See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Feature: a look at xcircuit. Xcircuit is a handy program for drawing electronic schematics. It is also useful for creating diagrams that are built from sets of graphical symbols. LWN's Forrest Cook has spent some time playing with this application and has written up a feature article on how it works. Have a look for an introduction to circuit design and hardware hacking with Linux.

Python development moves to BeOpen. Guido van Rossum has posted a letter to the Python community describing his move from CNRI to BeOpen.com. "What will change, and what will stay the same? First of all, Python will remain Open Source. In fact, everything we produce at PythonLabs will be released with an Open Source license. And we'll continue to maintain www.python.org. What changes is how much time we have for Python. Previously, Python was a hobby or side project, which had to compete with our day jobs; at BeOpen.com we will be focused full time on Python development!"

And, as if Guido hadn't stirred things up enough yet: "Oh, and to top it all off, I'm going on vacation. I'm getting married and will be relaxing on my honeymoon." Congratulations to Guido on all counts!

Guido isn't the only one moving to BeOpen.com. BeOpen PythonLabs will be staffed by Guido, Tim Peters, Barry Warsaw, Fred Drake and Jeremy Hylton, according to the Team page, a hefty list of Python hard-hitters. And they are still looking to hire more! We wish them the best of luck in this new collaboration between free software and free enterprise.

Browsers

Mozilla Status Update (May 25). A new Mozilla Status Update is now available, with reports from all the various Mozilla development groups. It includes the first status report from the newly formed Architecture group.

Chatzilla Report. From MozillaZine, we hear that Chatzilla, which adds IRC chat to the Mozilla Tasks menu, has been pre-installed in Mozilla as of the 2000052508 build and appears to be working quite well.

Browser Wars: The Future Belongs to the Dinosaurs (ZDNet). This ZDNet column predicts victory for Mozilla. "So far, the GPL and other xPLs have been more social than legal contracts, but if it comes down to it Netscape's parent (AOL/Time Warner) probably has better copyright lawyers than anyone. That should keep people honest and put Mozilla on a path to perfection."

Games

New Linux Game. Burn Baby Burn is a new Linux game that takes a look at the post-apocalyptic world (post-Microsoft court case, to be precise). No licensing information is attached, but the source code is freely provided. It is based on GTK/GDK and requires Glade builder.

Quake III arena editor for Linux. Loki has announced the release of the Quake III Arena editor for Linux. It's an "early test" beta version, available for free download.

Interoperability

Corel to host WineHQ. WineHQ, the information point for people interested in Wine, will soon be hosted by Corel.

Wine 20000526 released. A new version of Wine has been released. This release includes lots of bug fixes, a new C pre-preprocessor for the resource compiler, and OpenGL support.

Network Management

OpenNMS Update 1.10. This week's Open Network Management System information updatehas been released.

Office Applications

Gnucash heads toward a stable release. The gnucash team has announced a plan to release gnucash-1.4, the first GNOME-based stable release of this financial management package. The schedule they have adopted is aggressive, with a feature freeze happening on June 4 and the actual 1.4 release coming out on June 18. Gnucash is coming along nicely, and this release heralds the beginning of its widespread adoption.

AbiWord Weekly News (May 25). This week's AbiWord Weekly News is now available. Check it out to find out who won this week's $299 Patch Prize.

The Gimp version 1.1.23 has been released. A new version of the Gimp has been released. This is a bug-fix release that is a step towards the next stable version (1.2) of the program.

On the Desktop

GNOME 1.2 released. GNOME 1.2 ("Bongo GNOME") has been released - check out the press release for details. In addition, LinuxPower took a look at what's new in GNOME 1.2.

Developing GNOME Applications with Gnome-Python (LinuxDev.Net). LinuxDev.Net has run a tutorial article on writing GNOME applications in Python.

KDE's Konqueror (LinuxPlanet). This article on "Konquering the Web" discusses the KDE2 Konqueror web browser. Konqueror performs efficiently as a web browser, an FTP client, a file manager, and an application launcher. "It's so powerful that it would be a thick book that documented it fully--but nobody would need the book, because controlling it is so obvious."

Keystone VNC system for KDE. Keystone is a KDE tool that acts as a VNC client for remote access to various cross-platform VNC servers. This allows you to control a remote machine as if you were on the local console.

