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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


NEdit 5.1 released under the GPL. Many people working in the scientific community are familiar with NEdit, a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System. This editor, while freely available, was formerly tied up in a licensing arrangement that prevented Linux distributions from any desire to package it with their systems. Meanwhile, though, NEdit continued to provide intensive support for development in a wide variety of languages with a graphical interface that made it useful for just about any other task, as well. Now the red tape has been cut and NEdit can join the free software community. We haven't taken a look at it yet, but the feature set is extremely promising.

Application of the Week: vigor (Linuxcare). Linuxcare's application of the week this week is vigor. "While you try to get work done with vigor, the paperclip pops up random sayings inside dialog boxes. Of course, you can't continue editing your file until you click the 'OK' button and dismiss the dialog box. Some of my favorite random sayings are, 'Vigor: a compelling argument for pencil and paper,' 'Vigor: because hell was full,' and 'Vigor: putting new limits on productivity.'" (Thanks to author Brett Neely, who says "Sorry this article was a bit late. The paperclip kept interrupting me as I wrote the article!").

Browsers

Netscape's Gecko PR. Netscape has issued a press release saying that the Gecko HTML rendering engine is being adopted by a number of companies, including IBM, Intel, Liberate, NetObjects, Nokia, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. "Netscape Gecko is revolutionary because it gives Web developers maximum power to create more powerful Web content and Web applications. It is open source, allowing individual developers to tailor it to their own use, and is designed to operate across multiple platforms, so that it can be deployed on the widest possible range of devices. In addition, Gecko is considerably smaller than the engines of traditional browsers. "

Simultaneously, they also announced that the beta for Netscape version 6, their new Gecko-driven Internet browser, would be made available to the public in the next 25 days.

For a reaction to the latest announcement, check out the comments on Mozillazine or this CNet article.

Education

EduWare for KDE mailing list. A new mailing list has been started by KDE developer Uwe Thiem to allow teachers and programmers to get together and start coordinating projects aimed at education.

LinuxForKids has started a logo contest, for the artists of all ages. Entries are due by April 22nd and prizes are mentioned but not specified.

Linux Professional Institute newsletter. Here is the latest weekly newsletter from the LPI. They have some big news to report this time around: their "exam 102" is now complete, and will be available on April 17. This completes the LPI's exam development for its first level certification. They have also begun development on their second certification level.

Certification and the Linux Professional Institute (LinuxPower). LinuxPower interviews Evan Leibovitch about the Linux Professional Institute. "We can't stress enough that certification, in itself, is only one element in a person's skills assessment. No certification program takes the place of reference checking or thorough interviews. Anyone who hires/contracts someone solely based on certification, ours or anyone else's, is likely to be dissatisfied."

Games

Open Game Source looks at Beasts. Open Game Source looks at the game 'Beasts', which is not currently under development. "Every gamer, who has been playing for a couple of years, fondly remembers some of his old games. Invariably game programmers attempt to recreate these classics. Beasts is Kevin Turner's remake of one such game. Like many older games the premise is simple yet captivating. 'Push the blocks around and squish the beasts.'"

Heavy Gear II is on the way. Loki Games is now accepting pre-orders for Heavy Gear II for Linux, their first Linux game to support 3D-Audio using OpenAL. It is expected to start shipping on March 31st, 2000. "Get ready for the ultimate in mech experiences: a thrilling combat adventure pitting robot against robot in the distant future is waiting for you. Pit squads of your best mechanized warriors against the enemy to save Terra Nova -- but sheer firepower won't be enough. Use your guile and wits to get behind enemy lines and use your resources to their fullest, before it's too late... " (Thanks to Michael Simms at TuxGames.)

Shadowbane RPG petition. Shadowbane, the first massively-multiplayer online RPG by Wolfpack Studios, is scheduled for release this summer on the Mac and PC platforms. Wolfpack Studios is apparently following the Shadowbane for Linux Petition with interest, since providing a Linux version is a possibility. If you would purchase a copy of Shadowbane for Linux, adding your name to the petition will likely help.

Beta release of the COG Engine. The first beta release of the Cycon Online Gaming Engine (COG) has been announced. "The COG (Cycon Online Gaming) Engine is an Open Source project aimed at simplifying the creation of online video games."

