See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

The need for such hardware abstraction may not be obvious - after all, what is the framebuffer but an abstraction for the graphics hardware (according to the Framebuffer HOWTO). Both provide hardware independence (required by platforms like PowerPC and Sparc which gave rise to the original Linux framebuffer work). The real difference between the generic Linux framebuffer and DirectFB is that the latter provides graphics primitives not currently available to the former, not the least of which is alpha blending, otherwise known as transparent windows.

DirectFB provides access to various media formats using external modules to allow applications to load images, video and fonts. At the moment, PNG, JPEG and GIF images are directly supported. AVI movies can be read using the avifile module and other video devices are supported using the Video4Linux (V4l) interface. FreeType2 is used to render all fonts and provides antialiased font rendering to DirectFB.

While DirectFB provides its own window layering functions, it also has a backend version of GDK, the platform specific layer of the GTK+ library stack. That means that GTK+ programs can run on DirectFB (screenshot), and thus embedded devices, without the overhead of X. At the moment, however, only one application can access the framebuffer at a time.

Just recently the open-sourced version of DirectFB was added to the Debian unstable branch, meaning that it has found at least a potential home in the open source Linux distribution world. Whether or not this means DirectFB will find wide spread acceptance has yet to be seen. In the meantime, Sven and friends will continue their work, hoping for an embedded solution for graphics tools.

Noted in passing.  The KDE team is planning on releasing kdelibs-2.1.2 early next week after discovering that the just-released KOffice 1.1beta1 was having problems with the current libraries.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News for 2001-04-24. This week's Linux Documentation Project Weekly News includes two new documents: the MP3 Player Box HOWTO and the Connecting to MS SQL 6.x+ via Openlink/PHP/ODBC mini-HOWTO

Electronics

Simputer team interview (O.C. News). The Simputer team, designers of a GPL hardware platform, took some time this week for an interview by Open Collector News. "Our design is very different to the Intel reference design. Where the two designs might look alike, as in how the Flash is connected to the SA1110 for example, there is only one way to do it and this is clearly indicated in the data sheets, apart from the reference design."

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for Apr. 26, 2001 (LinuxDevices). The weekly summary of the Embedded Linux world came this week by way of LinuxDevices.com. Features included a developers view of the new Agenda V3 Linux-based handheld system and an open camera server project.

Embedded Linux Newsletter (LinuxDevices). Too late for last week's Weekly Edition of LWN.net, the previous week's summary of the Embedded Linux marketplace was also posted at LinuxDevices.com. Topics that week included Inder Singh's view of the ELC Platform Specification and a sneak peek at Linux based cellphone/PDAs.

Interoperability

WINE Kernel Cousin returns. Brian Vincent wrote with news that he has taken over the WINE Kernel Cousin production, with his first issue already out and another due soon.

New Samba improves Windows mimicry (News.com). C|Net reports on the latest release from the Samba team. "The software offers cost savings not only because customers don't have to pay for the server operating system, but also because they don't have to pay "client" license fees for all the computers that use the server." (Thanks to Cesar A. K. Grossmann)

Samba 2.2: your way to Windows file/print services (ZDNet). Excited by the better integration with Windows, ZDNet reviewed the latest release from the Samba team. "Samba has always done exceptionally well at enabling MS-DOS and Windows systems to use Unix file/print servers exactly as if they were NT servers. This new version enhances its basic abilities by enabling a Samba server to act as an authentication source for both W2K and NT clients."

Network Management

OpenNMS Update, Vol 2., Issue 17. The OpenNMS Update for the week of April 24, 2001 includes a quick tip on process dependencies and SNMP threshold configuration.

New EVMS released. The Enterprise Volume Management System Project released a new snapshot of their project this past week.

Science

Biology Yearns to Be Free (Wired). Wired News compared closed source and open source models in the world of molecular biology. "Applications in biology -- which include technologies from operating systems to gene databases -- in an open-source environment would give the best minds access to the information they need to invent new technologies and improve those that exist."