GTK+ and GLib 1.2.8 Released. Version 1.2.8 of GTK+ and GLib have been announced. The updates primarily include improved documentation and bug fixes.

Web-site Development

Perl to be supported in Zope. Digital Creations has sent around a pre-announcement that they will be working with ActiveState to support Perl scripting in the Zope system. Code is expected to be released at the O'Reilly conference in July. For commentary on this announcement, check this week's Front Page.

If you'd like some more detailed information on this decision, you might be interested in checking out this IRC chat session, including Digital Creation's Jim Fulton and Paul Everitt answering questions about Perl, methods and other miscellaneous items. PHP, for example, was also mentioned briefly...

A condensed version of the IRC chat is also available on the Zope.org site, for those who don't want to plow through the whole thing. There is evidently some interest at Digital Creations in making these chats into a semi-regular event.

This week's Midgard summary. Here is the Midgard Weekly Summary for May 31. It includes a article on how the French business Aurora has expressed interest in contributing to the Midgard project and more.

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

C/C++

Latest Version of Open-Source Cynlib. CynApps.com has announced a new release of its open-source cynlib C++ EDA hardware design class library. "This version contains a number of enhancements that make it richer, easier to use, and easier to integrate with other EDA tools."

SourceForge provides access to Itanium systems. SourceForge has announced that it is providing access to prototype Itanium systems for developers to port their code. They have also set up a IA-64 development portal to go along with the prototype systems.

Java

JavaOne.Computer Reseller News reports on Sun Microsystems Inc's hosting of it's fifth annual JavaOne conference in San Francisco, CA. "'Java will play an important role in smaller and smaller devices,' said Reed Hornberger, senior director of horizontal technologies market development for computer systems at Sun, based here. 'While Sun still derives revenue from selling its Java developer tools, it also is working to embrace the open-source community', he said."

Websprocket Offers Open-Source Java. A new Java language implementation, JEMINI, is being offered by Websprocket for use on embedded systems. "JEMINI includes a vast array of foundation libraries found in commercial Java distribution. JEMINI also includes a host of libraries suitable for device drivers, embedded file systems, embedded system design, and embedded system design automation."

Perl

This week on perl5-porters (22--28 May 2000). The latest report from the perl5-porters mailing list has a heavy section on regex engine enhancements, containing some good background material on the topic.

Perl Whirl reports. Reports from Perl Whirl 2000, the Alaska cruise full of Perl geeks, are being made available on use Perl;. So far, no technical tidbits ... don't tell us the scenery really made them speechless!

use Perl;. Speaking of which use Perl; is a new companion site to Perl News based on the Slash code. Check their announcement for more details.

PHP

Are You Being Served? An Introduction to PHP (ZDNet). Here's an introduction to PHP in ZDNet. We think they liked it.

When I started writing this article, I promised myself I wouldn't editorialize or evangelize the usage of PHP. Instead, I'd just write a nice little article about this cool server-side scripting language that's currently used on over 1.4 million web servers. I wasn't going to go on about the blazingly fast parsing engine in PHP4, or its database connectivity functions. I wasn't going to discuss the XML support, Java servlet support, native session handling and IMAP functions. Most of all, I wasn't planning to enter into the 'open source vs. commercial software' debate, and tell you about the hard-working group of developers working day and night to add functionality and upgrades, based purely on user responses and requests.

Python

This week's Python-URL. Here is this week's Python-URL. It covers a number of Python-related items, but appears to have come out a bit early to catch Guido's move to BeOpen.com.

Introduction to Python (Geeks404.com). If you are interested in learning python, check out this article for a quick introduction to the language. The article provides basic information on the language and is a good starting point for those already familiar with programming.

Qt 2.x and Python 1.6 bind together well (SunWorld). Here's a SunWorld tutorial on using the Qt GUI toolkit with Python 1.6. "Most GUI toolkits for Unix are presented through their C programming interfaces or, occasionally, with Java. But the number of toolkits available to Python programmers is remarkable, which is one of the reasons we believe Python is a far better vehicle for exposition and most development. One of the most interesting of these toolkits, PyQt, has just become even more interesting."

Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh

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