Development
Stream video and audio with Boxtream
Boxtream is a GPL-licensed streaming video and audio system that is being developed by Jerome Alet and a team of developers at the University of Nice in France:
Boxtream is a mobile and autonomous audio and video streaming and recording studio. Of course, depending on your own hardware choices, the number and extent of capabilities and the quality of the final results may vary, but at least the software part should be versatile enough to accommodate even the most basic hardware.
Boxtream was mostly designed to stream live courses featuring a professor and his slides (or any other computer based output like software training, web browser, video player...), but can also be used to stream congresses, interviews and the like.
Boxtream uses a virtual smorgasbord of open-source components to achieve its results. Scripting is done with the Python language, metadata is stored in the XML format. The GStreamer multimedia framework library is used for handling the audio/video data and the Icecast streaming media server is used for media distribution. Video and audio are encoded with Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. The Graphviz graph visualization software is used for presenting a graphical view of the video system's scenario.
A few notable Boxtream features include a GUI interface, support for on-disk recording, selectable audio and video rates, support for image overlays and automation for all tasks. The Boxtream features list has a more complete list. Boxtream supports a number of video switching devices as well as other video and audio equipment. The hardware list has more information.
This architecture diagram gives a pictorial view of a fairly complicated Boxtream system. An online example shows the system being used for a scientific conference.
Boxtream version 0.998 was announced on April 27, 2008. Changes include support for more video hardware, inclusion of the dia schema software, bug fixes and a license change from GPLv2 to GPLv3. If your organization is in need of a full-featured video conferencing system, you should give Boxtream a look.
System Applications
Database Software
Firebird sub-release 2.0.4 announced
Sub-release 2.0.4 of the Firebird DBMS has been announced. "Several important bugs have been fixed, including a number of unregistered nbackup bugs that were found to cause database corruptions under high-load conditions. During Firebird 2.1 development it was discovered that Forced Writes had never worked on Linux, in either the InterBase or the Firebird era. That was fixed in V.2.1 and backported to this sub-release. The issue with events over WNet protocol reported below for v.2.0.3 has been fixed."
Three Kexi patches announced
Three patches have been released for Kexi, a KDE visual database design tool. "Dear users, As there are no new releases of KOffice in 1.x series, we're providing important maintenance patches from time to time. These patches are especially recommended for Linux/Unix distributions: in order to maintain high quality of the software, packagers should apple them before building."
PostgreSQL Weekly News
The April 27, 2008 edition of the Postgres Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Interoperability
Inaugural Samba Mashup Report released
A new newsletter that covers the Samba world has released its first issue. It is planned to be bi-weekly (fortnightly for those of a UK persuasion). It will summarize mailing list threads and cover recent events affecting the Samba community. "Several of Samba team members agreed during discussions held at Samba XP (see article #3) that periodic thread summaries from the recent development activities would be helpful for keeping the community and Samba OEM vendors up to date. So using editorial privilege, I've decided to term these as mashup reports." Click below for the full issue.
Samba 3.2.0pre3 announced
Version 3.2.0pre3 of Samba has been announced. "This is the third preview release of Samba 3.2.0. This is *not* intended for production environments and is designed for testing purposes only."
Networking Tools
A GPL'd DHCP server with SQL, Perl, Python, Java, and LDAP support
Version 2.0.4 of the Freeradius DHCP server has been released. "It's experimental, but the code works for clients including MAC, XP, Vista, *BSD, and Linux. We're looking for contributors to test it, and to supply bug fixes, questions, scripts, SQL schemas, or anything else that could be useful."
Printing
CUPS DDK will be part of CUPS 1.4
The CUPS printing project has announced the inclusion of the CUPS Driver Development Kit with CUPS version 1.4. "As part of the CUPS 1.4 development, the CUPS DDK is being merged into the main CUPS sources. Aside from making the DDK components standard in every CUPS-based printing environment, we hope this will make providing printer drivers even easier than before."
Gutenprint: 5.2.0-beta2 released (SourceForge)
Version 5.2.0-beta2 of Gutenprint has been announced, it includes a critical bug fix. "Gutenprint is a suite of printer drivers that may be used with most common UNIX print spooling systems, including CUPS, lpr, LPRng, or others. These drivers provide high quality printing for UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh OS X (10.2 and above) systems. Gutenprint includes CUPS and Foomatic drivers, and an enhanced Print plug-in for GIMP that replaces the print plug-in packaged with the GIMP distribution."
Security
FreeIPA 1.0 released
Version 1.0 of FreeIPA has been announced. "FreeIPA is an integrated security information management solution combining Linux (Fedora), Fedora Directory Server, MIT Kerberos and NTP. FreeIPA binds together a number of technologies and adds a web interface and command-line administration tools. Currently it supports identity management with plans to support policy and auditing management. We were able to achieve most of the planned features for this release though we had to postpone some of them to later versions we are very happy about the outcome."
Miscellaneous
Wubi: 8.04 final released (SourceForge)
Version 8.04 final of Wubi has been announced. "We are pleased to announce the release of Wubi 8.04! Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that allows to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way."
Desktop Applications
Audio Applications
Rivendell v1.0.0rc1 announced
Version 1.0.0rc1 of Rivendell, a radio station automation system, has been announced. "Rivendell is a full-featured radio automation system targeted for use in professional broadcast environments. It is available under the GNU General Public License." Changes in this release include skinnable modules, a database update and bug fixes.
