See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

Browsers

Mozilla Chameleon Theme Builder makes progress. Progress is being made on the Mozilla Chameleon Theme Builder, a tool that is used for customizing the appearance of your browser screen. The screenshots of Chameleon look pretty interesting.

Databases

Oracle could face a Linux-like threat (CBS). CBS MarketWatch's Mike Tarsala discusses the threat of open-source databases on proprietary database companies. "'Databases have been overpriced for a long time,' said Michael Widenius, founder of MySQL, the most widely used open-source database. 'The bigger market we get, the more the commercial database companies don't get. Their profit returns are going to decrease rapidly.'"

Documentation

Linux Documentation Project updates. The LDP has received a slew of updates since the last time we reported on them. A stronger emphasis is being placed on categorizing and maintaining documents, and a summit was held to talk about future directions for the project.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter (Linux Devices). The latest edition of the Embedded Linux Newsletter has been posted. Included is a feature article on the RedBoot open source BIOS, and profiles of several embedded devices. Check it out for news from the Embedded Linux world.

Trolltech to Add GPL Licensing to Qt/Embedded. Trolltech announced that the current version of Qt/Embedded will be licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and also a commercial license. Linux Devices has a related article that discusses Qt/Embedded. "Thanks to application program interface (API) commonality between Qt/Unix and Qt/Embedded, Linux programs can easily be recompiled to run on embedded systems, making a large number of programs immediately available to newly developed embedded devices."

Interoperability

Wine 20001026 snapshot available. A new snapshot of Wine, dated October 26, 2000 has been announced. Visit the download site for your copy. This version includes many bug fixes, exec support from DOS mode, and header fixes for Winelib compiles.

Office Applications

Eazel Will Influence Re-vamped GNOME Interface Team (LinuxToday). LinuxToday covers the recent UI team reorganization over at GNOME. "Currently the team at Eazel is busy with the upcoming Nautilus release, but the efforts should be fully blended. While Eazel is currently focused on Nautilus, other people can look at other applications in the whole GNOME desktop and contribute to each application," [GNOME leader Miguel de Icaza] said.

What's New with GnuCash (LinuxNews.com). LinuxNews.com talks with GnuCash hacker Rob Browning. "'Right now we have four full-time developers, and we're about to hire a few more,' he said, attributing the growth of the staff--and the project--to financial backing from Gnumatic Incorporated, announced August 14, 2000."

Gimp 1.1.29 released. Release 1.1.29 of the Gimp is now available, this version is a release candidate for stable version 1.2, bug reports are requested should you find anything amiss.

On the Desktop

Candidates for GNOME Foundation Elections Announced. The candidates for the first GNOME Foundation board of directors election have been announced. The list includes a number of prominent names (de Icaza, Gettys, Levien, Pennington, Perens, Mena Quintero), but there are many other interesting candidates as well. There's still time - barely - to register to vote if you've contributed to the GNOME project. Eleven of the 33 candidates will be elected.

GNOME Documentation Project Status Report #3. The third GDP Status Report was just released. "Nautilus is getting even better at rendering SGML documents, ScrollKeeper is quickly approaching its first beta release, a bunch of new people have joined the GDP and started writing various documents, a solution to licensing issues has been found, a number of documents have recently been finished, more Sun contributors have trickled in and quietly started working, a GNOME style guide is slowly being prepared for discussion on the mailing list, and more."

New Plans for KDE Multimedia (KDE Dot News). A draft proposal concerning the update of KDE multimedia applications and infrastructure has been placed online. While "multimedia" seems to mean many things to many people, this proposal appears to be aimed mainly at audio issues.

People Behind KDE: Reginald Stadlbauer (KDE Dot News). This week The People Behind KDE interviews Reginald Stadlbauer, the programmer originally behind such things as KPresenter and KWord. "I posted to the KDE lists that I would write a PowerPoint clone. As I was new to C++ and Qt/KDE, nobody took me seriously."

KDE 2.0 Developer book online (Andamooka). A KDE 2.0 book for developers is scheduled for a November release both in print and online versions. The book is being published under an open content license.

