See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Browsers

Tap the power of Mozilla user style sheets (O'Reilly). Andrew Wooldridge from O'Reilly Network has written an article on using Mozilla Style Sheets. Examples are given for customizing various aspects of the appearance of Mozilla itself and web pages that it displays.

Extending the Mozilla editor (O'Reilly). O'Reilly has also run an article by Brian King on Extending the Mozilla Editor. " As browser vendors have added proprietary tags to their spec in order to extend their capabilities, web page designers have been caught in the middle of these browser wars. HTML editing tools had to ultimately address this issue. Another cause of concern was the corruption of existing markup when opened in editing applications. Users found that finely tuned markup was mangled, sometimes beyond recognition, when opened in another editor. The Mozilla Editor seeks to address both of these issues."

Education

Linux in Education report (July 3). This week's Linux in Education report contains a nice, lengthy report from the Red Escolar project, an on-going implementation of a Linux server/client system throughout the Mexican school systems. "All of the states showed themselves to be interested. All of them want to continue with what we call "stage 2", which consists of returning and staying one week with them, to train them and give them the CD. Jalisco and Nuevo Leon immediately asked for the "stage 2". Arturo is this week in Guadalajara, Jalisco and the next one he'll be in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon."

Having watched the Red Escolar project since they first announced their goals and design, it is very exciting to see the implementation of the project taking shape.

Games

Atlas Tutorial from Worldforge. A t utorial for Atlas has been published as part of this month's Chopping Block. Atlas is an object-oriented protocol for communications between processes, a key component of the Worldforge architecture (for game development).

GCompris. A new game known as GCompris (French for "I Have Understood") has been released. This game is intended for the 3 year old and up audience. The game has a screen with various items falling down. The player has to click the mouse, type a letter, or type in a word for each item.

Embedded Systems

Opening Handhelds (eWeek). Jason Brooks from eWeek writes about various projects on porting Linux to Palmtops. "The project will enable developers to take advantage of the flexibility and openness of Linux to speed development of new handheld applications. That flexibility and openness have largely failed to dent the dominance of Windows-based software on the desktop, but the still-young handheld space presents Linux developers with plenty of opportunities."

High Availability

Major, stable release of heartbeat. Heartbeat 0.4.8 has been announced. Despite the numbering scheme, this version is labeled a a major, stable release. "As a bonus, the tar includes the code for the Stonith reference implementation, and the beginning of the heartbeat API (these also on the CVS repository)"

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for July 4, 2000. This week's Wine Weekly News is out. Topics include Wine at the Linux Tag conference and results from a poll of Wine users on what the Wine project's top priority should be.

Network Management

OpenNMS Development Update. The latest OpenNMS Development Update reminds people to send bugs to their new Bugzilla, rather than in personal email. Also included is a brief list of coding projects underway and a longer list of events where someone from the OpenNMS project will be attending, in case you want to get together.

Office Applications

AbiWord Weekly News. This week's AbiWord Weekly News is out. Topics include scripting languages, Win32 word count, and page numbering. Last Week's AbiWord Weekly News discussed what to use for a scripting language for AbiWord. Suggestions ranged from Guile to CORBA to Visual Basic.

You Say You Want an Evolution (Linux Planet). Linux Planet looks at Evolution 0.1 on Gnome. Evolution integrates the mail/calendar/address book functions into a single GUI. "There's a certain positive sense to the GNOME project on the whole that's as entertaining as it is invigorating. The project has never been particularly concerned with keeping things under wraps until they were ready for the end user, which has been a boon for the curious, and people who don't mind a few bugs along the way."

On the Desktop

XFree86 4.0.1 announced. XFree86 4.0.1 has been released. This maintenance update for the XFree86 4.0 tree has been eagerly awaited, since minor problems with the initial XFree86 4.0 release have kept it from being adopted as a default by (or even shipped with) most Linux distributions. Hopefully, this new release will have shaken down well enough to become widely deployed. (Thanks to John Kodis). New Features in XFree86 4.01 include drivers for several AGP video cards, bug fixes, security fixes, and continuing work on the new xf86cfg configuration tool.

