See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

"The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is a collection of routines for numerical computing. The routines are written from scratch by the GSL team in ANSI C, and present a modern Applications Programming Interface (API) for C programmers, while allowing wrappers to be written for very high level languages." The GSL is being distributed under the GPL license. It has been tested on a wide variety of Unix platforms as well as OS/2. GSL also builds under Microsoft Visual C++.

A team of eight authors are responsible for the project.

The initial release already covers a wide variety of scientific applications including:

• Complex Numbers
• Roots of Polynomials
• Special Functions
• Vectors and Matrices
• Permutations
• Sorting
• BLAS Support
• Linear Algebra
• Eigensystems
• Fast Fourier Transforms
• Quadrature
• Random Numbers
• Quasi-Random Sequences
• Random Distributions
• Statistics
• Histograms
• N-Tuples
• Monte Carlo Integration
• Simulated Annealing
• Differential Equations
• Interpolation
• Numerical Differentiation
• Chebyshev Approximation
• Series Acceleration
• Discrete Hankel Transforms
• Root-Finding
• Minimization
• Least-Squares Fitting
• Physical Constants
• IEEE Floating-Point

If you prefer to work in languages other than C, GSL includes Wrappers for Python, Perl, and C++.

Several projects based on GSL are already being distributed, GSL should be a useful foundation for many more.

For those who are working on scientific software projects, GSL looks to be a great way to gain a huge step forward. Resourceful professors could use GSL as the basis for a number of different courses. (Thanks to Brian Gough.)

Clusters

Linux High Availability Summary. The latest Linux High Availability Summary has been published. Among other things, version 0.4.9.1 of the heartbeat node monitoring package has been released. Downloads of heartbeat are available here.

Directory Management Systems

Mailing lists for Ganymede. Two new mailing lists have been announced for the Ganymede directory management system. One list is for development questions, and the other is for general help.

Documentation

LDP Weekly News for November 27, 2001. The November 27, 2001 edition of the LDP Weekly News is available. This issue discusses a move of the LDP database and ScrollServer 0.6, and includes new releases of the Firewall Piercing mini-HOWTO and the Linux MP3 CD Burning mini-HOWTO.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. The SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for November 26 is out. Covered topics include journal publishing, the Distributed Encyclopedia of Sciences, and more.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter for November 22, 2001. The November 22, 2001 edition of the Embedded Linux Newsletter is out. This week's issue covers a number of different Linux PDA issues.

BusyBox 0.60.2 released. A new version of BusyBox, a toolkit of Unix utilities for embedded systems, has been released. Version 0.60.2 is considered stable, and features several bug fixes, backtick handling in msh works better now.

Mini-libc Builder 1.0. IBM has recently released Mini-libc Builder 1.0, a tool that builds a minimal version of the C library with memory constrained systems in mind. Mini-libc Builder has been released under the GPL license.

Web-site Development

mnoGoSearch 3.2.3 released. A new release of the web site search engine mnoGoSearch is available. the release notes list a number of additions and bug fixes.

The latest Zope Members News. The latest Zope Members News includes a number of articles on zwiki, announcements for CMFLocalizer 0.2 and Redirector 1.2, as well as other Zope news.

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

Audio Applications

GSMP, the General Sound Manipulation Program. A new, early release of GSMP, the General Sound Manipulation Program is available. "We currently focus on building a complete and open-source Virtual Studio environment for Linux. This General Sound Manipulation Program will consist of a normal Wave-Editor and an application where wave and MIDI unite to a full Virtual Studio environment." The latest version features an OSS plug-in and bug fixes.

Boodler: a programmable soundscape tool. Boodler, an application that appears to be a sonic wallpaper generator, is being developed by Andrew Plotkin. "Boodler is a tool for creating soundscapes -- continuous, infinitely varying streams of sound. Boodler is designed to run in the background on a computer, maintaining whatever sound environment you desire." Work is being done to tie Boodler to X10 remote motion detectors, so your soundscape can vary according to what room you are in. The code can be downloaded here. Boodler is licensed under the LGPL license.

Browsers

Mozilla 0.9.6 released. Mozilla 0.9.6 is available. The release notes indicate a number of changes including page icons in the URL bar, better support of .BMP and .ICO images, a new print preview feature, a new Search For capability, and more.

Galeon zips while Mozilla slips (Register). The Register reports on the Galeon 1.0 release. "Other Galeon addicts swear by the fine-grained font scaling, others are partial to the cookie management. And unlike Netscape, it loads the same day. But it's the tabs that keep us coming back to Galeon, even though KDE's file manager Konqueror is a first class browser in itself." Galeon 1.0 is available here.

Desktop Environments

The latest GNOME Summary. The GNOME Summary for November 17 through 23, 2001 is out. Topics include the Mozilla team and bug squashing, a Rodney Dawes interview, Overflow 0.6.0, the new GNOME 2 porting document, Java-GNOME 0.7.1, and more.

KDE 2.2.2. KDE 2.2.2 has been released. There are a number of new features, performance improvements, and a few security fixes. See the announcement for the full list.

People of KDE: Matthias 'Kalle' Dalheimer. The "People of KDE" series returns with this interview with Matthias Dalheimer. "Today, I mostly have the role of 'elder statesman': I help younger developers find their way into the project, handle press contacts, give talks at conferences and give my opinion when asked (and sometimes even when not asked :-))."

KC KDE #26 Is Out. The November 23, 2001 edition of Kernel Cousin KDE is out. "Read about how Linux father, Linus Torvalds, is also a model KDE user and bug reporter, LISa the new Lan Browsing Wizard, Kinkatta plugins, the Boson real-time strategy game, a KDE Script Interface, news of a kdeedu module, the KDE3 beta1 week delay, and much more."

