Development

gmodconfig 0.5 released (GnomeDesktop)

Gmodconfig is a GUI-based kernel module configuration application for the GNOME desktop. The utility is aimed at making kernel module configuration easier for inexperienced users.

The capabilities of gmodconfig include:

• Configuration of kernel module parameters.
• The display of module information.
• The ability to check on the availability of new module versions.
• The ability to Download, build, and install new modules.

The module information for gmodconfig is stored in XML files. Currently, the XML files are generated manually, with fall-back information coming from the modinfo utility. XML configuration files are generated with the companion gmodconfigedit tool. Automated XML file creation is on the list of project goals. The utility supports multiple language translations for modules with XML configuration files.

Version 0.5 of gmodconfig has been announced. "This version provides GUI improvements, and supports kernel 2.6 modules. The DKMS package installer has been improved to support both tarballs and RPMs."

The project status page details the history of gmodconfig. The software is available here. Project dependencies include the GNOME2 libraries and libxml2.

Documentation for gmodconfig includes the manual (available as a PDF document), and the FAQ. To see gmodconfig in action, see the screenshots page.

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Planet CCRMA Changes

The latest changes from the Planet CCRMA audio utility packaging project includes the latest version of Ardour, a multi-track hard disk recorder.

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Database Programming with Perl (O'Reilly)

Simon Cozens writes about accessing databases in Perl with Perl DBI. "A long, long time ago, when I was a tiny little programmer, I worked as a trainee Perl coder and systems administrator for a large database company. Naturally, at a database company, a lot of what we had to do was talking to databases in Perl. As a fresh-faced programmer, the only way I knew to interface with databases was through a command-line SQL client."

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PostgreSQL Weekly News

The October 23, 2003 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is available with another week's worth of PostgreSQL database information.

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psqlODBC 07.03.0200 Released

Version 07.03.0200 of psqlODBC, the PostgreSQL ODBC driver, has been released. Lots of bug fixes have been implemented.

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Proxool 0.8.1 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.8.1 of Proxool, a Java connection pool for JDBC drivers, has been released to fix some bugs that crept into the 0.8.0 release. The version 0.8.0 release notes state: "It is the first release with JDK independence. Or more precisely, Proxool now runs, out of the box, on JDK1.2 and up."

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ntfsprogs 1.8.0beta released (SourceForge)

Version 1.8.0 beta of ntfsprogs, a set of Linux utilities for dealing with NTFS partitions, has been released. "After a long, long wait, here is the all shiny and new first ntfsprogs-1.8.0 beta release. Several bug fixes, compatibility with newer gcc compilers, and lots of new utilities such as ntfscat, ntfsclone, ntfscluster, ntfsinfo and ntfsls are the highlights of this release."

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Sendmail 8.13.0.PreAlpha4

Sendmail 8.13.0.PreAlpha4 has been announced. "Sendmail 8.13.0.PreAlpha4 is available for testing. It should give you an idea of some of the new features that will be part of 8.13 such as connection rate control and a new "socket" map to query maps via TCP/IP sockets. 8.13 also enables many FFRs from 8.12 (and adds the required documentation) like quarantining and even more LDAP support. For a full list of currently available features see below. Note: this release is called "PreAlpha" because the set of features is not (yet) fixed, i.e., there might be (substantial) changes between this version and 8.13.0 when it is released, e.g., more features are likely to be added, existing features may be changed, and in some cases features may even be removed."

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Building an Advanced Mail Server, Part 3 (O'ReillyNet)

Joe Stump continues his O'Reilly series on setting up an email server with part three. "While it'd be nice to pretend you never receive spam or viruses, server-side filters are a necessary evil. In the final installment of Building an Advanced Mail Server, Joe Stump demonstrates how to install and configure SpamAssassin and ClamAV."

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Big Sister 0.98c8 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.98c8 of Big Sister, an SNMP aware network and system monitoring application, is available. "Release 0.98c8 is a production/stable release mainly fixing a few portability issues and other bugs discovered since 0.98c7 release."

