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See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects


Red Escolar Returns. This week brought renewed information from the Red Escolar Project - the project which is working to place Linux-based networks in over 100,000 Mexican schools. They've been hard at work and are now in a better place to share information on their status. This week, they issued an invitation (in both Spanish and English) for people to visit their updated web site. They are looking for volunteers to help with translating their documentation into English, test software and provide opinions. Check the Distributions Page to find their initial announcement of Red Escolar Linux on Freshmeat.

Browsers

NewZilla. A new site called NewZilla is presenting itself as "the unofficial Mozilla/Netscape 6 FAQ." It's just getting going, but there's already some good information to be found there.

Databases

InterBase Open Source release imminent (Technocrat.net\). InterBase is now "The Open Source Database", according to their web site. To back this up, Michael Bernstein posted a note to Technocrat.net stating that Interbase has announced a tentative schedule for releasing Interbase 6.X under the IPL open source license. "They expect InterBase 6.0 and the source to be officially released in the June or July time frame."

A (binary) beta release of Interbase 6.0 for Linux is currently available for download. There are some useful comments posted in response to Michael's note, both supporting the IPL as a good quality open source license and comparing the strengths of Interbase and PostgreSQL. (Thanks to J.H.M. Dassen).

Interoperability

The BIRD Internet Routing Daemon. Martin Mares, best known for his work on the PCI subsystem in the kernel, has announced the release of BIRD - the "BIRD Internet Routing Daemon." BIRD is an attempt to implement all of the current routing protocols while remaining easy to configure; it is licensed under the GPL.

Wine 1.0 coming? The latest Wine Weekly News covers the discussion among the developers on whether it's time to create a Wine 1.0 release. Such a release certainly has been a long time in coming - the Wine folks did not set an easy task for themselves. The code is getting to a point where a 1.0 release is possible, and probably even a good idea - the project leaders think Wine could benefit from some time spent emphasizing stability rather than new features. There seems to be agreement on working toward 1.0, but no time frame for a freeze appears to have been set.

Office Applications

Gimp 1.1.22. Gimp 1.1.22 has been released. Although mostly containing bug fixes, people are encouraged to give it a test drive and report back.

On the Desktop

KDE 1.90 released. KDE 1.90, code named "Konfucious", is a new beta version of the upcoming KDE 2.0 desktop. "For the developer, KDE 1.90 provides a stable API which will enable developers to commence serious development of their application so they may time the release of their software to coincide with the release of KDE 2.0, scheduled for September 2000."

Enhancements to KOffice and the release of Konqueror, a new file manager/web browser, are the key features expected to interest desktop users, though the non-adventurous should probably wait for the official 2.0 release. (From Appwatch).

GNOME 1.1.90 final beta released. "Octothorp GNOME," otherwise known as GNOME 1.1.90, otherwise known as the "hopefully final beta release before GNOME 1.2" has been released.

GNOME at the 2nd Braunschweiger LinuxDays. Martin Baulig posted this report from the GNOME booth at the 2nd Braunschweiger LinuxDays in Germany. It sounds like a good time was had by all.

Help browser needs help. Miguel de Icaza has posted this message describing the state of the Nautilus-based help browser for GNOME. It seems that this package got off to a nice start, but is not currently maintained by anybody. So Miguel is looking for a volunteer to step in and fix it up. Drop him a note if you can help out.

Science

FreeGIS news. Bernhard Reiter has sent in a report from the FreeGIS project, noting the availability of a new mailing list, a new version of GRASS and more.

OpenDX. OpenDX, formerly known as IBM Data Explorer, is an open-source "industrial-strength scientific/data visualization package". IBM made the source code for this tool available almost a full year ago, under the IBM Public License, a license that has been reviewed and generally approved as an open-source license. New resources for OpenDX added in the past month include a new ChangeLog and new binaries for the latest version (4.1.0), including binaries for Red Hat, SuSE and LinuxPPC. (From Python-URL).

Web site Development

April Netcraft survey. The April Netcraft survey is out. Apache continues to rise; it now runs 61.5% of all web sites. (Thanks to Fabian Wauthier).

Midgard weekly summary. Here is this week's Midgard Weekly Summary, by Ron Parker. The bulk of this issue has to do with licensing issues for Midgard documentation.

Zope 2.2.0 alpha 1 released. Zope 2.2.0 alpha 1 has been released. It contains some security updates, a new help system, the new Zope tutorial, and more.

Zope Weekly News. After a bit of an absence, the Zope Weekly News is back. Check it out for the latest in Zope-related happenings.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh


May 18, 2000


Project Links
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High Availability
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MagicPoint
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YAMS
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Development tools


The aegis project is looking for developers. Aegis is a long-standing project developing a configuration management system with an impressive set of features. Among other things, it includes regression testing built into the system, distributed repositories and more. Those who think they may want to participate in this project should check out this call for developers.

Perl

Culture clash. Here's a story on the Perl.com site by a Perl trainer who ended up teaching a class full of long-time Cobol programmers. "I didn't have to explain filehandles; they already knew about filehandles. But they used jargon to talk about them that wasn't the jargon I was familiar with. 'Oh, you're establishing addressibility on the file,' someone said. They seemed pleased at how easy it was in Perl to establish addressibility on a file."

The end of Perl development? According to this article Larry Wall has proclaimed that 5.6 will be the last version of Perl. The reason? There's no more weird keyboard characters available... Of course, the article is in Segfault...

Python

Python faqts. The Python faqts site seeks to develop an extensive knowledge base of Python tips and tricks. Here is a listing of the recent additions to the site, as an example of the sort of information that can be found there.

Python-URL (May 15). This week's Python-URL links to discussion about the effbot, performance measurement (for Zope), lightweight database objects and more.

Python to change name? According to this article, Guido plans to change the name of the Python language to "Homer." Of course, this one is from Segfault too...

Tcl/tk

Here is this week's Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL with the latest from the Tcl/Tk world.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

 
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