See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Netscape 6.2 released. This week saw the release of Netscape 6.2, the third release based on Mozilla. The release notes list a number of new features.

Features that affect the Linux version include improved auto-completion, improved downloading, with the ability to handle more file types, and a new address book tab for quicker access to addresses.

Netscape 6.2 may be downloaded here.

Databases

XML and Databases? Follow Your Nose (O'Reilly). Leigh Dodds talks about XML database issues and opinions from the XML-DEV community in an article on O'Reilly's XML.com.

Education

SEUL/Edu report #56. The October 29, 2001 edition of the SEUL/Edu Linux in Education report is out. Topics include looking at word processor fonts, patent problems with UK wireless attendance programs, the Nepalese Ganesha's Project, a French course writing system called Logidèe-tools, and more.

Electronics

gerbv 0.0.4 released. A new version of gerbv, the Gerber file Viewer, is available. Gerbv allows printed circuit CAD/CAM files to be viewed. This release features support for the broken Gerber files generated by EagleCad, and adds some minor code changes.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter (LinuxDevices). The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for October 25 is out, with the usual roundup of news from the embedded Linux community.

This week also marks the second anniversary of the LinuxDevices site, a lot has happened in the embedded linux arena in the last two years.

Printing Systems

Ghostscript installation truly terrifying. The Ghostscript site mentions the truly scary experience that one user had when installing Ghostscript. Of course, what testimonial is complete without an accompanying cartoon.

Notes from the OSDN Printing Summit 2001. Grant Taylor from LinuxPrinting.org is attending the OSDN Printing Summit 2001, and has written some notes on the conference. The summit is covering all kinds of current open-source printing issues. "Ben then launched into a presentation of admin issues. He led in with an apalling 40% stat for administrator time spent on printers."

Web-site Development

Zope 2.5 alpha 2 released. The 2.5 alpha 2 version of Zope has been released. The Zope 2.5 change list includes one bug fix for the alpha 2 release and a much longer list of features and squashed bugs for the alpha 1 release.

The latest Zope Members News. This week's News from the Zope members contains discussions on Using non-ascii character sets with Structured Text, Zope 2.5.0 alpha 2, ZBabel 2.0.0 beta 2, zQuest 1.1.0 beta 1, XMLKit, and more.

Notes from the first ObjectWeb conference. Stefane Fermigier has sent us his notes from the first ObjectWeb conference. (in French)

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

Desktop Development

Browsers

Mozilla adds a Calendar project. OEone Corporation has donated some pieces of their calendar system to the Mozilla project.

The latest projects from Mozdev. The latest Mozdev projects include the new projects pIXPCOM and Optimoz and updates for Jslib, Rpgtools, and Abimoz.

Galeon 0.12.6 available. Following on the heels of last week's 0.12.5 release, Galeon 0.12.6 is now available. This version is the first release candidate leading up to Galeon 1.0 and it includes a few new bug fixes.

Desktop Environments

Gdk-pixbuf updates. Two new releases of Gdk-pixbuf have been released this week. The Wensleydale 0.12.0 release, with some missing functionality for the BMP and ICO loaders. Wensleydale was quickly followed by the Roquefort 0.13.0 release, which featured a fix for a "really stupid bug" in the ICO loader. The Venezuelan Beaver Cheese release can't be too far off.

GNOME Summary for October 26, 2001. The latest Gnome Summary looks at accessibility, GNOME-LOVE, the Control Center 2.0 port, Guppi 0.40, the Unofficial GNOME I18N Development Guidelines, and more.

South African language translation effort for KDE. Dwayne Bailey sent us an announcement for a project that aims to add support for eleven South African languages to KDE and other open source projects.

gtkmm-1.3 alpha released. Gtkmm-1.3, the "first unstable alpha of the gtkmm C++ language binding for GTK+2.0" has been released.

Games

Civil v0.50 released. Version 0.50 of Civil is available. Civil is "a cross-platform, real-time, networked strategy game, developed using Python, PyGame and SDL--allowing players to take part in scenarios set during the American Civil war".

GUI Packages

FLTK News. The latest releases from the FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) project include FLTK 1.1.0b4, Fl_SevenSeg 1.0, and HTMLDOC 1.8.15.

Graphics

Gimp-Print 4.1.99-b4 released. Gimp-Print version 4.1.99-b4 has been released. This release requires Gimp 1.2 and includes improved performance for existing printers and support for some new printers.

Office Applications

Gnumeric 0.72 released. Gnumeric 0.72, aka 'squish', has been released. "This is a bug fix release. All reproducible crashes and redraw errors have now been fixed." Also included is the ability to reference named expressions in other sheets and books.

AbiWord Weekly News for October 30, 2001. The October 30, 2001 edition of the AbiWord Weekly News is available with the latest status from the AbiWord project.

Miscellaneous

This week in DotGNU. This Week In DotGNU for October 26 is out. Covered topics include the Portable.NET 0.2.0 release, the competition between virtual identity projects, and more.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News for October 30, 2001. The October 30, 2001 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Covered topics include the Ocaml 3.0.4 alpha MinGW port, the Caml Consortium, otags 2.0, and a search for a new CWN editor.

COBOL

TinyCOBOL version 0.55 released. A new version of TinyCOBOL has been released. Downloads and release notes are available here.

