See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Microprocessor development and Linux Linux has proven itself to be an excellent platform for developing code with many generic tools available for a wide variety of projects. The world of 4, 8, and 12 bit microprocessor development is an area that could benefit from a broader base of Linux tools. Currently, assemblers and disassemblers make up most of the free software for working with microprocessors. To date, there doesn't appear to be much support from the microprocessor manufacturers for Linux In Circuit Emulators (ICE) and EPROM/Microprocessor programmers. Perhaps some of the recent Linux activity in the embedded world will inspire these companies to start releasing their development tools under Linux.

The Microchip PIC chips are now supported by the GPASM assembler. Paul Vollebregt's GnuPIC site lists a number of useful micro development tools, some of which are open-source. Speaking of PICs, take a look at the world's smallest web server which is claimed to fit into a matchbox. There are several free assemblers available for the Motorola Motorola 680X/6811 series chips.

Mozilla Status July 6, 2000. The latest Mozilla Status Update is out. Work on Mozilla involving Tru64, XML, DOM, LDAP, XPToolkit, and Composer are discussed.

Mozilla Developer Meeting Aug 18. Alphanumerica will be sponsoring the Second Mozilla Developer Meeting on Aug 18 at the Netscape campus in Mountain View, California. Alphanumerica has created a mailing list for the event. The meeting will be held just after the Linux World Expo in San Jose.

Databases

PostgreSQL v7.0.2 Released . The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released PostgreSQL v7.0.2. This is a bug fix release for v7.0 and v7.0.1, improved documentation is included.

Electronics

Geda Snapshot for July 4, 2000. The Geda project has released a new snapshot of it's electronics design and analysys tools. New versions of gschem and gnetlist are included along with improved documentation and more symbol libraries.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for July 10. This week's Wine Weekly News is out. Numerous bug fixes are mentioned, but the main item of interest is an announcement from Corel that, now that PHOTO-PAINT is released, the company plans to merge all of its WINE work back into the project's tree and work more closely with the WINE project in the future. Corel also plans to help bring about the long-awaited WINE 1.0 release.

Common threads: Introduction to Samba, Part 2 (IBM). Daniel Robbins of IBM's Developer Works has published the second article in a three part series on Samba. This article covers installation and basic configuration of Samba and is an easy introduction to this useful system.

Network Management

OpenNMS Update Volume 1.16. The latest OpenNMS Update has been released. Current code work involves an Event Subsystem, ICMPD in Perl, a Service Control Manager, and capsd.

Office Applications

Evolution 0.2. Right on the heels of Evolution 0.1 comes Evolution 0.2, which integrates the Gnome mailer, calendar, and address book. Many new features are currently being added.

Resynthesizer 0.2 for Gimp. Paul Harrison has written Resynthesizer , a plug-in for Gimp 1.1. Resynthesizer may be used to combine the texture from one image with another image.

Killustrator Review (ShowMeLinux). Geno Boba from Show Me Linux has reviewed Killustrator, A KDE based drawing program. "Once the program is running, it's a fun ride, with a very shallow learning curve, but that's not because there's nothing to it. Modeled in the tradition of Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw, KIllustrator uses a similar intuitive approach, choosing the simpler of the two when there's a choice between Adobe's working environment, and Corel's. Gotta hand it to these guys, they know a good thing when they see it in another program."

On the Desktop

KDE 2.0 Release Plan. The latest release plan for KDE version 2.0 has been published. The Feature Freeze is coming soon and KDE 2.0 is scheduled for release in 8 weeks.

KDE History (Linux Planet). Linux Planet has published an article on the History of KDE. "I don't mean easy to use by Linux standards, either: I mean flat-out easy. You could poke around and figure out just about everything. As you got more familiar with KDE, deeper levels of configuration and customization were apparent. These guys, it seemed, had thought of pretty much everything."

Palmtops

Microwindows v0.88 adds far-eastern language support. The Microwindows project has added support for far-eastern languages. Microwindows is an open-source environment that competes with Microsoft's WinCE platform on palmtop platforms.

