See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Linux Systems Administrator Guide. Joanna Oja is the new maintainer for the Linux Systems Administrator Guide, taking over from Lars Wirzenius, who has been maintaining this resource since late 1992/early 1993. Many thanks to Lars for all his work and best of luck to Joanna.

VAX porting project revived. Kenn Humborg dropped us a note to mention that the Linux/VAX project, to port Linux to the VAX architecture, has been revived. The website listed is new and if you wish to be subscribed to the new mailing list, check that site for information on re-subscribing (the original subscriber list has been lost).

Note that if you want Unix on your VAX right now, he recommends trying out NetBSD, since the Linux project is still in the early stages.

BSD Driver Database. Apparently the FreeBSD Driver Database has been expanded to encompass drivers from all the BSD operating systems. The new BSD Driver Database wants to "help individuals with hardware that needs supporting get in touch with driver developers with the knowledge to write the support for the hardware." [From Slashdot]

Help out the LPI. The Linux Professional Institute still needs some people to help them out by submitting test questions for its Linux administration certification exams. If you know a lot about some aspect of running a Linux system, why not show it off by coming up with a few gnarly test questions? See the LPI web page for information on how to help.

Embedded Linux

Gnome

Miguel de Icaza is US bound. Miguel de Icaza is quitting his day job and moving to the US. To answer your first question, no, it does not appear that he has taken a job with Red Hat. From his activity log, "We got a secret investor firm to invest in our supper-dupper free software company to develop free software and provide kick-ass applications for users all around the globe". Congratulations, both Miguel and Nat!

Gnome Summary for October 20th-26th. Here is this week's Gnome Summary from Havoc Pennington, including news from Japan, the documentation front and the usual hacking activity reports.

Enlightenment

Christian also noted that he wrote the article with Abiword, which he commented was becoming really useable. Abiword is licensed under the GPL.

KDE

The KDE Development News. This week's KDE Development News is part 1 of two parts. It includes pointers to recent articles on KDE and more information about the new technology mentioned in the roadmap above (with some unintentional overlap). Part 2, when available, will contain the usual overviews from the mailing lists.

Midgard

Midgard Weekly Summary This week's Midgard Weekly Summary covers the release of Midgard 1.2.4, the latest stable release of this web application development suite, a Russian version of Midgard, and the second Midgard Workshop, to be held in January 2000 in Karlskrona, Sweden.

PHP

YAMS

Wine

The anonymous struct and unions patches have made it into the main CVS tree for gcc. This is heralded by the Wine community, since it will "greatly help porting existing Windows code with WineLib without having to change the code".

Zope

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Project Links
EmbedLinux.net
EMLAB
linux-embedded.com
Gnome
High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
PHP
Wine
Zope

More Information
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Cobol

Java

No updates on the Blackdown JDK port. The status pages on blackdown.org have not been changed since September. Apparently the progress made on the issue of native threads was not sufficient to shake loose the development process.

Perl

The reports are long and detailed. They are a welcome addition to other weekly reports and fill a needed gap. Have fun poking through them!

Tom Christiansen on Perl and Y2K. Tom has written an article on Perl and the Y2K issue which recently showed up in LinuxPlanet (but may have been written a while ago). "Remember this: if someone asks you to warrant that your software is free of year 2000 bugs, they're really just looking for an excuse to sue you if they misuse your software, even if it should happen to be their own fault. "

Perl and MySql. Perl News also pointed out The Perl You Need to Know: Part 7, which focuses on MySql. " Solid as MySQL is, it can be a tough nut to crack for starters; those without extensive summer days holed up inside a Unix box may find the supporting documentation a bit, well ... is there such a language as programmerese? "

Perl Trainers mailing list. A mailing list for people who train others in perl has been created.

Python

HP joins the Python Consortium. This note mentions the move, indicates that it is prompted by "the extensive use of Python in development of pilot applications for Espeak" and mentions that they've got positions open for experienced object-oriented developers who want to work with Python.

Python HOWTOs updated. Changes to the Python HOWTOs include the addition of HOWTOs on configuring your editor for writing Python code and Python advocacy,

O'Reilly interviews Guido. O'Reilly published an interview with Guido van Rossum. It crosses over a lot of topics, Python with Java, versus Javascript and the Computer Programming for Everybody project.

Python jobs. A Python Jobs Board has been started.

Tcl/tk

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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