See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

The final version of PostgreSQL 7.2 has been released. There are many "enterprise friendly" changes from 7.1.X, some of them include

• An improved vacuuming operation that does not lock tables.
• New support for transactions exceeding four billion counts.
• Optional OIDs.
• Histogram stats are performed during ANALYZE for better optimizations.
• Support for MD5 encryption when dealing with passwords.
• A new table access statistics module for improved index usage statistics.
• New support for international languages.

Those wishing to migrate to version 7.2 will need to perform a dump/restore operation.

The full PostgreSQL 7.2 Documentation is available online, in addition, the Developers-FAQ contains a lot of useful information.

Looking forward to version 7.3 and beyond, the TODO List has a long set of desired additions. The most urgently desired features include replication of distributed databases and point-in-time data recovery.

Audio Projects

Ogg Vorbis RC3 available. Release Candidate number three has been announced for the Ogg Vorbis open-source audio compression suite. "This release features bitrate management, meaning that instead of choosing one of several VBR modes, you can specify average bitrate, put boundaries on the bitrates to emulate CBR (useful for streaming), or the default VBR modes which have millions of possible quality levels."

RX/Saturno DX7 Synthesizer Emulator (linuxmusic). This week, linuxmusic features RX/Saturno, a new (version 0.0.1) emulator of the classic Yamaha DX7 6 operator FM Synthesizer.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in education report #63. The latest SEUL/edu Linux in education report looks at work towards an open-source implementation of the Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) Zone Information Server (ZIS). "To recap, the SIF is an XML schema proposed by a consortium of software vendors to allow compliant programs to exchange data. The ZIS is a 'gatekeeper' program that registers the application programs as to what type of data they provide (each 'type' can be registered to only one app at a time)."

Electronics

Icarus Verilog 0.6 released. Version 0.6 of the Icarus Verilog electronic simulation language compiler has been released. This version features lots of bug fixes, better standards compliance, and more. See the release notes for all of the details.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter. The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for January 31 is out. The bulk of the news this week is from LinuxWorld.

Using GTK+/X as an Embedded GUI (ELJonline). Chuck Groom explains how to modify GTK+/X to build a custom GUI. "One of the reasons why WinCE and Palm-sized PC devices did not initially do as well is that a general-purpose GUI design borrowed from desktop paradigms is not appropriate for embedded devices."

Peer to Peer

Smart & simple messaging (IBM developerWorks). Wes Biggs discusses SMS (Short Messaging System), a wireless message protocol. "Developing wireless applications in the present environment can be frustrating. Because device-independent code is still the exception rather than the rule, today's successful projects tend to focus on narrowly defined target audiences, where each user can be guaranteed to have the same, or at least highly similar, wireless equipment. Despite recent trends toward technology consolidation, there is no standard, or even de facto standard, for deploying a wireless app."

Printing Software

AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 Released. A new version of AFPL Ghostscript has been released. Version 7.04 is a security and maintenance release.

CUPS v1.1.13 is released. A new version of the CUPS printing system is available. "CUPS 1.1.13 adds support for the KOI8-R and KOI8-U encodings, message catalogs for several Russian locales and for Simplified Chinese, improvements for MacOS X (Darwin) and IRIX, improvements to the PDF, PostScript, and text filters, status reporting for IPP-based printers (paper out, etc.), and improvements to the SAMBA driver export facility. The new release also fixes bugs in the scheduler, the lpstat command, the CUPS API, and the pstoraster filter."

Science

SQL Clinic Reaches 1.0 (LinuxMedNews). LinuxMedNews reports on SQL Clinic 1.0, an SQL interface for dealing with clinical data via a web interface.

Standards

The Free Standards Group Releases Two Linux Standards Platforms. Here is the official announcement from the Free Standards Group on the release of LSB 1.1 and Li18nux 1.0.

Joint POSIX/Single Unix Specification. The Open Group has announced version 3 of its Single UNIX Specification document. (Thanks to Andrew Josey.)

System Administration

Intro to cfengine for system administration (IBM developerWorks). Teodor Zlatanov illustrates the use of cfengine for automating systems administration tasks. "Cfengine (configuration engine) is a UNIX administration tool that aims to make the easy administrative tasks automatic, and the hard tasks easier. Its goal is system convergence from any state towards an ideal state."

