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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


FSF alternative to Freshmeat. The Free Software Foundation is apparently not satisfied with the existing software databases, including Freshmeat and others. They are building their own and have put out a request for assistance to the Debian developers. "The reason they are not using a happy with existing databases like freshmeat is that their database has a lot more details, and they don't want any non-free software in there."

Browsers and Mail support

TradeClient 0.2beta released. Bynari International has announced the final pre-release of its TradeClient email client and personal information manager. Tradeclient is aimed at people accustomed to or currently using Microsoft Exchange. TradeClient is released under the LGPL. Note that a proprietary product, Bynari TradeXCH, is required in order to connect Tradeclient to Microsoft Exchange.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. The SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for April 24 is available. This issue concentrates on scheduling and timetable software for schools, but covers a number of other interesting programs as well.

Games

Merchant Empires .1. Merchant Empires is a new GPL'd game that has been ported to PHP. This is a very early release; a link is provided primarily for people who may be interested in its development.

Graphics

Open CASCADE 3.0 released. Open CASCADE 3.0 has been released. This release of this extensive graphic modeling library includes a new "data exchange processors" module and extensive changes to the visualization module.

Gimp Tutorial: 60 Second Reptiles, Paint lines, and Bark. Michael Hammel has put out a new Gimp tutorial over at Graphics Muse. "In this tutorial I'm going to show you the tricks you can play with noise. The Gimp is often thought of as a tool whose end product is a goal in itself. But Hollywood knows better. There, the Gimp is used as just another tool in a long list of tools to generate the final product - a special effects shot for a movie. Noise plays an interesting part in that pipeline of tools."

Gimp 1.1.20. Gimp 1.1.20 is now available for download. Unfortunately, it came accompanied by a segfault-inducing bug came out with Gimp 1.1.20. A bugfix for this is now available and is highly recommended. This release is also sometimes dubbed "1.2pre", containing many features from the upcoming 1.2 release.

Gimp FreeType. Sven Neumann and Jens T. Lautenbacher are working on Gimp FreeType, a project to improve font support in Gimp. (From Gimp News.)

Interoperability

Samba 2.0.7 released. Samba 2.0.7 has been released. This is the first release of Samba to include the O'Reilly Using Samba book; it also contains the beginnings of Windows 2000 support and a great many other fixes and enhancements.

Office Applications

Reviewing Linux Word Processors (LinuxPlanet). LinuxPlanet has started off a series of word processor reviews with this review of StarOffice 5.2. "We did our tests on version 5.2 of StarOffice, even though this is still a beta release. We encountered stability problems and a few bugs, which we fully expect to be ironed out by the time it goes into final release. Since StarOffice is free for download and a fairly inexpensive CD purchase, prospective users may want to consider sticking with 5.1a, and moving to 5.2 when its stability is more guaranteed."

Applixware 5.0 announced. Applixware 5.0 was announced this week. The new version is based on the GTK+ toolkit. This is a commercial product; more information is available on the Commerce Page.

AbiWord Weekly News. This week's AbiWord Weekly News indicates that the release of 0.7.9 is imminent and a list of features needed for the 0.9.0/1.0 release has been put together. James Ritchie was lauded for the posting of his constructive suggestions, based on what he needs, as a professional writer, in order to move from Microsoft Word to AbiWord.

On the Desktop

This week's GNOME summary. Here is this week's GNOME summary by Havoc Pennington.

Havoc has also announced the X Desktop Group. Its purpose is to promote collaborative work toward the improvement of the X desktop in general - it is not a GNOME-specific project. Havoc is reaching out to all developers (and writers!) in the desktop area in an attempt to produce concrete results and a better desktop for all.

KDE2 is around the corner. Are you curious? (Olinux.com.br). Olinux.com.br interviews KDE hacker Mosfet. "The difference between KDE and competing projects is KDE developer funding seems to be spread over a wider group of Linux companies. You don't have one or two interests controlling an important group of KDE developers."