Software Development

Guikachu, resource editor for PalmOS files. A new release of Guikachu, a GNOME application for graphical editing of resource files for PalmOS-based pocket computers, has been made available from the project web site.

Standards

Khronos Group Completes OpenML 1.0 Specification. The Khronos Group, a consortium of digital media and graphics companies consisting of 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI and Sun Microsystems Inc., announced the delivery of the OpenML 1.0 specification. OpenML is a software environment that is complementary to the peer OpenGL API designed for digital content authoring across multiple operating systems and hardware platforms.

Commercial implementations of OpenML 1.0 are expected on Linux and other OS environments with shipments starting later this year.

System Administration

Omni 0.1. Following in line with the past two weeks, a new release of the Omni package was made available by the Omni Project this week. Omni is the package of printer drivers designed to work within the Ghostscript framework.

Web-site Development

Zope 2.3.2 beta 2 released. Zope.org released the second beta version of the 2.3.2 release this past week. Changes for this release have also been posted. If no other serious problems are found they expect to make the final release on Friday, April 27th.

A new dictionary interface, ZDictionary, has also been released. A sample implementation has been placed online.

Zope Newbies for Aprl 25th. A new issue of Zope Newbies has been published at the Zope Newbies website. News of note includes a fix for using Konqueror with Zope, a link to a Zope Talk of particularly good quality, and news on using Zope on OpenBSD.

Zope and MySQL e-book. Beehive has announced the release of an English language version of its e-book titled Zope and MySQL.

Generic Sort External Method for Zope. Oleg Broytmann has written a generic sort external method for Zope, as posted to their discussion site.

Window Systems

The Linux GFX project. A group of developers has decided that XFree86 is never going to produce the graphics environment they want, so they have gone off and announced the Linux GFX project. Its plan is to develop a new X server from scratch which is oriented around performance and have "a faster development cycle." People are already questioning whether it makes sense to start a new, competing project of this magnitude, but the Linux GFX folks seem to be determined. See the announcement if you would like to join their mailing list.

Section Editor: Michael J. Hammel

Application Links
GIMP
Mozilla
Galeon
High Availability
ht://Dig
mnoGoSearch
MagicPoint
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

Open Source Code Collections
Berlios
Freshmeat
OpenSourceDirectory
Savannah
Le Serveur Libre
SourceForge
Sweetcode

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The latest release of the Caml Weekly News has been published.

Perl

If You Don't Know Perl, You Don't Know Dick (Linux.com). Linux.com talks with Dick Hardt, founder and CEO of ActiveState. "A great deal of our revenue so far has been around the 'bottled-water' business model, where we provide quality-assured versions of Perl for vendors that want us to have Perl work well or better with a particular technology of theirs. In this case we almost always invariably roll that out as open-source technology."

Quick Start Guide With SOAP and SOAP::Lite Part Two (Perl.com). Paul Kulchenko takes a deeper look at SOAP clients and servers in part 2 of this article on perl.com. "Another lightweight solution might be to implement the SOAP service as an HTTP daemon; in that case, you don't need to use a separate Web server. This might be useful in a situation where a client application accepts SOAP calls, or for internal usage."

This week on perl5-porters(Perl.com). This week's Perl5 Porters summary includes notes on quality control, placing modules in the core, regex debugger and ithreads.

This week on perl6-porters(Perl.com). This week's Perl6 Porters summary includes notes on internal data types, API conventions, and garbage collection.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary. This week's summary of the PHP world includes a large amount of discussion on the developers' list focused on the idea of a PHP 4.1 release

Python

Dr. Dobb's weekly "Python-URL!". The latest summary of the Python development world has been posted in Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!.

PyQt v2.4. The latest release of the Python bindings for the Qt toolkit have been posted to projects web site.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's weekly "Tcl-URL!" Summary. The latest summary of the Tcl development world has been posted in Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!.

Section Editor: Michael J. Hammel

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