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CUPS 1.1.20rc5 released

Version 1.1.20rc5 of CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System, has been released. See the version announcement for the list of fixed bugs.

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LinuxPrinting.org changes

The latest changes section on the LinuxPrinting.org site says: "Added Epson Stylus C63, C64, CX6400, CX8400, PX V500, AcuLaser C900, C1900. The Epson EPL-2750 works with the Epson Kowa laser printer driver now. Fix: Epson AcuLaser C4000 understands also PCL 5e. Update: Epson AcuLaser C1000 perhaps works with Epson's non-free driver for the AcuLaser C900."

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Bricolage Devel 1.7.0 available

Development version 1.7.0 of Bricolage, a web-based content management and publishing system, is out. "In addition to all of the bug fixes included in the 1.6.x series, this version of the open-source content management system adds a number of significant new features."

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mod_caml 1.0.0 released

Version 1.0.0 of mod_caml, the OCaml language binding for Apache, has been released. Change information is in the source code.

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mod_python 3.1.2 beta released

Version 3.1.2 beta of mod_python, the Python extension to the Apache web server, is available. Downloads are available here. "This is a Beta release, therefore it is likely to contain bugs and is not of production quality. We strongly recommend that you try out your application in a test environment with this release and report any incompatibilities or problems you may encounter."

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Twisted 1.1.0 released

Version 1.1.0 of Twisted, an event driven networking framework, is available. This release features an updated deployment and configuration library, better documentation, bug fixes, and more.

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Ardour 0.9beta7 released

Version 0.9 beta 7 of Ardour, a multi-track audio hard disk recorder, has been announced. Lots of new features and bug fixes are included.

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WaveSurfer 1.5.5 available

Version 1.5.5 of WaveSurfer, an audio file editor, is available. The changes include several new informational display windows, bug fixes, and more.

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GTK+ 2.3.0, Pango 1.3, Glib 2.3 released (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org has a multiple announcement for GTK+ 2.3.0, Pango 1.3, and Glib 2.3. "This is the first development release loading up to GTK+-2.4. This release contains a number of major new widgets and capabilities including: an action based menu system, a replacement for GtkFileSelector, and a new unified GtkComboBox widget that replaces both GtkOptionMenu and GtkCombo."

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KDE-CVS-Digest

The October 25, 2003 edition of the KDE-CVS-Digest has been published, here's the summary: "KHotkeys now has a gui. KOrganizer now supports todo attachments. Kexi has a postgresql driver. Bug fixes in Khtml layer support and rendering engine. Many bugfixes in KMail, Kopete, Korganizer. We are very close to feature and string freeze in the 3.2 release cycle. After Sunday the 26th, only urgent fixes will be accepted, and Beta 1 will be packaged and released."

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Help KDE: Clean Up bugs.kde.org

The KDE development team has announced a bug cleaning effort that is underway. "As KDE 3.2 is approaching and the first Beta version is near, more and more people are testing it. Therefore, a lot of new bugs are appearing in KDE's bugtracking system. While this is of course a good thing, it is much easier for the developers if all the reported bugs are (still) valid and precise enough. Everyone with a current version of KDE is able to do this cleanup-work, coding-knowledge is not needed."

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Animation in SDL: OpenGL (O'ReillyNet)

Bob Pendleton writes about the OpenGL API on O'Reilly. "SDL, the cross-platform multimedia toolkit, is powerful enough to have brought over 40 commercial games to Linux. While it has its own graphics primitives, it also supports the popular and powerful OpenGL API. In the third of a series of articles, Bob Pendleton introduces OpenGL and demonstrates how to use it in your SDL programs."

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Gnuplot.py 1.7 released

Version 1.7 of Gnuplot.py, a Python language interface to the Gnuplot graphing utility, is available. "This version includes a change of license from GPL to LGPL, support for sending data to Gnuplot via FIFOs (named pipes) under unix, and preliminary support for running Gnuplot.py under Jython. For more information, read the NEWS.txt file in the distribution."