News from KDE.org. Updates to the news section of the KDE.org site include a call for documentation writers and a heartwarming letter to KDE from The London Capitals Youth American Football Club. "I am an American who works in London with underprivileged kids. We work with the kids primarily through American football. We have maintained a website for the past 7 years. I teach the kids primarily through Linux. The KDE desktop environment has proved incredibly helpful in giving these kids a simple to understand interface with a dense operating system. "

Sawmill becomes Sawfish. The Sawmill project has announced a name change, due to a naming conflict with an existing Linux log analyzer, also called "sawmill". As a result, the Sawmill window manager will become the Sawfish window manager, with an accompanying change in all websites, etc. (From GNotices.)

Science

Linux in Science Report #5. This week's Linux in Science report focuses on getting binary packages for scientific software and the need for a Linux distribution targeted for scientific users.

Medicine-HOWTO. The Medicine-HOWTO has been updated, with the addition of links to additional software and resources (from Freshmeat).

One of the new links points to LinuxMedNews, a new Zope/Squishdot-based news site that focuses on Linux and the medical community. It looks, perhaps, a bit too much like Slashdot ... it is almost hard to remember which site you're on. However, they are clearly working hard to get good content up.

GNUMed presentation. A presentation on GNUMed, An Open Source Comprehensive Software Package for Paperless Medical Practice will be given at the July 17-20, 2000 O'Reilly's Open Source Conference by Horst Herb.

Website Development

Zope tutorial preview available. Amos Latteier has released the first preview version of his Zope tutorial. The tutorial is a "hands on" experience, and thus requires an installed Zope server to host it. Those who are not in a hurry can wait for the next major Zope release, which will include the Tutorial.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


April 27, 2000


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

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

   

 

Development tools


C

The wonders of glib (IBM DeveloperWorks). This IBM DeveloperWorks article takes a look at the glib utility library for C, which provides data containers, portability and more. "Glib's most prominent and powerful aspect is its containers, although it is also extremely useful in writing portable code. Glib does not require you to restrict code to small subsets of functionality that work on all target platforms, nor, when you use glib, do you find yourself resorting to prayer as a method of ensuring satisfactory implementation of your functions on other platforms." (From Gnotices.)

Java

Blackdown Java3D 1.1.3 status. A note added to the Blackdown Java3d Status Page on April 20th indicated progress on the port. "We are currently working on finishing the final release of Java3D 1.1.3".

Perl

Perlmonth Issue 11 available. Perlmonth #11 is now available, with nine new articles. The focus is very much on web applications in this issue.

Perl5-porters digest. A new version of the Perl5-porters digest was released on April 23rd. It seems that whining was a major response to the release of Perl 5.6. "On the one hand were people complaining about bugs and how it was unstable and saying that nobody was going to switch, and there were some accusations that Sarathy was part of a Microsoft conspiracy to sabotage Perl. Blah blah blah. Then on the other hand were a lot of people saying that the changes were not significant enough to warrant a new version number. "

This prompted Tom Christiansen to post this reply. "If this hadn't gotten out NOW, it might well NEVER would have gotten out? Why? Because Sarathy would have quit in frustration over the demands put upon him, the expectation that he and he alone would rewrite and redesign all the major subsystems for everybody's pet little feeps, from threads to unicode to the codegenerators."

Work appears to be ongoing to try to salvage the working atmosphere of the group. Best of luck, guys.

PHP

PHP HOW-TO. An updated version of the PHP HOW-TO has been made available.

Python

Linux Journal Python Supplement. The May issue of the Linux Journal apparently contains a Python supplement, with articles ranging from the silly to the strictly serious.

It included a reference to the Linux Journal's Python Book Reviews, a joint review of three Python references. (From Daily Python-URL)

Tcl/tk

Tcl/Tk 8.3.1 announced. Tcl/Tk 8.3.1 has been released. This is a patch release for Tcl/Tk 8.3 and contains over twenty different bug-fixes and added features.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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

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