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DevelopmentThe Ethereal Network Protocol AnalyzerEthereal is an open-source and cross-platform network protocol analyzer that offers a wide range of useful features for the network administrator.![[Ethereal]](/images/ns/ethereal.jpg)
Ethereal is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product. Its open source license allows talented experts in the networking community to add enhancements. It runs on all popular computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows.
Ethereal features include:
Ethereal source code and pre-compiled packages are available. The long list of authors is a great example of open-source cooperation. Ethereal has been released under the GNU General Public License. Version 0.10.4 of Ethereal was released this week. Changes include new GUI features under GTK+ 2.4, better PostScript output, the ability to set preferences on the main display window, support for a number of new network protocols, improvements to the existing network protocol support, and more.
System Applications Audio Projects New MidiShare/ALSA driver for LinuxThe msAlsaSeq ALSA driver is out. "The driver lets you connect to ALSA devices and other ALSA sequencer clients from MidiShare applications. It can be used instead of the msRawMidi, msRawSerial and msInetDriver clients if you're running ALSA instead of plain ol' OSS (which you should ;-). It also allows you to map ALSA client ports to corresponding MidiShare ports."
Planet CCRMA ChangesThe latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project include new versions of VASP, Audacity, and FIL-plugins.
Database Software knoda 0.7 test1 releasedVersion 0.7 test1 of knoda, a database front-end, is out. "The main feature is a database designer dialog".
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe May 17, 2004 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is available with the latest PostgreSQL database information.
Mail Software Mailman 2.1.5 releasedVersion 2.1.5 of Mailman, a mailing list manager, has been released. "Mailman 2.1.5 is a significant upgrade which should improve disk i/o performance, administrative overhead for discarding held spams, and the behavior of bouncing member disables. This version also contains a fix for an exploit that could allow 3rd parties to retrieve member passwords. It is thus highly recommended that all existing sites upgrade to the latest version."
Networking Tools Distributed CfengineLuke A. Kanies continues his O'Reilly series on cfengine. "In this article we are going to take the script we wrote in Introducing Cfengine and distribute it to all of our servers using cfengine. As an added bonus, we're going to pull both our cfengine configuration and the sudoers file directly out of a versioning system. It's a simple additional step something you should do with all centralized configuration files and provides a convenient control point for modifying and auditing your configurations."
Twisted 1.3.0 releasedVersion 1.3.0 of the Twisted networking framework has been released. See the Release Notes for details. "This is the last release before Twisted begins splitting up."
Security realtime 0.1.1 with 2.6.6 kernel supportVersion 0.1.1 of the realtime Linux Security Module has been released. "This release handles changes to the capabilities structure introduced in Linux 2.6.6, but still works with earlier 2.6 kernels. There are no functional changes. Unless you are running 2.6.6, there is no need to upgrade."
Web Site Development Zope X3 3.0.0 alpha 1 releasedThe first alpha release of the long-awaited Zope 3.0 project is out. "Zope X3 is the next major Zope release and has been written from scratch based on the latest software design patterns and the experiences of Zope 2." Click below for the details.
Web Services Web services for bioinformatics, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks)Chetna Warade, Virinder Batra, and Rick Runyan work with web services and bioinformatics in part one of a series on IBM's developerWorks. "This series describes the process of building, deploying, and using high-throughput Web services for bioinformatics applications. This is meant to serve as a guide for development of software based on the Open-Bioinformatics Foundations software toolkits with packages such as BioPerl, BioJava, and BioPython. This article provides directions for how to deploy a service and present a new implementation of document-style Web services extensions to the BioPerl module that will allow a wide range of existing applications to consume such services."
Miscellaneous GNOME System Tools 0.33 is out! (GnomeDesktop)Version 0.33 of the GNOME System Tools, a set of cross-platform configuration utilities, has been announced. "A new release of the GST is out! this time with a whole bunch of improvements, such as adding full PPP support for Slackware, network tool support for Conectiva and adding full support for all tools for Gentoo and FreeBSD".