Real-Time Systems

Second Workshop on Real Time Linux Nov, 2000. The Thinking Nerds has announced the second Workshop on Real Time Linux, November 27-28, 2000 in Orlando, Florida. There is currently an open call for papers for this conference.

Team takes different path to real-time Linux (EE Times). EE Times has run an article on Real Time Linux with comments from Victor Yodaiken, the developer of RT Linux. "With RTLinux on an X86 platform, interrupt handlers can spring into action within 15 microseconds of the detection of a hardware interrupt, compared with 600 microseconds for standard Linux. That time window is actually determined by hardware and will improve as processors get faster, Yodaiken said. "

Science

DocScope. Minoru Development Corporation has announced DocScope , an open-source project that uses XML to work with medical records. "DocScope will be a free medical information tool that is as natural and easy for physicians to use as the spreadsheet is for accountants."

Telecommunication

Speech based web initiative. SpeechWorks International, Inc has announced its plans to build a speech based implementation of the world wide web. The project will be based on the open-source Carnegie Mellon University SPHINX speech recognition software.

Web-site Development

Zope 2.2.0 beta 4 released. The fourth beta for Zope 2.2.0 has been released. This is expected to be the last beta before the final 2.2.0 release.

Zope Weekly News for July 7, 2000. The July 7 edition of the Zope Weekly News is out. Items discussed are the upcoming open source conference, the help system, and documentation.

XML Standards Move Forward (InternetNews). InternetNews published this brief article mentioning that the XML Linking Working Group released its recommendation for the XML Linking Language (XLink) Version 1.0. Comments are being accepted until October 3rd. "'The Working Group is asking developers to look at the document, experiment and give us feedback,' Daly said. 'We are also hoping to see open source implementation, which is important for the success of a specification.'"

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Project Links
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High Availability
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KDE
MagicPoint
Midgard
Mozilla
YAMS
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

More Information
AppWatch
Freshmeat
LinuxDev

Development tools

Erlang

Sixth International Erlang/OTP User Conference. The Sixth International Erlang/OTP User Conference will be held in Stockholm, Sweden on October 3, 2000. The conference is divided into two parts, applications and technology development.

Haskell

Glasgow Haskell Compiler version 4.08 released. A new release of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), version 4.08 was announced on Friday. Jens-Ulrik Petersen reported, "Apart from loads of bug fixes, the main changes include: a new improved profiling subsystem, fixed x86 native code generator, implicit parameters, and a new package system for libraries". For more details, check the release notes.

Perl

Perl 5 Porters summary for July 9, 2000. This week's Perl 5 Porters summary is out. A bug database system and the perl man page table of contents generator, buildtoc are discussed.

Camp Camel. This Year's Camp Camel Perl campout is scheduled for September 7 through 10 in Weyehaeuser Wisconsin. It sounds like a wild time: "Also, bring things to shoot! Like AOL and MSN CD's or old computer hardware!!!!"

Return of Program Repair Shop and Red Flags. Mark-Jason Dominus has written this article on cleaning up and optimizing a perl program. It is a good read if you want to see how an expert perl programmer deconstructs a program.

Python

July 10 Python-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for July 10. It covers the renaming of the 1.6 release (to Python 2.0) and numerous other topics of interest to the Python development community. Also note that the new Python release will be delayed, for the ominous reason that "a number of issues have arisen that CNRI and BeOpen are in the process of working out."

Developing Gnome Application with Python (Linux Focus). Hilaire Fernandez of Linux Focus has written the first article in a series about Developing Gnome Application with Python. This is an extensive article that describes the building of a GUI based kid's game program.

Five Minutes to a Python CGI(Webreview.com). David Mertz has written a nice article on writing CGI scripts in Python. " Compared to Perl, most people find Python code easier to read and maintain. Compared to VBScript or ColdFusion, Python packs more powerful basic constructs. Compared to PHP, TCL, or REXX (or C for that matter), it's a lot easier to make modular and object-oriented code in Python. Compared to JSP, Python is concise, dynamic, and loosely typed-in short, a lot quicker to develop. Compared to Bash...well. "

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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