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 Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development projects"Linmodem" drivers for Lucent-based modems. Lucent has released a working Linux driver for PCI modems ("winmodems") which are based on the Lucent chipset. This driver is being released in binary form only - and that appears unlikely to change in the near future. Since it's a kernel module, it carries all of the problems normally found with binary-only modules - i.e. it may well not work on your system (it's compiled for Red Hat 6.1). Nonetheless it may get some people by until the LinModems project is able to release an open source alternative. The driver may be downloaded from the LinModems site. (Thanks to Jason Clifford) Almost simultaneously, Richard Close has announced version 0.9.2 of LTModem - a free software implementation for Lucent-based modems. Richard shows some discouragement as a result of the Lucent announcement - he says "the recent release of a Linux binary from Lucent has now made most of it irrelevant now." Hopefully he will be corrected on this point shortly - a binary-only release certainly will not make a free version "irrelevant." Free software "linmodem" implementations are needed as much now as ever, and we are fortunate to have one that is progressing well. gPhoto for digital cameras. The first official release of gPhoto, the GNU digital camera application, is now available. "gPhoto 0.4.1 ships with 16 different camera libraries and supports 90+ different digital still camera models, from Agfa, Apple, Canon, Casio, Chinon, Epson, Fuji, Hewlett Packard, Kodak, Konica, Minolta, Mustek, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Philips, Polaroid, Ricoh, Sanyo, and Sony. " New beta release of dump/restore. Stelian Pop has released 0.4b10 of the dump/restore utilities. Although these are labeled early beta, the dump/restore utilities are critical tools that many sites have depended on from early Unix days and which many sites are actively using, so continued work on these tools is good to see. The new version can dump an active ext3 partition and contains some libc5 compile fixes, and a few more additional features. GPLTrans. The alpha release of GPLTrans, a new, open source, machine-translator designed for language translation, has been announced. It is in a useable state for short documents being translated from English to Spanish or Spanish to English. It also has support in place for French, German and Portuguese, but they need people knowledgeable in the those languages to submit corrections or word translations in order to build the capabilities to a useable level. Nonetheless, the response to the announcement of GPLTrans on Slashdot was tremendous, temporarily causing a site outage this week and eventually a move of the site to its current location. The source code has been made available, but there is not a tremendous amount there. Remember, this is an alpha version of the product! So please don't expect too much. Bruce Perens commented on the press release along these lines. "The author should have identified this as a toy program in search of people to help fill it out. This doesn't mean that it's a bad project or a bad goal. In fact, I think lots of people should join the project and help them out. But it will take a lot more work and some significant linguistic smarts before GPLTrans will be able to compete with babelfish." Comparison of four Linux databases. People interested in relational databases on Linux may want to have a look at this detailed posting on the PostgreSQL mailing list. It compares MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Informix from a primarily feature-oriented point of view. It is a good collection of information. (Found in NNL). Localising Linux in Indian Languages. The Indian Institute of Information Technology, and FreeOS.com are looking for volunteers to help with localising Linux in Indian languages. "The goal of this Indianisation project is to ensure that the benefits of Information Technology percolate down to the Indian masses. We want to make technology accessible to the "other 90 percent" of India that does not speak English." Ganymede 0.99.8 released. Version 0.99.8 of the (GPL) Ganymede network directory management system has been released. "New features include object cloning, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux-compatible MD5 password support, and a big rework of the object database logic to improve concurrency when it comes to making asymmetric object links." Embedded LinuxReal-Time Linux 2.0 released. It has been downloadable for a while, but here, finally, is an announcement for the release of Real-Time Linux 2.0. "The significantly enhanced functionality of Version 2.0 is expected to extend RTLinux into a wider range of applications. Version 2.0 RTLinux is also redesigned to make ports to other processor architectures simpler. FSMLabs plans to release Version 3.0, with support for PowerPC as well as x86, within the next two months."Real Time Controls Laboratory, also known as RTiC-Lab, has been released. RTiC-Lab is a fast implementation platform for real-time control systems; it requires RTLinux 2.0. GnomeGnome-Summary, November 17-23. Here is last week's GNOME Summary by Havoc Pennington. It highlights news on XFCE's ability to interoperate with the GNOME development framework as well as status reports back from GnomePixmap, gEdit and GTK.Gnome-Summary, November 23 - December 1. This week's Gnome Summarymentions the creation of a Widget Repository, themes for Sawmill, new diaries (a la Alan Cox) from Miguel, Ettore Perazzoli and Nat Friedman, new employees of Helix Code (formerly International GNOME Support) and a request-for-assistance with new GNOME Office web pages. It appears that "GNOME Workshop" has been renamed to "GNOME Office" to make sure all the media could figure out that Gnome actually has an office suite ... High AvailabilityNews from High Availability Linux. Alan Robertson sent in his most recent report from the High Availability Linux community. The report mentions that Volker Wiegand of SuSE is now working full-time on the project, along with Marcelo Tosatti of Conectiva Linux and others. "David Jules is ensuring we work properly on Mandrake Linux. David Martinez is working on a cool GUI configuration tool. Matt Soffen is making good progress on his FreeBSD port."ht://Dight://Dig News. After a long period of little news, Geoff Hutchison of the ht://Dig project finally wrote in with another update. He reports that a feature-freeze has been in effect for a few weeks to speed up the release of a 3.2.0b1 package, feature-incomplete but with sufficient major features (including phrase searching) that users would have the ability to provide performance feedback to the developers. It is moving into the testing/bug-fixing stage.