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JSynoptic v0.3 released (SourceForge)

Version 0.3 of JSynoptic is available. "JSynoptic is dedicated to rendering information graphically. It can be used as a simple graph plotter, or as a complex run-time monitoring environment. The user sets up and edits shapes (ex: plots) on a synoptic (graphical page). Data sources (ex: ASCII file) are then applied on the shapes to render the information. Version 0.3 introduces new shapes: Polygon, Ellipse, Lines, and Text shapes (inc. array and history)."

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Matplotlib 0.31 released

Version 0.31 of Matplotlib is available. "matplotlib is a pure python plotting library designed to bring publication quality plotting to python with a syntax familiar to matlab users. A lot progress towards this goal has been made since the first release of matplotlib, the library does produce high quality 2D plots."

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ChatZilla 0.9.44 Available in French (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has an announcement for a French version of ChatZilla 0.9.44. A Spanish version is also available.

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wine20031016 released

Wine version 20031016 has been announced. "New features include support for the Xrandr extension, completion of the Dll separation of kernel and ntdll, metafile improvements and bug fixes."

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Wine Traffic

Issue #193 of Wine Traffic has been published. Topics include: News: Press Coverage, WineSetupTk Resurrected, RedHat 7.3 Packages, and User Forums (Maybe) Resurrected.

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Beep the player formerly known as the XMMS GTK2 port (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop has an announcement for a fork of XMMS that's known as Beep. "I renamed the project to 'beep' since 4Front had asked me to do so (which is of course 100% ok), a new version is uploaded too, 1.0.0-pre2 (1.0.0 because of the fork), featuring Pango font rendering in the playlist widget and main window (try dropping fonts from Fontilus/Nautilus onto the main window :) and other nice stuff, many bugs since the short-lived -pre1 got fixed (the crashing skin browser and the drop hint etc)."

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GStreamer 0.7.1 released

Version 0.7.1 of the GStreamer multimedia framework is available. "The goal of this release series is to stabilize it towards a 0.8 release which will be part of the GNOME 2.6 release. This development series and the ABI/API stable 0.8 release series that is to follow it also hoped to increase our chances of KDE choosing GStreamer as their multimedia framework for KDE 4.0."

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mp3db2-2.8 final has been released.

Version 2.8 of mp3db2, a collection of bash scripts for keeping track of MP3 audio file collections, has been released. "The 2.8 development cycle has focused primarily on making the scripts easier to install. There is now an interactive configuration script that can be run at install time to generate the configuration file and make sure all of the path names are valid."

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BEAST/BSE 0.5.5 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 0.5.5 of BEAST/BSE, the Bedevilled Audio SysTem/Bedevilled Sound Engine, has been announced. "This new development series of BEAST comes with a lot of the internals redone, many new GUI features and a sound generation back-end separated from all GUI activities. The most outstanding new features are the demo song, the effect and instrument management abilities, the track editor which allows for easy selection of synthesizers or samples as track sources, loop support in songs and unlimited Undo/Redo capabilities."

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KOffice 1.3rc1 available

The first release candidate for KOffice 1.3 has been announced. The changelog details what has gone into the rc1 release, but those who have not been following KOffice development closely may want to look at the beta1 changelog instead, as it covers the changes since 1.2.

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Adblock 0.5 Development Build 1 Released (MozillaZine)

A new development build of Adblock, a content filtering plug-in for Mozilla and Firebird, has been announced. "This is an incredibly awesome upgrade, not only fixing a few bugs with Firebird integration, but also making it even easier to block any object on a page, including images, Flash, etc. with incredible regular expression matching."

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Epiphany 1.1.0 released (GnomeDesktop)

Version 1.1.0 of the Epiphany browser has been announced with a long list of changes.

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Galeon 1.3.10 Released

Version 1.3.10 of Galeon, a minimalist browser, has been released. This release works with Mozilla 1.4, 1.4.1, 1.5, 1.6a, and trunk, and features better error reporting, bug fixes, and more.

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Mozilla Links Newsletter

The October 28, 2003 edition of the Mozilla Links Newsletter is out with lots of news about the Mozilla family of browsers.