Helix GNOME 1.2, how an upgrade/install SHOULD work (Linux Orbit). Linux Orbit has run a review of Gnome 1.2, the Helix release. "...but for some reason, I went ahead with the installation and hit "Enter". From that point on, I've never seen a smoother installation/upgrade for ANY software on ANY platform. And even more amazing, this is a "preview" of the final product."

Linux users: Upgrade to Helix Gnome!(Tech Republic). Tech Republic has also reviewed Helix Gnome and gives the installation process good marks. "All because of a desktop update, I have become a big supporter of the Linux revolution. And it is because of a very simple thing: ease of use."

New GNOME file manager. Miguel de Icaza sent out an e-mail announcing the new GMC: "So, we got a trashcan for the GNOME desktop now." You can get the new file manager from the usual place ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/mc.

Also, there is now icon support on the windows if you have a recent enough gnome-libs, available from the same ftp site. Unofficial RPMS are also available (thanks to Kevin Breit).

Science

New release of Linux for Astronomy. David Mills dropped us a note to point out that the Linux for Astronomy CD set has been updated. It now includes over 3Gb of Astronomical software precompiled for the Linux (x86) operating system. "Applications include a wealth of general purpose image and signal processing tools, as well as the state-of-the-art algorithms in use at observatories and universities worldwide. Facilites for processing the data products of the major space-based instruments (Hubble Space Telescope, EUV, Einstein, ROSAT, IUE, etc) are also included."

Web-site Development

Zope Weekly News out. The June 28, 2000 edition of the Zope Weekly News is out. Topics include Zope at the recent Linux Tag conference in Stuttgart, Germany and the release of Zope 2.2b3.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

C/C++

Software Carpentry Competition News. The latest news from the Software Carpentry competition has announced the on-line availability of all second round entries in the `build', `config', and `track' categories. Second round winners will be announced July 31st, 2000.

GNOMEnclature: The wonders of GLib (IBM). George Lebl from IBM's developer works has written an article on Using Glib. In this second of two articles, topics addressed are Hash tables, the iterator, GScanner, and tokens.

Java

IBM, Sun Settle Java Licensing Dispute (InternetWeek). InternetWeek takes a look at how Microsoft's release of C#, and submission of the languages to the ECMA international standards body, may have given the nudge necessary to resolve some Java licensing disputes between IBM and Sun. "Quinn said he believes the existence of C# and Microsoft's backing will prompt Sun to open Java even further to the industry.

'They're going to want to open up a little faster just to preempt anything that Microsoft wants to pull,' Quinn said. 'I think you'll see Sun, just for the purpose of pre-empting some of Microsoft's initiatives, becoming a little bit more licensee-friendly and working more closely with [the] open source [community].'"

Pilot Bean Project. IBM has announced the Pilot Bean Project, which is a collaborative project with the goal of improving the suite of Java Beans for the Palm Pilot. Pilot Beans is released under the IBM Public License.

Perl

The Poop on persistence (PerlNews). Perl News talks about two new mailing lists for Perl Object Oriented Persistence (Poop). This is an effort to encourage communication between module authors and to address redundant object persistence issues. Also read about the latest Perl modules.

Unicode and Perl. Perl.com has information on Perl Unicode handling. Unicode is an extended character set that improves upon ASCII by supporting characters from many languages. Also, IBM's DeveloperWorks has run an article on globalizing E-commerce with XML and Unicode.

PHP

PHP 4.01pl2 available. PHP 4.01pl2 has been released, this fixes some problems with readdir() and error_reporting() that were present in PHP 4.01.

Python

Python 2.0 to be released soon. Python 2.0 is scheduled for release sometime in July. For those of you who are itching to start working with Python 2.0, you can download a beta version.

Python, Random Numbers, and Monte Carlo Simulation (LinuxDev) . LinuxDev decided to demonstrate the usefulness of Python in situations other than web programming. This article takes a look at the Python randon number generator, using a few Monte Carlo simulations as examples.

PyUnit 1.2.0 Unit Testing Framework. PyUnit is a unit testing framework for Python that is derived from JUnit for Java and an earlier Smalltalk testing framework. PyUnit 1.2.0 has been released as of July 2, 2000.

Shell Scripting

Shell Skills (Linux.com). Linux.com has run a two-part series on working with shell scripts. Part one discusses basic shell concepts and part two delves into I/O redirection and pipes. If you are new to shell scripting, this would be worth checking out.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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