See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

How Many Bugs Does Linux Have?. There is an interesting discussion going on over at Advogato. The original poster is amazed that the average distribution is so stable, and wonders if there is a way to somehow get a handle on how many bugs a large distributed open-source software project might have. "It is truly amazing to me that Linux and all the packages that make your average distribution are so stable. The stability is certainly not due to testing. I'm still stumped as to the reason beyond the most obvious one: things that are used (dogfood) are fixed. But what about the stuff that's not used, but you may one day need to work?"

LART CAD files released. The LART project has announced the release of a full set of CAD files under an open hardware license. "The LART is a small yet powerful embedded computer capable of running Linux, built around an Intel SA-1100 StrongARM processor. Its performance is around 250 MIPS while consuming less than 1 Watt of power."

Application of the week: Gnumeric (Linuxcare). Linuxcare's application of the week is the Gnumeric spreadsheet. "This application looks sharp and functions pretty well for my current needs. Given the momentum behind the GNOME project, Gnumeric is on its way to becoming a convincing alternative to similar proprietary applications."

Developing with Open Source. This week's Freshmeat editorial discusses the approach one should take to develop software using the open source model. "Be very strict about the project. Write guidelines on how the code is going to be formated. Write guidelines about the extent of documentation required both in the code and externally. And then stick to your guidelines. This way, you'll understand the code in two months time, but more importantly, if new developers join the project, there will be some consistency and cohesion to it."

LUIGUI is dead. We mentioned LUIGUI , the Linux/UNIX Independent Group for Usability Information, on the front page of the February 24th, 2000 edition of the Linux Weekly News. Now, only a few weeks later, we must report its demise. "I have the unfortunate job of telling you that the LUIGUI list and associated projects have been put on hold (read: cancelled) due to lack of support by the University."

Browsers

Education

SEUL/EDU Linux in Education report. Last week's SEUL/EDU Linux in Education report is available. It provides a link to Doug Loss and and Pete St. Onge editorial on Linux in Education.

This week's Linux in Education Report talks about testimonials from teachers and students using Linux in schools that they received in response to the editorial. Many of these people thought they were alone in their efforts. It also mentions a search for a summer camp that supports Linux or open source software ... none were found. Here is a good project for next summer: a Free Software Summer Camp!

Embedded Linux

Enterprise Applications

Gaming

For Gamers: An interview with CEO's of BioWare Corp.. Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Dr. Ray Muzyka are joint CEO's of BioWare Corp, a company based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada which developed Shattered Steel, Baldur's Gate, Tales of the Sword Coast, and is developing Baldur's Gate II, MDK2, and Neverwinter Nights. LinuxPower has put out an interview exploring their future plans in general and their plans for Linux. " BioWare's goal is to develop products for every possible platform. Linux is an operating system with a lot of potential for the future."

Interoperability

Samba Kernel-Cousin. The Samba Kernel-Cousin for March 23rd covers five alpha releases that have gone out this week, including the second pre-release of Samba 2.0.7 and four alpha releases of Luke Leighton's Samba-TNG branch. This branch, by the way, is slated to go directly into Samba 3.0 if and when the code is stable enough.

Networking

Along the same lines, Martijn van Oosterhout announced his Packet-Shaping-HOWTO.html.

OpenNMS Update (Mar 28). The OpenNMS project, which is building an open source network management package, has started releasing bi-weekly development reports. Here is their first report.

Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News. - Starting Word Exporter, GNOME support, LaTeX export and Modal dialogs are the topics for this week's AbiWord Weekly News.

On the Desktop

KDE Development News. The implementation of a new icon scheme, a new crash handler, Java support and more are discussed in this week's KDE Development News.

Meanwhile, over at mosfet.org, two new KWin plugins have come out, Krabber gets top ranking among audio encoders from Linuxcare and the kHTML widget gets complete bidirectional input support.

Science

The SEUL project announces SEUL/sci. The SEUL project has announced the SEUL/sci project, to foster the development of useful open source scientific software for Linux. They have issued their first weekly Linux in Science report. This week's report includes a summary of recent scientific software releases, along with a bit more detailed coverage of the R Statistical System.

Website Development

Midgard Weekly Summary (#34). This week's Midgard Weekly Summary reports that a stable version of Oracle-enabled midgard-lib may be released within a week. Work on a postgres port is beginning as well, starting with developing better documentation for the internal Midgard API to assist the port. Midgard's default database implementation is MySQL. "Midgard is a freely-available Web application development and publishing platform based on the popular PHP scripting language."

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

Project Links
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High Availability
ht://Dig
KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
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Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

C++

Haskell

Java

Tritonus 0.1.91. A new version of BROKEN LINK tritonus, the Java Sound API for Linux, has been released, version 0.1.91. This version has MIDI mostly working and promises major improvements in the handling of 8-bit sound data.

Perl

perl v5.6.0 announced!. Perl v5.6.0 was announced today. Additional details were posted to the perl5-porters list. They include a long list of new features, such as Unicode support. "After almost two years of intense deliberation, patching, troubleshooting, and testing, the Perl Porters are proud to bring you the newest major release of Perl. Welcome to Perl v5.6.0!" (Thanks to Baiju Thakkar, PerlMonth.)

Following up the above announcment, ActiveState has announced the release of ActivePerl 5.6. ActivePerl is a value added, binary distribution of Perl that can be downloaded for free. ActiveState provides commercial support for ActivePerl under Linux, Windows and Solaris.

Perl Bindings for RealTime Linux. Zentropix has announced the release of perl bindings for real-time Linux. "Using these bindings, programmers can use the RTAI programming API from a scripting environment, thus giving simple access to a soft real-time programming environment."

Python

Dr. Dobbs' Python-URL. This week's Python-URLcovers all the Python news for the past week.

Tcl/tk

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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