Linux Mandrake KDE2 tutorial. Linux Mandrake has published an online beginner's tutorial for KDE 2.0 The tutorial provides a nice overview of KDE2 for beginners and is a good way to view the capabilities and features of KDE2.

Science

Will free software come to the rescue of the UK's health service? (ZDNet). ZDNet's UK division has an article that discusses the advantages of using open-source software in the British health service. "'Free software concepts make particular sense in medicine,' says Dr Douglas Carnall, associate editor of the Journal. 'Once a customer is "locked into" proprietary software, its makers can demand premium prices, safe in the knowledge that the client would find it even more expensive to change. Much better instead to invest time on a system licensed under the General Public License that will always be free,' he says."

Web-site Development

Zope Weekly News for November 1, 2000. The late breaking November 1 edition of the Zope Weekly News has been published. News includes the addition of the Python Labs group to Zope, progress on the Write Locking and HiperDom projects, and several new proposals.

Zope Weekly News for October 25, 2000. The October 25 edition of the Zope Weekly News is also available. The status reports of various Zope projects are featured. Michel Pelletier and Amos Latteier have published an alpha release of their upcoming Zope book and are interested in feedback. "Documentation has been an albatross for Zope for a long time and this book is a huge opportunity to rectify that - please do your part in making it the best it can be by taking an early look and contributing your thoughts or concerns!"

MoinMoin release 0.4. Release 0.4 of the MoinMoin collaborative hypertext environment has been announced. MoinMoin is a Python based clone of a WikiWikiWeb system.

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

Erlang

Erlang R7B available as rpm. An RPM packaged version of Erlang version R7B has been made available by Goeff Wong. If you are interested in getting Erlang on your system, this should be a quick route.

Perl

Larry Wall gives ALS Keynote. Larry Wall gave a keynote at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in which he discussed his current thinking on the state of Perl. An MP3 version of the talk is available as are the slides and the full text.

Simpleware vs hypeware - Why PERL isn't dead yet (CNET). Srikant Sreenivasan has written an interesting article that discusses the pitfalls of moving code from older, more stable languages to trendy new languages. "Don't get me wrong. I'm no frenzied zealot of an anti new languages or technologies movement. My only passion is technology. But I really see that all these so called new languages are not enhancing my productivity as a developer nor giving me any major benefits in a production environment." This article is worth reading even if you aren't working with Perl.

University of Perl Day 1.3 (Use Perl). Nathan Torkington has published Day 1.3 in his continuing series of journals from the traveling University of Perl classes. Check it out for a glimpse into the world of Perl culture.

PHP

PHP Weekly Summary for October 30, 2000. The October 30, 2000 edition of the PHP Weekly Summary is out. News includes Apache 2.0 support, and work on serializing references. A new feature wish list has been included as well.

Python

This week's Python-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for November 1 with the latest in python development news, including Guido's announcement of the PythonLabs move and some discussions on locking mechanisms.

Call for Papers: Ninth Python Conference. November 6, 2000 is the deadline for submitting papers for the Ninth Python Conference which will be held from March 5 through 8, 2001 in Long Beach, California.

Python-dev summary, October 17-31, 2000. The October 17-31 issue of the Pythondev summary is out. Included are discussions of the Python team's migration to Digital Creations, and questions about the future of Python and Tcl/tk.

Tcl/tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Here is Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL for October 30 with the latest in Tcl development news, including a look at the acquisition of Ajuba Solutions and whether [incr Tcl] should be part of the core distribution.

XML

XML Matters #4 (IBM developerWorks). David Mertz has put together the fourth article in his series on XML Matters. He discusses the use of the DocBook XML dialect for pulling many document formats into a single standard XML format.

The XML Elements of Style (O'Reilly). O'Reilly author Steve Muench presents his own Elements of Style (ala Strunk and White) in this article on the rules for creating a well-formed XML document. "The first, outermost element in an XML document is called the document element because its name announces what kind of document it is--<FAQ-List>, <Book>, <Transaction>, <TrackingStatus>, etc. You must have only one document element per document."

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

Next: Commerce