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Independent Status Reports (MozillaZine)

The October 26th, 2003 edition of the Mozilla Independent Status Reports are out. Here's the content summary: "The first set of third-party project status reports from Brian King includes updates from easyGestures, MozillaBook, QuickManager, Mozile, StumbleUpon, mozdev, Link Visitor and Optimoz."

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Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the October 13, 2003 Mozilla.org staff meeting are available. "Issues discussed include Mozilla 1.5 final, Mozilla Firebird 0.7, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3, CDs, the Roadmap update, Asa Dotzler's absence and the FTP mirror network."

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Minutes of the mozdev Admin Meeting (MozillaZine)

The minutes from the October 27, 2003 mozdev admin meeting are available. "Issues discussed include site performance, non-profit status, the website and user notes."

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OSAF Status Update #10

Status Update number 10 is out from the Open Source Application Foundation (OSAF). Take a look to see the latest news on the Chandler Personal Information Manager (PIM), and related activity.

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GNOME Network version 1.99.2 Released (GnomeDesktop)

GNOME Network version 1.99.2 has been announced. "GNOME Network is a set of client network-oriented tools, which currently contains a network information tool, a remote shell and desktop clients, and a personal web server."

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Caml Weekly News

The Caml Weekly News for October 21-28, 2003 is out with a report on the week's Caml language activity.

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Developing With Maven (O'ReillyNet)

O'Reilly has published an article about Maven, a Java project management and comprehension tool. "By knowing what developers want in a build tool, Maven hopes to unseat Ant as the favorite build tool of Java developers. Rob Herbst looks at Maven's most compelling features."

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Analyze Your Classes (O'ReillyNet)

Vikram Goyal introduces the Byte Code Engineering Library on O'Reilly. "Most of us never need to go beyond the basics of coding and compiling our classes. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is a highly efficient engine that executes our classes and for the most part, we are happy with the way it runs. However, to extend and enhance the JVM to improve runtime performance, among other things, we need to take a deeper look inside this engine and the structure of the class files that it loads and executes. The Byte Code Engineering Library (BCEL) from the Apache-Jakarta stable helps the average developers by analyzing and manipulating the structure of class files."

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Eye on performance: A load of stress (IBM developerWorks)

Jack Shirazi and Kirk Pepperdine write about Java performance on IBM's developerWorks. "TheServerSide.com discussion boards are usually quite active, so we stopped there this month to see what was happening in the world of performance. Given its name, it should come as no surprise that performance discussions at TheServerSide tend to focus on J2EE systems. Of course, that's a pretty wide-ranging subject, as it encompasses almost everything in the Java platform -- even J2ME systems are often clients to J2EE systems, so you can even get an occasional question about optimizing J2ME systems."

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The easy way to non-blocked sockets (IBM developerWorks)

Kenneth Ballard covers the issue of SSL blocking in Java on IBM's developerWorks. "Although SSL blocking operations -- in which the socket is blocked from access while data is being read from or written to -- provide better I/O-error notification than the non-blocking counterpart, non-blocking operations allow the calling thread to continue. In this article, the author will cover both the client and server side as he describes how to create non-blocking secure connections using the Java Secure Socket Extensions (JSSE) and the Java NIO (new I/O) library, and he will explain the traditional approach to creating a non-blocking socket, as well as an alternative (and necessary) method if you want to use JSSE with NIO."

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SBCL 0.8.5 released

Version 0.8.5 of SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) is available. "This version includes the new module sb-introspect, cleans up the behavior of REQUIRE/PROVIDE, provides compiler enhancements and threading fixes, and more."

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CL-PDF 2.0.3 released

Version 2.0.3 of CL-PDF, a Common Lisp library for generating PDF formatted files, is available. "This version changes the way AFM files are loaded."

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The CL-INTERPOL string interpolation library

A new Lisp library called CL-INTERPOL is available. "CL-INTERPOL is a library for Common Lisp which modifies the reader so that you can have interpolation within strings similar to Perl or Unix Shell scripts. It also provides various ways to insert arbitrary characters into literal strings even if your editor/IDE doesn't support them." Thanks to Paolo Amoroso.

