See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Linux support for people with disabilities. Making sure that Linux is accessible to people with disabilities is as important to world-wide domination as multiple language support. Both are about empowering people, allowing them to have an operating system that truly fits their needs and goals. The linux-access mailing lists and website are a part of this effort and have been for several years. Now Marc E. Christensen, the current maintainer, has announced the need to find a new home and maintainer for both the mailing lists and website. He acknowledges that traffic on the lists has been light recently and that a merger with one of the other projects in this arena, such as the blinux mailing list, might also be appropriate. We strongly encourage the efforts of both of these projects and others in this important field.

Browsers

Discussion: key Mozilla feature. Mozillazine sponsored a weekend discussion about what single key feature people would like to see working in Mozilla before its release. The volume of responses shows a high level of interest in the topic, though not all of the suggestions have even been implemented in Mozilla. "I'd like to see a built-in validator for (1) HTML 4.0 + CSS 1/2 and (2) XUL+CSS+DTD(+JS?) (chrome)."

Alphanumerica support for Mozilla. Alphanumerica has committed in-house developers to the Mozilla effort, according to this press release. "The Mozilla development team at Alphanumerica is working to implement refinements to XUL (rhymes with "cool" and stands for XML-based User Interface Language). Mozilla's XUL technology will enable users to customize both the user interface as well as the functionality of the application."

Netscape 4.72 has been released. Netscape 4.72 isn't exciting anyone, but at least one person reported it running more smoothly, at least initially,

Education

Authenticated User Community 0.6.2. AUC (Authenticated User Community) for Education provides a uniform, web-based interface to discussion forums, e-mail, file management, and user information. It was designed for use in a K-12 setting. The latest version adds support for e-mail attachments, UI improvements and more.

Linux in Education Report #8. This week's Linux in Education Report discussions include multilingual word bases, HICCUP, "a programming language designed to be processed by groups of children rather than by a computer (not open source), and a planned new distribution from Mandrakesoft. "Since our last report when we mentioned the beginnings of the Debian Jr. project we've learned that Mandrake is working on a Linux distribution for the French State Educational Minister intended for children ten or more years old. " Linux Knowledge Base Weekly News. Here is this week's LKB Weekly News.

Linux Knowledge Base Project report. Here's the Linux Knowledge Base weekly report for February 17. It is mostly concerned with the status of their alpha rollout.

Gaming

Trollbridge. Open Game Source feature of the month: Trollbridge, a "mostly-GPL"-licensed adventure in the style of the original Legend of Zelda. "The game is still under development. Although it can be played, the game balance needs tweaking to make it enjoyable."

Crystal Space (beta). Crystal Space is an LGPL'd 3D SDK that has released its first beta (version 0.15r002). For more information, screen shots, etc., check the Crystal Space website.

High Availability

Office Applications

Kword: "Overall, I'd say this program is well designed and relatively stable, especially impressive given its current alpha status. It's simple to use (after a half-hour of retraining yourself), intuitive, feels responsive and has most of the features that I'd need to write a great technical report."

ApplixWords:"Applix Words is neither free as in speech or in beer, but is worth the price if you're looking to spend money on a solid-looking word processor."

Gimp Kernel Cousin (2/18). The February 18th edition of the Gimp Kernel Cousin takes a look at CMYK support in the Gimp, errors produced when EPS files are loaded and a couple of new patches.

On the Desktop

KDE news for the week. Here are the KDE development highlights for the week, courtesy of the Mosfet.org Development News:

Mosfet has put out Pixie, a new image viewer for KDE2.0. *** KDE popularity on the Tucows sites has hit a new high, commented Arthur H. Johnson II. "I received the hit statistics for my site yesturday and I must say Thanks to all of you KDE users out there who visit our site. The hits reveal that my KDE section is alot more successful than the GNOME and Enlightenment sections." *** A new development version of KDbg has been released. KDbg is a graphical debugger interface. *** A revamped version of the KDE2 I/O library, KIO, with an API cleanup and rather massive speed improvements for all protocols, has been included in the in the CVS kdelibs module. "KIO is what allows KDE applications to be so easily made internet transparent..."

Gnome Summary (Feb 10-21). This week's Gnome Summary covers the recent announcement of Eazel, in addition to more regular topics. "Eazel's participation is a truly exciting development for GNOME; they've been hacking on GNOME for quite some time, but the company hasn't been publically announced before this past week or so. Their Nautilus project promises to be _the_ central feature of the GNOME 2.0 desktop."

Samba

Website Development

Zope Weekly News (Feb 23). This week's edition of the Zope Weekly Newsis now available, full of product announcements, updates and documentation links.

Wine

Wine Weekly News (Feb 21). This week's Wine Weekly News covers the problems on the Wine HQ webserver that prevented us from covering Wine in last week's edition. Calling conventions and the etiquette of working on an open source project both as a volunteer and as a paid employee were also covered this week.

XFree86

XFree86 3.9.18 announced. XFree86 3.9.18 has been released. Check the release notes for a list of new features added since 3.9.17.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Java

• Coverage on Nathan Meyer's new book, "Java Programming on Linux"
• LinuxWorld Announcements
• The Face of Blackdown.org

Lisc 1.2.0. Lisc, the "Lightweight Scheme interpreter on Caffeine", is a Java-based scheme interpreter for Linux. "The new version features code improvements for math functions and an optimized evaluation pipeline. "

Perl

PHP

Python

Python-URL (Feb 21). This week's Python-URL introduces a daily URL service, Daily Python-URL, for those that can't wait a week for their URL fix. This week's issue has links to a lot of interesting articles; best to check it out.

Tcl/tk

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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