Erlang

Erlang Release 8B. A new release of Erlang, version 8B, has been released. The release highlights indicate improvements in the capabilities of Erlang on high end systems with better multi-threaded I/O, memory handling, and disk and memory based tables. This version now supports native compilation on Solaris and Linux x86. Online documentation has also been improved, in addition to many other things.

Erlsnoop 1.0 released. Gordon Beaton has released Erlsnoop 1.0, a utility for sniffing Erlang messages on a local network.

Haskell

HaXml. David Mertz looks at XML processing with HaXml on IBM's developerWorks. "Consider Haskell in lieu of DOM, SAX, or XSLT for processing XML data. The library HaXml creates representations of XML documents as native recursive data structures in the functional language Haskell. HaXml brings with it a set of powerful higher order functions for operating on these 'datafied' XML documents. Many of the HaXml techniques are far more elegant, compact, and powerful than the ones found in familiar techniques like DOM, SAX, or XSLT."

Java

XML Data Binding with Castor (O'Reilly). Dion Almaer looks at Castor, an open-source data binding framework for Java. "In this article, we will walk through marshalling data to and from XML, using a XML data-binding API. The first question is, why? Why not use SAX or DOM? Personally, when I sit down to work with XML, I get frustrated with the amount of code that you need to write to do simple things."

Java 2 gets a new focus subsystem (IBM developerWorks). Bertrand Portier examines JDK 1.4 from the Java 2 platform.

Lisp

OpenMCL 0.8 released. Version 0.8 of OpenMCL has been released. This version improves support for the PPC architecture, and adds some bug fixes and performance improvements.

Perl

Providing Feedback to Module Authors (use Perl). Use Perl mentions a news posting from Jonathan Stowe that discusses improving user feedback to authors of Perl modules: "The basic premise is that all of us who use modules from CPAN should at least once in a while provide some feedback to the authors of those modules. I don't think that the authors do what they do for adulation and praise, but I do think they are interested in what people think of there creations and what the use them for."

Apache::Emulator (use Perl). Mwetters has written a Perl module that emulates the Apache request object from CGI. The code looks to be useful for debugging CGI scripts.

Perl 5 Porters for October 21, 2001. Better late than never, the October 21, 2001 edition of Perl 5 Porters is now available. This edition talks about a Perl 5.8.0 TODO list, Sean M. Burke's POD documentation rewrite efforts, Taint issues, AUTOLOAD and packages, B::Parrot, and more.

Perl 6 Porters for October 13, 2001. Also better late than never, the October 13, 2001 Perl 6 Porters came out this week. Topics include NaN (Not a Number) issues, Numerical Strings, hyperoperator ( ^ ) reduction, and Parrot Magic Cookies.

PHP

PHP Weekly News for October 29, 2001. The October 29, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. Issues this week are bugs with trans-sid, ob_* and $_POST, discussions of extensions and static libraries, SMTP and mail(), and more.

Python

Noisy Python (O'Reilly). Stephen Figgins looks at some Python based sound apps on O'Reilly's OnLamp site. Solfege, Snack, MusicKit, and PyGame are examined.

Preview of the [anygui] project (IBM developerWorks). David Mertz examines the Anygui project. "A very interesting project in the Python world has entered early development. The [anygui] project is intended as a wrapper API for a large number of underlying graphic toolkits. Once fully developed, a Python programmer will be able to call a common [anygui] function -- for example, to create a window -- then have the 'best available' toolkit do the work."

Daily Python-URL items. The latest from the Daily Python-URL includes a look at Asmo for processing XML, an updated draft of Andrew Kuchling's What's New in Python 2.2 document, dbdoc, "A simple Python API for inspecting database schemas to generate documentation.", and " From Logo to Python in Two Decades", an article from Warren Keuffel.

Ruby

An Introduction to Ruby (O'Reilly). Colin Steele introduces Ruby on O'Reilly's Linux Devcenter. "I can already hear you grumbling, 'Oh, great, another language.' Why should you care? You're already up to your elbows in technologies to learn, right? Well, call your significant other and tell him or her you're going to be late tonight. And go get another Jolt. You're going to be hooked on Ruby for the simple reason that Ruby makes programming fun again (and that's what really counts)."

The Ruby Garden. This week, The Ruby Garden features articles about SqlRelay for tweaking databases, the attr_initializer shortcut for def initialize(...), Double Dispatching vs Clumsy Coercing, an event-based Ruby parser called Ripper, and more.

Tcl/Tk

Tcl-URL for October 29, 2001. The latest edition of the Tcl-URL contains articles on floating point representations, exec tricks, program launchers, WIMP bindings, dealing with window managers, and more.

XML

The Selfish Tag (O'Reilly). Ed Dumbill discusses evolving XML standards on O'Reilly's XML.com site: "The current received wisdom has corrupted the desirability of open standards into the notion that the developer is helpless and must wait for standards to emerge before progressing. In fact much criticism of XML is based on this misconception, that somehow if you choose to use XML 1.0 you're immediately beholden to anything that emerges from W3C, OASIS, or others."

Miscellaneous

Solaris-to-Linux porting guide (IBM developerWorks). Malcom Zung and Brian Thomson cover the issues involved in porting Solaris applications to Linux. "Linux source code is freely available. Any developer who has struggled with debugging a problem that involves someone else's proprietary code knows how much easier it is when you can actually see for yourself what that code is doing. And if you find a problem there or want a feature added, you can modify Linux, provided you follow the provisions of the GNU General Public License. You aren't forced to wait for an operating system supplier to work on your problem for you. This isn't just a theoretical advantage."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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