Meanwhile, a group of interested developers are beginning to look at
how ht://Dig could use an SQL backend as an option for those who do
not wish to use the Berkeley DB. Anyone interested in this or other
projects should mail the developer mailing list at
htdig3-dev@htdig.org.
Additionally, there's a
request on Cosource.com for a developer to add support for a SQL
backend A
new stable release, version 3.1.4, is nearing completion to take care
of a few bugs and small feature enhancements.
This week's Midgard summary provides
access to the IRC log from the first Midgard developer meeting, a
note to expect a compilable version (alpha) of the Midgard 2 code tree
within the next week or two, and some discussion of content management.
Criteria for a Mozilla Alpha Release.
The folks at Mozilla have written up a
description of the criteria required for a Mozilla Alpha
Release. An alpha release precedes a beta release. According
to their criteria, a beta release must be feature-complete or
nearly so. An alpha release must be usable, architecturally
complete (or nearly so) and of a high quality. Users are also
allowed to vote for bugs they feel should be fixed before an
Alpha release. M12 will be a candidate for an alpha release,
though it may not yet make all the criteria.
MozillaZine in French.
A French translation of MozillaZine has been made
available. Francophone readers who want to keep up on what Mozilla is
doing are now able to do so in their own language. (Found in NNL).
Also mentioned
this week was an
article on yet another patent issue. It seems that GraphOn has
acquired a patent describing how to display Windows applications
remotely on UNIX and Linxu boxes using the X protocol. "Even if
everybody agrees this is again a ridiculous patent, it may impair
Wine, as well as other programs like VNC which all use X as the
display protocol between server and client to display Windows'
applications (Wine also displays Windows application through the X
protocol, even if X client and server sit on the same machine)."
The November 29th
edition is also available.
Zope Weekly News for December 1st.
This week's Zope Weekly News,
written by Mike Pelletier, mentions the creation of
Zope France, "a place for Francophone Zope users to
meet", along with the usual product announcements, updates,
and other Zope news.
Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh
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December 2, 1999
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Development toolsJavaSun gets cold feet over standards for Java. This Infoworld article describes Sun's recent decision to withhold turning over key documents to the European Computer Manufacturers' Association (ECMA), as had been agreed to in a deal struck in June. "During last month's TC 41 meeting in Menlo Park, Calif., at which portions of the Sun submission were displayed, a discussion of ECMA's handling of copyright issues apparently gave Sun's representatives cold feet, causing them to withhold the 8400-page document. ... The 11th-hour move came as a surprise, because ECMA's treatment of copyright issues is well-established, and the deal to standardize Java through the group was struck in June, according to van den Beld. "This is not the first time that Sun has tried to work with a standards organization only to fall out over issues of control. Their efforts to work ISO apparently unravelled under similar pressure. Xavier Basora editorialized on Sun's recent actions. "Sun's removal of JAVA from consideration amply demonstrates that the company just doesn't understand Open standards let alone Open source. If Sun truly understood Open standards, the company would've realized that it gained more by opening than by owning the software code. Further, if Sun also understood Open source, it would've released JAVA under the GPL the moment that Microsoft began to add its own proprietary extensions." PerlPerl and Enlightenment. A perl interface to Enlightenment, dubbed "pesh", has been announced . A Russian-speaking Perl e-zine. Pref News is "a Russian-speaking e-zine about Perl, UNIX and database programming which has just gotten started, according to their note to us. "It is currently maintained by two people only, we post links to useful tutorials and articles and publish interesting code snippets found in newsgroups. We hope to involve more authors and extend the covered themes later."PythonDr. Dobbs' Python-URL!" We have two weeks worth of Python news available this time around. First, the November 23rd editionof Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!, with the usual features.Next, the November 30th edition of Dr. Dobbs' Python-URL! indicates that it has been a good week for the announcement of new packages, including pyCA-0.6.2, "a set of scripts and CGI-BIN programs written in Python for setting up and running a certificate authority using OpenSSL" and sockserv, "a SMTP/NNTP/POP- like server module that makes it easy to create command / response type servers". Also included are the usual pointers to interesting discussions on the python lists this week. Tcl/tkHere is the November 30th edition of Dr. Dobs' Tcl-URL!.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
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