Xfce 3.8.12 is released. Version 3.8.12 of the Xfce desktop environment has been released. This version includes bug fixes, an improved look and feel, and an updated xftree utility. (Thanks to Joe Klemmer.)

Games

Gnomoku: First GTKmm 1.3 app. Gnomoku, which appears to be a tic-tac-toe game on steiroids, is the first test application for the recent GTKmm 2 efforts. GTKmm is the C++ wrapper for the GTK+ libraries.

Building Freeciv: An Open Source Strategy Game (O'Reilly). Howard Wen looks at Freeciv, an open-source game that is modeled after Civilization.

Civil 0.60 released. A new version of Civil just came out. "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." The new version includes a working framework for game sound, better scoring, and improved exit screens. (Thanks to Gareth Noyce.)

Graphics

Gimp Print 4.2.0 released. A new, stable version of Gimp Print has been announced. This version supports many new printers and includes updated manuals, improved print quality, more language translations, and improved packaging.

GSview 4.1 released. A new version of GSview, a PostScript previewer, has been released. Version 4.1 is primarily a bug fix release but it also has a few new features, including the ability to specify page sizes on the command line, and translations to Dutch and Greek.

Office Applications

AbiWord 0.9.5 released. Release 0.9.5 of the AbiWord word processor has been announced. This version features a number of new features and some bug fixes. "Highlights include: Command Line Printing, Normal Mode, Thesaurus ,Dictionary support, All image type support (these last three via plugins) , Header/Footers for first/last/facing pages, Dynamic Toolbars (drag and drop toolbar icons) for Unix/Gnome. Plus lots of other stuff and bugfixes."

AbiWord Weekly News #71. Issue number 71 of the AbiWord Weekly News is out.

Miscellaneous

This Week in DotGNU. The This Week in DotGNU Newsletter for November 24 is out. Covered topics include phpGroupWare (which has joined DotGNU), the new GNU Common C++ release, and more.

Overflow 0.6.0 released. A new version of Overflow has been released. "Overflow is a free (GPL/LGPL) "data flow oriented" development environment. It can be use to build complex applications by combining small, reusable building blocks."

gFTP 2.0.9 released. Version 2.0.9 of the gFTP ftp client has been announced. This version adds support for sshv2, gtk+ >= 1.3.8, and more. Downloads are available here.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The November 21-27, 2001 issue of the Caml Weekly News is out. Check it out for the latest in the world of Caml.

This week on the Caml Hump. The latest Caml Hump listings include a look at mlglade, a Glade to OCaml compiler, Report, an XML structure tool, Zoggy, an interface builder, and Maple-MuPad which converts Maple code to MuPad.

Haskell

Haskell Communities and Activities Report. The first edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report has been announced.

Java

Java-GNOME 0.7.1 released. A new version of Java-GNOME is available. "This release has focused on stability and completeness of the bindings. New classes and methods have been added to achieve very close to complete coverage of GDK, GTK, libgnomeui, and libgnome."

Perl

Developing coding guidelines (IBM developerWorks). Teodor Zlatanov discusses Perl coding guidelines on IBM's developerWorks. "The most common mistake a programmer can make is not in the list of bugs for his program. It is not a function of the programmer's age or language of choice. It is, simply, the assumption that his abilities are complete and there is no room for improvement."

New CPAN Distributions for November 27, 2001 (use Perl). The use Perl site highlights a bunch of new Perl modules that have recently been added to CPAN.

POOP Module Comparison (use Perl). Use Perl points out some documentation on Perl Object-Oriented Persistence, or POOP that was in need of some better publicity.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for November 26, 2001. The November 26, 2001 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is available. Topics include the definition of a final RC, PHP 4.1.0 RC 3, a new ImageMagick extension, PHP documentation, the GD extension, debugging Apache and a new PHPdoc.

Python

This week's Python-URL. The Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for November 26, 2001 is out with coverage of new extension proposals, and an interesting paper by Andrew Kuchling.

Updating your Python reading list, Part 2 (IBM developerWorks). David Mertz updates his Python Reading List on IBM's developerWorks. "This installment provides new comparative reviews of recent Python titles (or titles missed in the last roundup)"

Reviews of 15 Python books. If the previous article doesn't give you enough Python reading material for your Christmas wish list, Ron Stephens also reviews 15 Python Books.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. The Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for November 26, 2001 is out, with the latest from the Tcl/Tk community.

XML

Kawa-XQuery. Kawa-XQuery is a partial implementation of the W3C draft XML Query language. XQuery is a high-level expression, XML generation, and SQL-like xquery language that includes XPath as a sub-set. This implementation achieves high performance because a query is compiled down to Java bytecodes using the Kawa framework. The latest release adds servlet support, namespace support, line numbers in stack traces, and more optimizations.

Miscellaneous

Lightweight Languages (O'Reilly). Perl guru Simon Cozens covers the recent Lightweight Languages Workshop held at MIT. "Bringing together the academic and commercial sides of language design and implementation was the interesting premise behind last weekend's Lightweight Languages Workshop, LL1, at the AI Lab at MIT, and I'm happy to say that it wasn't the great flame-fest you might imagine."

Open64 Forum. There will be an Open64 Forum at the upcoming MICRO34 conference. "Open64 is a suite of optimizing compiler development tools for Intel Itanium(TM) systems running Linux. The Open64 project is the continuation of the SGI Pro64(TM) compiler suite which was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) . The Open64 compiler suite currently includes compilers for C, C++, and Fortran90/95 compilers for the IA-64 Linux ABI and API standards."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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