Hand Helds

Piloting Your Palm With Linux (Web Review). Here's a lengthy Web Review article on how to use a Palm Pilot with Linux. "Palm Pilots are not intended to be your sole computing platform, but instead are designed to be satellite devices for when you're away from your desk. And if your desk features a Linux box (or any brand of Unix, for that matter), you'll be pleased to know that the Palm Pilots are well supported on this platform."

High Availability

LinuxFailSafe Seminar. The first LinuxFailSafe seminar for the open source LinuxFailSafe High Availability project has been scheduled for March 31st, 2000, in Westminster, CO. Developers from SuSE, SGI, TurboLinux, Red Hat and Mission Critical Linux are expected to attend. Due to the timing and proximity to the Colorado Linux Info Quest (CLIQ), we are hopeful that many of them will also attend the High Availability BOF at the CLIQ the next day, Saturday, April 1st.

Interoperability

Samba Kernel-Cousin. The latest Samba Kernel-Cousin covers issues through March 16th.

Wine Weekly News. Well, we had problems getting through to Wine headquarters this evening, so we are linking to the Wine Kernel-Cousin instead. From what we've seen in previous weeks, the two are actually identical. So if you can't get to Wine headquarters, trying rolling over to Linuxcare and checking there instead.

Network Management

OpenNMS.org launches. The Open Network Management Software project has put out a press release announcing its existence. "In three weeks since OpenNMS.org went on-line, more than 275 contributors have joined the consortium, more than 350 people have downloaded the source code, the website has received 5,000 page hits a day..."

Of course, we first announced OpenNMS.org on March 9th, 2000.

Office Applications

HancomLinux develops Chinese word processor (Korea Herald). Here's an article in the Korea Herald about a new Chinese word processor for Linux. "HancomLinux unveiled the beta version of its "Wenjie" program yesterday for Chinese users. Its final version will be marketed from early April after completing tests with 1,000 Chinese users, the company said."

Siag Office 3.3.0. An updated version of the Siag Office Suite has been released. This GPL'd suite includes the spreadsheet Siag, the word processor PW, the animation program Egon, the text editor XedPlus, the file manager Xfiler and the previewer Gvu. The new version is minor, but we wanted to remind people of this package. If you are reviewing free software office packages, Siag should be on your list for consideration. The reports back that we've heard have been mixed, but the issues are somewhat stylistic. Siag was not designed to be a drop-in replacement for people accustomed to the style of the Microsoft or Corel offices suites, but may suit some technical users just fine.

AbiWord Weekly News (March 22nd). This week's AbiWord Weekly News reports good news for namespace support, the LaTex exporter and the Danish translation.

On the Desktop

KDE Development News (March 18th). The latest edition of the KDE Development News covers March 13th through March 18th, 2000. New KDE Icons, experimental Red Hat RPMs, a new programming book for KDE 2.X and more are covered.

More KDE news can be found in the LinuxUK Weekly KDE Roundup, by Jono. "It's good to see a non-core developer's perspective on what we are doing :)", commented Mosfet. Speaking of which, his site, http://www.mosfet.org/, has gone through a nice remodel and he welcomes comments. We like the new design, ourselves, since it makes it easier to link back to specific items that he puts together.

Gimp slides from GUADEC. Sven & Mitch have made available their slides from their Introduction to the Gimp talk at GUADEC. It includes information on upcoming Gimp 1.2 features. (From

GUADEC is over!. The GNOME Users and Developers Conference in Paris was declared much fun and a great success. Havoc Pennington covered the event in this week's Gnome Summary. It appears that a lot of important decisions were made at the event: a nine-person Gnome steering committee was appointed and a Gnome Foundation is being created. " All decisions will still be discussed on gnome-hackers or gnome-devel-list as appropriate. That is, the committee will basically just gather information and maybe come up with proposals, it won't be actually making decisions."

Also in this week's Gnome news was the issuance of the first Telsa Gwynne Bug Crusher Award to Jason Leach. "Telsa wrote in to nominate Jason Leach as the bug-fixing hero of the hour. Jason cleaned a number of pesky gnome-core and gnome-applets bugs out of bugs.gnome.org in a very short timeframe; moreover they were the kind of spit-and-polish bugs that really need to get fixed to give GNOME that finished, professional look."