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Albert 0.4.9 released

Version 0.4.9 of Albert, a Common Lisp documentation generation tool that is similar to JavaDoc and Doxygen, is available.

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Perl 5.8.2 RC1 is out (use Perl)

Version 5.8.2 RC 1 of Perl has been announced on the use Perl site. "5.8.2 is being released to fix minor binary incompatibilities discovered between 5.8.1 and 5.8.0 in the hashing code. 5.8.2 should be binary compatible with both, so if you have modules already installed with 5.8.0 or 5.8.1 please check that they work with 5.8.2."

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This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)

The October 20-26, 2003 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is online. The summary says: "This week, several threads raised concerns with tainting. Plan C for randomized hashes was successful. The language issues with constant subroutines were discussed. Bugs were found, some of which were fixed ; some others were dismissed as features. Quite an usual week for the Perl 5 porters."

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This week on Perl 6 (O'Reilly)

The October 19, 2003 edition of This week on Perl 6 is out with another wrap-up of Perl 6 development news.

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Cultured Perl: Inversion lists with Perl (IBM developerWorks)

Teodor Zlatanov explains inversion lists as applied to Unicode, on IBM's developerWorks. "So what are inversion lists? Inversion lists are best described as a condensed summary of a bit string. They are similar to a simple run-length encoding of data, though there are some differences. Let's look at an illustrative example. Suppose you want to encode the bit string "1110011." An inversion list would store a list of three numbers: 0, 3, 5. All we store is the start position of the 1s, then the start position of the 0s, then the position of 1s again, and so on until the bit string is over."

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Gtk2-Perl supports Gtk+ 2.3.0 (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org mentions the recent efforts of the Gtk2-Perl project team. "Only a few hours after Gtk+ 2.3.0 was released, the Gtk2-Perl team has added support for the new version to the existing Gtk2-Perl libraries."

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PAR 0.76 released! (use Perl)

Version 0.76 of Par, a cross between Java's JAR and Perl2exe/PerlApp, is out. "This version offers bytecode-compiling and bleaching filters, bringing Perl on par with Java's obscurability. There is also a new GUI frontend for pp, among other improvements."

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PHP Weekly Summary for October 27, 2003

The PHP Weekly Summary for October 27, 2003 is out. Topics include: PHP 5 Beta 2, RC 1, PHP 5, XML, PHP 4.3.4, RC 2, OpenGroupware PHP, TLK: Dangling Comma, No more rows, ext/java in PHP 5.

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Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!

The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for October 27, 2003 is out, with weekly news and links for the Python community.

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Scheme Weekly News

The October 27, 2003 edition of the Scheme Weekly News has been published. Take a look to see what's been happening in the world of the Scheme programming language.

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Developer's notebook (IBM developerWorks)

John Papageorge looks at some shell programming tricks from Spence Murray. "For a Linux developer, Murray believes the shell is a powerful software development tool whose utility is hard to overestimate. 'Shell scripting is an integral part of just about everything I do, whether quickly perusing and editing plain text or writing code," he says. "It's small and quick, and its short commands make moving code around a quick and painless process. As an editor, it quickly becomes second nature.'"

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Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

The Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for October 27, 2003 is out, with weekly news and links of interest to Tcl programmers.

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Using Embedded XML Databases to Process Large Documents (O'Reilly)

Mark Wilcox covers embedded XML databases on O'Reilly. "However, when you are processing a large XML document (for example one that is several megabytes in size), you often have to drop out of DOM due to memory constraints, in which you probably use a SAX processor which allows you greater control over memory consumption. But you pay a price for this control. SAX programming can be quite a bit more complex if you need to do a lot of processing based on parent-children element relations. I propose as an alternative the use of an embedded XML database so that you can continue to utilize DOM for processing but without eating all of your memory."

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OProfile 0.7 released

Version 0.7 of OProfile, a code profiler, is available. "OProfile is still in alpha, but has been proven stable for many users."

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