See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Browsers

Galeon 0.7.7 released. Version 0.7.7 of the Galeon Web Browser has been released. This version features improved mime type handling, better key handling, and many bug fixes. Galeon's motto is "The web, only the web"; the browser is small, fast, basic, and very effective. Currently, the installation is somewhat tricky and involves installing the Mozilla browser, along with recent versions of gnome-libs. A one-step installation process would be a welcome change.

Mozilla Milestone 18 released. The Mozilla project has released Mozilla M18. This version includes improvements to the Mail-News system and better response time.

Learning the ways of Mozilla (Upside). Upside Today has run an article on Learning the ways of Mozilla. The article discusses the efforts of two Mozilla designers, David Boswell and Ian Oeschger, in documenting the process of working with the Mozilla development project.

Project Update: Mo-Zilla not Less-Zilla (LinuxNews). Linux News' Michelle Head looks at the Mozilla development effort. The Mozilla project schedule and licensing issues are discussed. According to Mozilla's Mitchell Baker: "Linux is one of Mozilla's core platforms; we build and test on Linux constantly. Code that doesn't support Linux is not welcome in our source tree."

Databases

Oratcl 3.1 announced. Version 3.1 of Oratcl (no, that isn't a typo!) is now available. "Oratcl is an extension to the Tcl/Tk language that utilizes Oracle OCI calls to provide Oracle access via tcl."

Education

Freeduc Zone (Ofset.org). The Ofset organization has a project known as Freeduc, the FREe EDUCation software database that aims to build a catalog of educational open-source software projects. If you are working with Linux and education, check it out. "Until now - and probably for a while in most heads - the GNU/Linux system at school has been perceived as a good replacement of other proprietary servers. However the server is probably the least important things in term of freedom in a school network. It doesn't allow a teacher to share a workstation software with students. Supporting GNU/Linux in the workstation side can grant higher sharing freedom between users in school. At the same time several group has built list of free edu soft. OFSET has setup Freeduc, a tool to help to list, to evaluate and to package free - non GPL exclusive - edu soft."

Embedded Systems

Second deepLINUX Embedded Toolkit release candidate. The second deepLINUX Embedded Linux Toolkit (dELT) release candidate has been announced. It fixes a fairly serious problem that prevented the first one from working for a lot of people.

SiS boots PC BIOS out of the system (Linux Devices). Linux Devices reports on an announcement from SiS, which claims to have the first System On a Chip to boot Linux without a BIOS. The system performs device initialization directly from the Linux kernel and speeds the booting process considerably.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for October 9 and 16, 2000. The Wine Weekly News for October 16 is out. A new version of the Winecfg tool, version 0.32b, has been released.

Last week's Wine Weekly News showed up somewhat late. News included a recent $1.8 million investment from CodeWeavers to fund Wine development, an upcoming Wine release, and discussion of the effect that Microsoft's purchase of Corel stock may have on Wine.

Open-source angst: Fear of forking (ZDNet). ZDNet discusses the recent fork in the Samba project. One fork will emphasize the basic Samba functionality and the other fork will work on W2K interoperability and other cutting-edge support. See the original announcement about the SAMBA_TNG fork from Samba.org.

Network Management

OpenNMS Update. The latest OpenNMS update, Vol. 1 Issue 30, has been forwarded to LWN. This issue includes some highlights from the ALS show in Atlanta this past week.

Office Applications

Gnumeric 0.57 Released. Version 0.57 of the Gnumeric spreadsheet has been released. Numerous bugs have been fixed and improvements have been made to international character set support. Interestingly, this version now sports a working Applix importer.

GnomeICU 0.94.1 released. The Gnome ICU project is back on track after a brief hiatus and has released GnomeICU 0.94.1, an ICQ protocol based internet communications program. This release has some important bug fixes and adds a few new features.

LyX Development News for 20001018. Allan Rae has posted the latest edition of the LyX Development News. Lyx is a graphical front-end for Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting language. Lots of information on CVS and release scheduling is covered here, along with plenty of information for the upcoming 1.6 release.

On the Desktop

GNOME With Goodies (Linux Magazine). Linux Magazine reviews Helix GNOME in a feature article by Jason Perlow. "In addition to having many updated software applications that the official GNOME doesn't have, Helix GNOME is also a lot more polished and "feels" more like a commercial product -- it has a lot more desktop themes to choose from and the pre-loaded menu icons have a more professional look."

The people behind KDE: David Faure. The "people behind KDE" series continues with this interview with David Faure. "The funniest thing about meeting KDE or Linux developers in general is that everyone is always younger than you first imagine."