Desktop Environments
GNOME 2.24 roadmap released
The roadmap for GNOME 2.24 (and beyond) is out. There will be a lot of stuff in the next release, including Epiphany's WebKit migration, "unified account management" in Evolution, XRandR 1.2 support, Empathy, Conduit, and a decision on a new distributed version control system.GARNOME 2.23.1 released
Version 2.23.1 of GARNOME, the bleeding-edge GNOME distribution, has been announced. "Welcome to the 2.23 development cycle! We'll hopefully enjoy some nice new bugs and crashes, while we'll have to live with new features, improvements or fixes. This is the first development release on our trip to GNOME 2.24, which will be out in September, in around five months."
GNOME Software Announcements
The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:- Beagle 0.3.7 (bug fixes and translation work)
- Capuchin 0.3.1 (new features and bug fixes)
- Conduit 0.3.10 (new feature, bug fixes and translation work)
- GParted 0.3.7 (new feature, bug fixes, documentation and translation work)
- gtkmm-utils 0.3.1 (new features and bug fixes)
- libxklavier 3.6 (bug fixes and translation work)
- metacity 2.23.13 (bug fixes)
- Rapicorn 8.4.0 (new features and bug fixes)
- Sysprof Linux Profiler 1.0.10 (Support for Linux 2.6.25)
KDE 4.1 Alpha1 is out
The first alpha release of KDE 4.1 has been released. "Highlights: - Qt 4.4 based (webkit support, among others) - Akonadi cross-desktop PIM storage engine - KDE PIM available (not Akonadi-based yet)".
KDE Software Announcements
The following new KDE software has been announced this week:- digiKam 0.9.4-beta4 (new features and bug fixes)
- KAlarm 1.5.2 / 2.0.0 beta1 (new features and bug fixes)
- KGRUBEditor 0.6 (new features and bug fixes)
- KTorrent 3.0.2 (bug fixes)
- KTorrent 3.1beta1 (new features)
- Kvkbd 0.5 (new features)
- QChat 0.3 (new features)
- Soprano 2.0.98 alpha1 (new features)
- TorK 0.28 (new features and bug fixes)
Xorg Software Announcements
The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:- xf86-input-joystick-1.3.2 (bug fixes and documentation work)
- xf86-video-radeonhd 1.2.1 (new features and build fixes)
Financial Applications
GnuCash 2.2.5 released
Version 2.2.5 of GnuCash has been announced. "The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.2.5 aka "Do what I mean", the fifth bug fix release in a series of stable releases of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software."
Games
OpenCards: 0.14 released (SourceForge)
Version 0.14 of OpenCards has been announced, it includes new features and bug fixes. "OpenCards is a flashcard learning extension for OpenOffice Impress. The basic idea of OpenCards is to use slide-titles as flashcard fronts and the slide contents as their backs."
UFO:Alien Invasion: 2.2.1 released (SourceForge)
Version 2.2.1 of UFO:Alien Invasion has been announced. "It is the year 2084. You control a secret organisation charged with defending Earth from a brutal alien enemy. Build up your bases, prepare your team, and dive head-first into the fast and flowing turn-based combat. The UFO:AI development team is proud to announce the release of UFO:Alien Invasion Version 2.2.1 - This is a bugfix release for the 2.2 version."
GUI Packages
FLTK 1.1.9 final version released
Version 1.1.9 final of FLTK has been announced. "This version fixes two regressions and a bug that could lead to a crash under some circumstances."
Music Applications
jack-smf-utils 0.9 released
Version 0.9 of jack-smf-utils has been announced. "Jack-smf-utils is a set of two utilities - jack-smf-player and jack-smf-recorder - whose purpose is to play and record MIDI streams from/to Standard Midi Files (i.e. the files with .mid extension) using JACK MIDI."
Office Suites
OpenOffice.org Newsletter
The April, 2008 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with the latest OO.o office suite articles and events.
Languages and Tools
C
GCC 4.3.1 Status Report
The April 17, 2008 edition of the GCC 4.3.1 Status Report has been published. "GCC 4.3.1 is scheduled for 2008-05-05. As we have not yet built 4.3.1-rc1, we will slip that date. As shown below, there are 2 P1s on the 4.3 branch, so we are not yet ready to build RC1."
Caml
Caml Weekly News
The April 29, 2008 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Python
PEP 3108 - stdlib reorg/cleanup
Python PEP 3108 has been announced. "Just like the language itself, Python's standard library (stdlib) has grown over the years to be very rich. But over time some modules have lost their need to be included with Python. There has also been an introduction of a naming convention for modules since Python's inception that not all modules follow. Python 3.0 has presented a chance to remove modules that do not have long term usefulness. This chance also allows for the renaming of modules so that they follow the Python style guide [#pep-0008]_. This PEP lists modules that should not be included in Python 3.0 and what modules need to be renamed."
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links
The April 28, 2008 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Tcl/Tk
Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links
The April 24, 2008 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Version Control
Subversion considers its future
Ben Collins-Sussman has posted an interesting note on the future of Subversion and centralized version control. "I've chatted with other developers, and we've all come to some similar private conclusions about Subversion's future. First, we think that this will probably be the 'final' centralized system that gets written in the open source world - it represents the end-of-the-line for this model of code collaboration. It will continue to be used for many years, but specifically it will gain huge mindshare in the corporate world, while (eventually) losing mindshare to distributed systems in the open-source arena."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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