LWN - Development

Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Development page.	Development tools Java The JDK 1.1.8 for Linux is, indeed, in development. Juergen Kreileder dropped us a note to let us know that it is scheduled to be released in the next couple of weeks. Excellent news! The Java BOF at the Linux Expo will be held tonight, May 20th, at 6:30pm in room E3. Here's the informal agenda. A pre-release of Java 3D for Java 2 has been uploaded. Here is Steve Byrne's note for more details. Perl An interview with Jon Orwant, publisher of The Perl Journal, discusses the creation and demise of The Perl Institute. It was published April 26th, on www.perl.com, but we missed it, so you had to wait to hear about it until we found it referenced in the Perl Institute News. A more up-to-date version of Tom Christiansen's web design principles, entitled Diversity Compliance in Web Design, is now available. It incorporates some suggestions he picked up from Charles R. Thompson. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh	May 20, 1999

	Development projects Evan Leibovitch, well known in many circles, and currently Executive Director of the Linux Professional Institute, mentioned on the Caldera mailing list that his company has been instrumental, and succesful, in advocating for the "freeing" of the source code for 'sar', a popular System V performance-monitoring suite. Check out his posting for more details. The free version was announced on Freshmeat on May 18th. Evan also confirmed that Stephen Tweedie has been aware of this possible development and that support for 'osar' in the Linux kernel should be present. AbiSuite AbiWord Preview Release 0.7 is now available, via CD or the Internet, according to this press release from AbiSource. This is the first release to provide pre-compiled binaries, to aid non-developers in trying out the software. Both rpm and deb packages are available. Paul Rohr at AbiSuite mentioned that they've seen over 16,000 downloads of AbiWord since its initial announcement, to more than 9,000 unique sites. CashCow Currently primarily of interest only to Danish programmers, a new open source project, CashCow, has been launched to support a library for clearing credit card transfers with the Danish credit card clearing authority, "Danish Payment Systems" (PBS). There is interest in expanding CashCow to work with other credit card authorities, but actual progress will depend on the involvement of new developers. If you've been planning to create something like this, here's a good opportunity to survey the project to see if working with them will help you achieve your goals more quickly and painlessly. For more information, check out this note from Troels Arvin. Gnome The GNOME Workshop Project was announced this week. The purpose of this project is to bring order, consistency, and integration to the numerous productivity applications that are emerging from the GNOME project. It looks like an important next step. Gnumeric 0.26 is now out. The announcement promises a lot of advances, plus bug fixes and better translations. GNU The latest edition of the Brave GNU World newsletter is now available. An announcement list has been created as well, for those that wish to be notified immediately of new editions. High Availability The MOSIX system has been released under the GPL. MOSIX is a package for building clusters; its primary claim to fame seems to be a process migration facility that makes load balancing across clusters much easier. The GPL release ends a long series of complaints and gripes about MOSIX's previous license. Good news. (Thanks to Rahul Dave). Heart 0.12 beta is now available for download. The Linux/HA BOF at the Linux Expo will be held tonight, May 20th, at 6:30 pm in room A. The ExtremeLinux track at the Linux Expo this week should be the best source of the latest information on high availability projects for Linux. We look forward to hearing some reports on how it goes. The program has been posted and the featured speaker is Jon Hall. KDE KDE Art. This week, the artist currently known as Torsten Rahn providedus with a second screenshot of the new high-colour icons that the KDE artist team is currently working on. Torsten also expressedintentions of dropping the 40-colour icon sets in favour of dithering the high-colour ones as necessary; it is also likely that they will switch from the XPM format to PNG. Artists interested in joining the the KDE artist team to help with icons, logos, rendering, backgrounds, tiles and such should contact torsten@kde.org. KPanel. There's been a lot of discussionon the matter of applets, docking and swallowing in KDE. The thread started with this message from Matthias Ettrich and diverged somewhat into menubar/toolbar issues including this descriptionof a menubar/toolbar consolidation from Glen Parker. It turns out that Sirtaj Singh Kang has already laid out the foundationfor an implementation of this idea. Matthis finished up with an explanationof the problems associated with tear-off menus. KConfig. Preston Brown raisedthe issue of switching from INI-style config and desktop files to XML, possibly in coorperation with the GNOME folks. Cristian Tibirna summed up some of the issues involved; there appears to be little consensus on whether XML would be a worthwhile improvement or not. KDE Quickies. Also this week, David Sweet announceda new mini-HOWTO for KDE developers, and David Faure released a temporary patchfor the infamous FTP upload problemthat was introduced in KDE 1.1.1. (Many thanks to Navindra Umanee for gathering the KDE information reported here). Mozilla/Netscape Netscape 4.6 was announced on Sunday, May 16th. It is available for download from the ftp.netscape.com site. The Mozilla M5 tarball became available for download on May 12th, so the project continues roughly on schedule, with four more milestones before the official beta. Samba Samba 2.0.4 has been announced. This is a stable release, and is the recommended version for production servers. Zope The official announcement for Zope 2.0.0 alpha 1 is now out. There are currently compatibility problems between Zope 2 and earlier versions, but these are expected to be fixed soon. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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