KDE Desktop 2.0 Final Release Candidate Available. The (hopefully) final release candidate for KDE 2.0 has been announced. The project plans to freeze the release on October 16, so now is the last chance to find and report any showstopper bugs.

KDE and OpenOffice. Here's an editorial on KDE Dot News on how the OpenOffice release will benefit KDE. "In contrast, KOffice, was built from the ground up for KDE[2], and is fully integrated with native KDE component and related technologies. It may actually be easier to import useful code and technology from OpenOffice to KOffice than to rewrite OpenOffice."

KDE Linux Packaging Project taken down. KDE Dot News reports on the demise of the KDE Linux Packaging Project due to lack of time and "one person" who was making life difficult. An interesting discussion about dealing with this kind of problem in an open-source project follows.

Science

PyClimate 1.0 released. Version 1.0 of PyClimate, a climate variability analysis toolset, has been released. PyClimate has been released under the GPL license.

Web-site Development

Apache 1.3.14 released. Apache 1.3.14 has been released. The mod_rewrite security problem and a few other bugs have been fixed. A new directory-based configuration scheme has been added. If you plan on using the new version, however, you'll want to apply this patch. Without it, sites that use RewriteMaps will likely break.

Zope Weekly News. This week's Zope Weekly News is out. It covers the first reactions to the Zope book, as well as providing updates on the latest happenings in Zope development.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Application Links
GIMP
Mozilla
Galeon
High Availability
ht://Dig
mnoGoSearch
MagicPoint
Wine
Worldforge
Zope

Open Source Code Collections
Berlios
Freshmeat
OpenSourceDirectory
Savannah
Le Serveur Libre
SourceForge
Sweetcode

Programming Languages

Ada

Ada for Linux. If you are working with the Ada language, you should check out the Ada for Linux Team page. This group is working on an open-source Ada compiler and associated development tools.

C/C++

Internet C++ alpha release. The alpha release of Internet C++ has been announced. Internet C++ is intended to be an open alternative to both Java and C#; it's essentially C++ which runs on a portable virtual machine. They have even ported Doom to the new system...

Java

A proposal for fixing the Java programming language's threading problems (IBM). IBM's Developer Works has published an article by Allen Holub that discusses Java's threading problems. " Allen Holub suggests that the Java programming language's threading model is possibly the weakest part of the language. It's entirely inadequate for programs of realistic complexity and isn't in the least bit object oriented. This article proposes significant changes and additions to the Java language that would address many of these problems. "

JavaUnix 1.0 released. Version 1.0 of JavaUnix, a portable extension API for the Java platform that provides access to Unix environment and filesystems, has been released. JavaUnix is distributed with an "Open Source" license.

Perl

Larry Wall gives ALS Keynote. Larry Wall gave a keynote speech at the Atlanta Linux Showcase entitled Camel Lot #6 where he discussed Perl's future directions. Nathan Torkington transcribed Larry's talk and Larry's slides from the talk are available. An audio recording of the talk is available in mp3 format from Dr. Dobb's.

University of Perl daily journals (Use Perl). Nathan Torkington continues his series of jornals from the University of Perl class. Here are the notes from day 1.1 and day 1.2.

PHP

PHP 4.0.3 Patch Level 1 available. PHP 4.0.3 Patch Level 1 is available for download. This version fixes a bug with Apache php_value and .conf files and plugs a memory leak in module versions of PHP.

PHP Conference Material Site. If you are interested in enhancing your PHP web publishing skills, you might want to check out the PHP Conference Material Site which has numerous slide sets from talks on PHP. The slides cover a wide range of PHP topics from introductory to advanced level.

Python

This week's Python-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for October 17, full of goodies from the Python development world.

This issue was evidently written just a little too soon to catch the Python 2.0 release (see below). Those who are interested in what's in 2.0 should most certainly check out What's New in Python 2.0 by A.M. Kuchling and Moshe Zadka. It covers the new features in detail; worth a look.

Python 2.0 released. Guido van Rossum has announced the release of Python 2.0. This release contains a number of new features, some of which were explored in last week's LWN development page. Congratulations to the Python team!

Python Web Modules Overview. Paul Boddie has published a list of Python Web Modules. This is a good site to check out if you want to get an overview of the various Python based web projects. Zope and its derivatives are not covered in the list since they are documented elsewhere.

Tcl/tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for October 16 with the usual collection of interesting tidbits from the Tcl development community.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Next: Commerce