Web-site Development

ht://Dig 3.1.6 released. A new version of the ht://Dig web site search engine has been released. "This new production version fixes a number of important bugs and adds a few heavily-requested features. As the latest stable release, it is recommended for all production servers." See the Release notes for all of the details.

Call Profiler - profile your Zope website. Version 1.2 of Call Profiler, a Zope site optimizer tool, has been released. Call Profiler features a BSD style license.

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

WaveSurfer 1.2.1 released. Version 1.2.1 of the WaveSurfer audio editing package has been released. The Changes in this release include new command line options, GUI additions, and bug fixes.

Web Browsers

Mozilla 0.9.8 Released. Version 0.9.8 of the Mozilla browser has been released. Changes include improvements to the address book, a fix for dynamic theme switching, improved favicon.ico handling, support for MNG animations, and more.

Galeon 1.0.3 and 1.1.3 released. Two new versions of Galeon have been announced. Version 1.0.3 (stable) adds Mozilla 0.9.8 compatibility and bug fixes. Version 1.1.3 (development) also adds security options, a new set of preferences icons, socks proxies support, and more.

Desktop Environments

GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha 2: 'Mr. Nilsson Sheds a Tear'. The Alpha 2 release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop has been announced. "Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface.".

GARNOME Preview 1. The first preview of GARNOME, "the bad-ass, bleeding edge GNOME distribution for testers and tweakers everywhere", has been announced. (Thanks to Jeff Waugh.)

There is also a GNOME Gnotices discussion available on GARNOME.

People of KDE: Cornelius Schumacher. This week's People of KDE features Cornelius Schumacher, the maintainer of KOrganizer, author of Kandy, and contributor to other KDE projects.

Impressions on the Paris Linux Expo. Philippe Fremy writes about a real-time code writing experience from the Paris Linux Expo. "Then I saw this magic thing: A live coding session by a truly talented KDE core developer: David took his laptop and started coding under my eyes. In five minutes, it was done: the 'URL' label on Konqueror would accept a pasted URL and simply open it. Really great!"

GNOME Summary for February 2, 2002. This week's Gnome Summary includes news of the upcoming GUADEC conference, two recent versions of GNOME, Miguel on GNOME and Mono, Evolution 1.0.2, and more.

Games

The Chopping Block returns!. The February, 2002 issue of the Chopping Block is out with all of the latest developments from the WorldForge project.

WorldForge Audio White Paper. A new version of the WorldForge Audio White Paper is available. Various audio formats are compared.

Three new games on PyGame. This week, PyGame takes a look at Samepygame 1.1, Pykanoid 0.12.1, and Pypong 0.2.

Graphics

GDKXFT for i18n Environment. A new version of GDKXft has been released. GDKxft adds anti-aliased font support to gdk+-1.2. "GDKXft has a new version for the international environment that allow GTK-1.2 to render anti-alias font for i18n environment."

Interoperability

Samba 2.2.3 released. Samba 2.2.3 has been released. It contains a number of bug fixes (but, seemingly, no security fixes), and a number of changes aimed at dealing with scalability problems.

Multimedia

Gnome-Media 1.112.0: 'The IMF taking care of business' released. A new version of Gnome-Media has been released. Version 1.112.0 adds a new theme format, preferences, and bug fixes.

GStreamer 0.3.2 released aka 'Do-b-day'. A new version of the GStreamer multimedia framework has been announced. Version 0.3.2 is the first release that was built with using Glib 2.0 and libxml2, it features a new capabilities negotiation system, a new Alpha GNOME 2 mediaplayer, new mjpeg encoder/decoder plugins, and lots of bug fixes. GStreamer also has new support for the Ogg Tarkin video encoding and decoding system.

Office Applications

Gnumeric 1.0.4 released. Version 1.0.4 of the Gnumeric spreadsheet program is available. This is a bug fix release.

AbiWord Weekly News #81. Issue #81 of the AbiWord Weekly News is online. The bug fixing mission continues.

Programming Languages

Caml

Caml Weekly News for February 5, 2002. The latest Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include building TAGS tables for emacs, IoXML, ocamlnet-0.92, OCamlCVS 1.1, and string searching with OCamlAgrep 1.0.