Desktop Applications Accessibility gnopernicus 0.9.2 releasedVersion 0.9.2 of gnopernicus, a screen reader for the GNOME desktop, is out. This version adds a configurable magnifier option and more.
Audio Applications Helix Player 1.0 (alpha) availableThe alpha release of Helix Player 1.0 is available. See the release notes for information on what's in this release and the known problems (e.g. no ALSA support). Of course, if you want to play certain proprietary media formats, Helix Player won't do it for you, but the alpha version of Real Player 10 is available from the same place.
Rhythmbox 0.8.4 is outVersion 0.4 of Rhythmbox, a music player, has been announced. "Among other things, I spent a day squashing memory leaks in Rhythmbox and GStreamer. Upgrading to this release is suggested for long-running playback, and you'll also want to upgrade to the hopefully-soon-to-be-released gstreamer-plugins 0.8.2 (which will also fix stuff like infinite loops on .wma files)."
Desktop Environments GNOME 2.6.1 released - Gnome Installation Guide updated (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop reports on the release of GNOME 2.6.1 with lots of bug fixes and improvements.Also an updated GNOME Installation Guide has been released.
GARNOME 2.6.1 releasedGARNOME version 2.6.1 is available. "The latest 'somewhat toned down' version of GARNOME distribution for those who want a new version of GNOME for regular day-to-day use, but don't want to wait until your distribution catches up, is now out and about."
GSwitchIt Plugins 0.3 are availableVersion 0.3 of the GSwitchIt Plugins are available for the GNOME 2.6.x series. "GSwitchIt Plugins is a set of plugins which include functionality not available (or hidden) in the core GNOME Keyboard Indicator (because of usability, political correctness, code quality, HIG compatibility, external dependencies etc etc etc)."
KDE-CVS-Digest (KDE.News)The May 14, 2004 KDE-CVS-Digest is available. Here's the content summary: "More work on KDevelop documentation tools, adding a TOC plugin. Khtml text-decoration mostly brought up to CSS1 standards. KBlueTooth adds utilities to search for services and send faxes. Kopete adds rich text editor capabilities."
Quickies: KolourPaint, KWin Deco Howto, Desktop Theming, Boson, Opie (KDE.News)KDE.News has a Quickies announcement that lists a bunch of new versions of various applications.
Games gnome-games 2.7.1 releasedVersion 2.7.1 of gnome-games, a collection of games, is out.
Interoperability Wine TrafficThe May 14, 2004 edition of Wine Traffic has been published. Take a look for the latest WINdows Emulation (WINE) news.
Web Browsers Mozilla 1.7 Release Candidate 2 Available (MozillaZine)Release Candidate 2 of the Mozilla 1.7 browser has been announced. "Like the first release candidate, which came out last month, this build is designed to ensure that there are no major bugs remaining before the final release of Mozilla 1.7."
Word Processors AbiWord Weekly NewsThe May 15, 2004 edition of the AbiWord Weekly News is out with news and information about the AbiWord word processor.
Miscellaneous The Spatial WayColin Charles has put up an article explaining and defending the GNOME 2.6 "spatial Nautilus" file manager. "It sticks to the fact that people associate better with the computer's interface when they know that files and folders seem real, just like their physical equivalents, where you 'could manipulate in familiar, direct and predictable ways.' So, the spatial interface is supposed to be better, because it helps mimic real life - this makes associations easier and better for the user. GNOME has done something ground-breaking by doing away with the browser-styled, Navigation metaphor. Everytime the contents changes within a window, people get lost, and file navigation becomes harder. So 'folders' are 'windows', now..."
Languages and Tools C GCC tree-ssa branch merged into mainlineThe GCC Tree SSA branch has been merged into the GCC mainline code. "I am glad to announce that Tree SSA has been merged into mainline. The branch is now closed and mainline is, once again, open for business."See last week's LWN development page for more information on this project.
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe Caml Weekly News for May 11-18, 2004 has been published.
