile bugs have been fixed.

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Gnumeric 1.1.8 released

Version 1.1.8 of the Gnumeric spread sheet has been released. Click below for a detailed list of changes.

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Kernel Cousin GNUe #43

Issue #43 of Kernel Cousin GNUe covers the specification for Supply Chain Management, the GNUe data dictionary and open standards, and other GNU enterprise development issues.

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AbiWord Weekly News #106

Issue #106 of the AbiWord Weekly News looks at AbiWord use from within a web browser, replacing Microsoft's formerly free fonts with CoreFonts, a new font preview project, and more.

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Web Browsers

Mozilla 1.1 released

Mozilla 1.1 is now available. Changes include improved stability and performance, better compatibility with more web sites, improved CSS, DOM and HTML standards support, and more. See the release notes for the list of changes.

Also, see MozillaZine for links to a number of articles on Mozilla 1.1.

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Galeon2 status update

A Galeon2 development synopsis has been posted. "While all may seem quiet in galeon world, we are working hard on Galeon 2, a new major version based on Gnome 2. We decided to do a full rewrite of the our code base because of the huge changes in Gnome architecture, to improve maintainability and stability. The new code is already pretty stable and all the major features of Galeon 1 have been reimplemented. Many people are using it as their full time browser. We tried to improve the usability of the user interface and the integration with the desktop."

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Miscellaneous

Privoxy 3.0.0 released

Privoxy is a "privacy-enhancing proxy" server; the just-announced 3.0.0 is the first stable release of this package. "Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk."

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Languages and Tools

Caml

The Caml Hump

This week, The Caml Hump covers Caml and OCaml exercises, MetaOCaml, Cameleon, Cash, SpamOracle, camllets, the Ensemble Juke Box, and more.

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Java

Robocode Rumble: Tips from the champs (IBM developerWorks)

IBM's developerWorks covers a virtual Java-based robot contest. "The Robocode Rumble opened with programmers around the world using their coding skills to create the most fearsome Java "robots" they could, and releasing their 'bots to battle it out in a virtual arena. With names like TheArtofWar, BienatorII, SandboxLump, BulletMagnet, and Cake, these robots were a little more fierce and a lot more entertaining than your ordinary Java objects. When the dust cleared, only a few 'bots were left standing. Dutch programmer Enno Peters had taken the overall victory."

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JSP Overview, Part 1 (O'Reilly)

Hans Bergsten covers Java servelets in an excerpt from his book on Java Server Pages. "JSP is the latest Java technology for web application development and is based on the servlet technology introduced in the previous chapter. While servlets are great in many ways, they are generally reserved for programmers. In this chapter, we look at the problems that JSP technology solves, the anatomy of a JSP page, the relationship between servlets and JSP, and how the server processes a JSP page."

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Lisp

Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp

Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp is an online document that has been placed in the public domain. Check it out for a good introduction to the history and ideas behind Lisp. Thanks to Paolo Amoroso.

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Perl

Damian Conway publishes Exegesis 5 (Perl.com)

Damian Conway has published Exegesis 5 for Perl 6, an examination of Larry Wall's Apocalypse 5 document.

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The August 19-25, 2002 edition of Perl 5 Porters is out. Topics include a Config.pm discussion, a threads tutorial, a Perl 5.8.0 memory leak with PerlIO for sockets, problems with B::SV::FLAGS, Regex optimizations, Valgrind bug fixes, p5p patches, Copy-On-Write issues, and a fix for shift // 0.

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Web Basics with LWP (O'Reilly)

Sean M. Burke shows how to perform common tasks with LWP. "LWP (short for "Library for WWW in Perl") is a popular group of Perl modules for accessing data on the Web. Like most Perl module-distributions, each of LWP's component modules comes with documentation that is a complete reference to its interface. However, there are so many modules in LWP that it's hard to know where to look for information on doing even the simplest things."

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PHP

PHP Weekly Summary

Issue #100 of the PHP Weekly Summary covers PHP 4.2.3 RC 1, mysql_db_query(), Pcntl extension updates, problems with ob_gzhandler, Nicer Alpha-blending for GD, using UDP from within PHP, test suite updates, support for WebDAV, a Streams filter API, and more.

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Pear Weekly News

This week's Pear Weekly News is out. "With 5 new releases this week, including the Second MDB Release Candidate, along with 2 new packages PEAR continues to grow, heavily benefit from new contributors sending code, bug fixes and new ideas. The eternal problem of documenting this growing collection of tools is being attacked on many fronts with phpdoc to docbook tools, and openoffice converters. This week, existing classes like Auth/Permissions, Config have been re-examined and plans are underway for major improvements. Meanwhile, Rasmus has been helping out with the issues of licensing conflicts with GPL code."

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Python

The Daily Python-URL

This week's Daily Python-URL entries include articles on XMLdiff, omniORBpy 2.0, XMail Library 1.00, using PDF for presentations, doclifter, Easy Publisher 1.7, cPickle, the Python Bibliotheca, and more.

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Ruby

The Ruby Garden

This week's Ruby Garden looks at a faster IO#read interface.

The Ruby Weekly News items include FXRuby-1.0.13, ZenWeb 2.12.0, the TCLink credit card processing extension, scanf for Ruby, Amrita 0.8.5, and more.

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Scheme

Scheme Weekly News

The August 27, 2002 edition of the Scheme Weekly News is out. Topics include SRFI support in Guile, Guile 1.5.8 beta, Quack.el 0.6, and more.

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Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The August 26, 2002 edition of Dr. Dobb's TCL-URL is out.

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