This week on the Caml Hump. The Caml Hump features articles on MLDonkey, a linux client developed in OCaml for the peer-to-peer file sharing network, openin, OCamlAgrep, and IoXML.

Java

Building dynamic Web sites with mathematical content (IBM developerWorks). Michael Juntao Yuan writes about using LaTeX and Java to add mathematical figures to dynamic web pages. "The Internet and the Web were originally designed by scientists to exchange scientific and mathematical research information. Ironically, after more than 30 years of Internet and 10 years of Web development, there is still no easy way to publish mathematics-intensive content on the Web."

Using XDoclet: Developing EJBs with Just the Bean Class (O'Reilly). Dion Almaer introduces XDoclet on O'Reilly's xml.com. "Have you developed an EJB? Have you been frustrated at having to create and manipulate the XML deployment descriptors, as well as the interfaces? I certainly have. I was recently working on an EJB for the Xbeans open source project and I decided to use another open source tool -- XDoclet -- to generate the XML descriptors and interfaces for me."

Lisp

CL-PDF 0.3 brings Adobe Acrobat to Lisp. A common lisp library known as CL-PDF version 0.3 has been released. "This is an early version of a Common Lisp library for generating documents in Adobe Acrobat format. This small but powerful library is self-contained and does not require Adobe tools such as Acrobat Distiller."

Free The X3J Thirteen! for January, 2002. The January, 2002 issue of Free The X3J Thirteen! is out. Topics this month include new releases of GCL, OpenMcL and SBCL, and more.

Perl

Inaugural issue of The Perl Review (use Perl). Use Perl has posted an announcement for the first issue of The Perl Review. The first issue covers extreme programming, structured classes, benchmarking, and more.

Beginning PMCs (Perl.com). Jeffrey Goff discusses extensions to the Perl 5 Parrot interpreter. "One of the best things about Parrot is that it's not just for Perl implementors. Parrot 0.0.3 came with support for extensible data types that can be used to implement the types used in your favorite language. The mechanism by which these types are extensible is called the PMC."

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for February 4, 2002. The latest PHP Weekly Summary topics include manual translations, a safe_mode_include_dir patch, Satellite in PECL, FreeBSD and CVS, a PHP 5 build system, the Roxen SAPI, and more.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! for Feb 4. Stackless Python returns with a 2.2 alpha release; Zope 2.5.0; Python and Zope participants needed at The O'Reilly Open Source Convention; and more in this week's Python-URL.

This week on the Daily Python URL. This week's entries on the Daily Python URL look at converting TrueType fonts to XML, doing Church's lambda calculus, using the SimpleParse module, processing meteorological radar data, and more. A python 3D museum display is also examined.

PyChecker 0.8.9 released. PyChecker version 0.8.9 has been released. This release features several new warnings and lots of bug fixes.

Ruby

This week on the Ruby Garden. This week's Ruby Garden entries include Version 0.4 of the Radical web application framework, and an interview with Kent Beck and Alan Cooper,

The Ruby Weekly News. The Ruby Weekly News looks at the Ruby utilities Log4r 1.0.1, RbProf 0.2.1, PerfCtr 0.1.0, and Locana.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for Feb 4. This week's Tcl-URL looks at driving Excel from Tcl; SMTP authentication; explanations of names paces; and more.

XML

Using tDOM and tDOM XSLT (IBM developerWorks). Cameron Laird writes about tDOM and tDOM XSLT on IBM's developerWorks. "Simple benchmarks show that tDOM is one of the best-performing XML processors currently available. Access through the Tcl 'scripting' language makes for a particularly potent development environment -- fast in both development and execution. A 'dual level' (or two-language) model of development combines the advantages of Tcl and XSLT for different aspects of XML manipulation."

Miscellaneous

Introduction to Make (O'Reilly). Jennifer Vesperman introduces Make on O'Reilly's Linux DevCenter. "Make is useful for system administrators as well as developers. This article primarily discusses Make as a compilation tool, but it can be effective for program installation or system configuration changes."

oprofile-0.0.9 available. Version 0.0.9 of the oprofile profiler has been released. The release notes show that support for Linux 2.x kernels has been added, and an RTC mode is now available.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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