Java Cellular automata and music (IBM developerWorks)Paul Reiners makes music with Java on IBM's developerWorks. "Take computers, mathematics, and the Java Sound API, add in some Java code, and you've got a recipe for creating some uniquely fascinating music. IBM Staff Software Engineer Paul Reiners demonstrates how to implement some basic concepts of algorithmic music composition in the Java language. He presents code examples and resulting MIDI files generated by the Automatous Monk program, which uses the open source jMusic framework to compose music based on mathematical structures called cellular automata."
Nested Classes, Part 1 (O'ReillyNet)Robert Simmons, Jr. explores nested classes in Java. "One aspect of the Java language that is not widely understood is the concept of nested classes. But because you're bound to encounter one or more of them in other people's code, it's important to understand how they work. Chapter six of Hardcore Java covers the various nested classes. In this first excerpt in a three-part series of excerpts from the chapter, author Robert Simmons covers the first of the three basic categories of nested classes: inner classes."
JSP JSP 2.0: The New Deal, Part 4 (O'ReillyNet)Hans Bergsten completes his series on JSP 2.0 with part four. "The wait is almost over: the latest version of the JavaServer Pages (JSP) specification, JSP 2.0, is about to be released. Hans Bergsten shows how the new changes make using JSP and its expression language cleaner and more powerful."
Lisp Loom released under open-source licenseLoom is now available under an open-source license. "The Loom group at the University of Southern California has released the Loom(tm) knowledge representation language under an open-source license. Loom is a "language and environment for constructing intelligent applications" written in Common Lisp."
Perl This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)The May 10-16, 2004 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is online. "Welcome to our latest edition of the P5P summary, for which I'm sure you have been waiting. This week, you'll read about considerations on Storable, nice improvements to the debugger, bugs, and other interesting subjects."
This Week on Perl 6The May 14, 2004 edition of This Week on Perl 6 is online. "Ooh look. Stuff's been happening in perl6-internals again. Will wonders never cease?"
PHP Using Shared Memory from PHP (O'Reilly)Alexander Prohorenko writes about the use of shared memory from PHP on O'Reilly. "IPC is one of the most important features of the UNIX systems. It allows two processes to communicate with each other. In this article we'll work with two System V IPC functions, semaphores and shared memory. System V IPC originated in SVR2, but has implementations by numerous vendors. It's also available in SVR4."
Python Python 2.3.4, release candidate 1Version 2.3.4 RC 1 of Python is out with bug fixes. If no major problems are found, the final Python 2.3.4 release will be out shortly.
python-ldap 2.0.0 releasedVersion 2.0.0 of python-ldap is out. "python-ldap provides an object-oriented API to access LDAP directory servers from Python programs. It mainly wraps the OpenLDAP 2.x libs for that purpose."
python-dev SummaryThe May 14, 2004 python-dev Summary is out with a summary of the python-dev mailing list traffic from April 1-30, 2004.
Ruby Ruby/GtkSourceView 0.2.0Version 0.2.0 of Ruby/GtkSourceView, a Ruby binding for the GtkSourceView C library, is out. "This release fixes several bugs (memory-related for some), brings more compliance to the Ruby-GNOME2 design guidelines, wraps more classes/methods and provides API reference documentation."
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The May 17, 2004 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is out with the week's Tcl/Tk article links.
XML XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 revealed (IBM developerWorks)Arnaud Le Hors covers XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 on IBM's developerWorks. "In this article, software engineer Arnaud Le Hors explains what XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 are about, what changes they bring, and how they affect other specs and users."
XML Namespaces Support in Python Tools, Part Two (O'Reilly)Uche Ogbuji has written part two in his O'Reilly series on XML Namespaces. "In this article I shall focus on the various libraries packaged in 4Suite. If you need background on 4Suite, see my earlier article "A Tour of 4Suite ". I did briefly cover how to express namespaces for use in 4XPath in that article, but in this one I will explore different angles on the topic."
SVG and Typography: Characters (O'Reilly)Fabio Arciniegas A. explores SVG and typography on O'Reilly. "In the second part of our discussion of SVG and typography we explore some time-honored practices of typographic excellence; as we go along, each type issue will lead to the discussion of relevant technical aspects of SVG."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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