Search Engines

ht://Dig update. Geoff Hutchison wrote in with another development update for the ht://Dig search engine. He reports that they're still working on squashing a few reported bugs for version 3.2.0b2, which will be coming out shortly. Recently, the subject of indexing double-byte/Unicode documents came up again. Though the main developers still have their hands full, they agree that they'd help anyone interested in working on this. A proposal will likely go up on CoSource.com in an attempt to solicit some interest. Last, a series of "architecture overview" documentation has started to help ease the learning curve for interested new developers, with about one new write-up a week. The documentation is archived at http://dev.htdig.org/internals/.

Science

Website Development

Zope Enterprise Option to go open source. Digital Creations has announced that its Zope Enterprise Option package will be released as open source. ZEO was formerly a proprietary add-on to Zope that enables the creation of distributed servers. Thus, ZEO allows Zope-based servers to scale across both processors and continents. It's another great contribution from DC, and can only help encourage the continued success of the Zope platform.

Zope 2.1.6 released. Zope 2.1.6 has been released. It fixes a few problems created by last week's 2.1.5 release, which contained security updates. An upgrade is recommended.

Zope Weekly News. Here's this week's Zope Weekly News, by Mike Pelletier. It covers the new zope releases, and mentions the new Spanish translation of the ZWN.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


March 23, 2000


Project Links
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
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Freshmeat
LinuxDev

   

 

Development tools


The GNU Fortran 95 project. Toon Moone wrote in to point us at the GNU Fortran 95 project. These folks intend to take the successful g77 code and update it to the latest Fortran standard. They have a way to go yet, but never underestimate the determination of a Fortran programmer. There is code downloadable now, but don't expect it to gracefully handle your Fortran 95 code quite yet.

Java

Blackdown Java3D 1.1.3 API. The Blackdown team announced the release of the Java3D 1.1.3 API (RC1) on March 10th.

The Tritonus Java Sound API. Version 0.1.90 of Tritonus, the Java Sound API implementation for Linux was release on March 18th. New features include the Java Sound API 1.0 interface, full integration of the mp3 decoder, full-duplex recording that works and lots of new MIDI features.

Javascript 1.5 Release Candidate. Javascript 1.5 has reached the release candidate stage.

Simon Phipps, IBM's XML and Java Evangelist. IBMDeveloperWorks has published an interview with Simon Phipps, proclaimed "XML and Java Evangelist" for IBM. "I'm still looking for the source of the quotation that an American president once said: "It is easiest to persuade a man of that which is obvious." We're not telling the industry to use TCP/IP, Web servers, Java, and XML. We're observing they do use these technologies, that they do fit together, and that there is one unifying philosophy underlying them: making things work in a connected world. And we're just going out and doing it."

Multi-threading in Java programs. Neel V. Kumar talks about how easy it is to develop and use threads in Java programs. "Using multiple threads in Java programs is far easier than in C or C++ because of the language-level support offered by the Java programming language."

Perl

Perl 5.6 RC3. Release Candidate 3 for Perl 5.6 has been announced. This summary describes the changes since RC2.

Perl drives the US Census Gathering. Perl News reported on the use of Perl in the US Census Bureau. "Lisa Nyman of the U.S. Census Bureau wrote in a note to the Perl advocacy list that 'The Census 2000 Internet Form is a great example of a government agency implementing essential (Constitutional even) operations with perl.'"

PerlMonth #10. The latest edition of PerlMonth is out, complete with a new column by Jeff Boes.

PHP

Python

No Python-URL this week. Dr. Dobbs' Python-URL apparently did not make it out the door this week. To get your Python fix, step on over to Daily Python-URL. No big announcements this week, but lots of nice links to interesting discussions.

Tcl/tk

Dr. Dobbs' Tcl-URL. This week's edition of Tcl-URL promises "All the Tcl, none of the Blarney.."

First European Tcl/Tk User Meeting. The first European Tcl/Tk User Meeting will be held in Hamburg-Harburg on the 15th and 16th of June, 2000. Registration is open and a preliminary schedule is available.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

 
Language Links
Guile
Blackdown.org
IBM Java Zone
Perl News
PHP
Daily Python-URL
Python.org
JPython
Smalltalk
 

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