See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Browsers

Mozilla Status Update for December 13, 2000. A new Mozilla Status Update has been published. Check it out for the latest status on Composer, MailNews, Rendering, XML/DOM, and more.

Databases

Python Berkeley Database 3.1.x wrappers. Robin Dunn has announced a new BerkeleyDB wrapper module for Python. This project is unique in that it does not rely on SWIG like previous wrappers.

Education

Linux in education report #35 for December 18th, 2000. The latest Linux in Education report has been published by SEUL/edu. Discussions cover using the Gimp, Sketch, and various other tools for graphing and plotting, plus the usual list of new educational applications available for Linux.

Debian Jr. Package List. The current list of packages has been published for the Debian Jr. project. "The primary goal of the Debian Jr. project is to make Debian an OS our children want to run. This involves some sensitivity to the needs of children as expressed by the children themselves. As parents, developers, older siblings, sys admins, we need to keep our ears and eyes open and discover what it is that makes computers desirable to children. Without this focus, we can easily get sidetracked trying to achieve abstract goals like 'user friendliness', 'simplicity', 'low maintenance', or 'robustness' that, while they are certainly laudable goals for Debian as a whole, are too broad for addressing the specific needs and wants of children."

Dr Genius 0.5.10 released. Version 0.5.10 of Dr Genius is now available for download. Dr Genius, Dr Genius Refers to Geometry Exploration and Numeric Intuitive User System, aims to help with the visualization of geometry. The project is the result of the merging of two other projects, George Lebl's Gnome Genius Calculator and Hilaire Fernandes' GTK Dr. Geo. Dr Genius is licensed under the GPL license.

Electronics

New releases from gEDA. The gEDA project has announced new versions of the gschema schematic capture program and the Icarus Verilog circuit simulation software.

Embedded Systems

Fundamentals of Real-time Linux Software Design (LinuxDevices). LinuxDevices.com presents a technical white paper by Kevin Dankwardt, explaining the fundamentals of real-time Linux system programming. "If there is only a single task to worry about, lots of issues, such as kernel preemptibility, are no longer pertinent. If you are not dealing with hardware interrupts, then, do you really have a real-time system (we include timers here)? If your target system has multiple CPUs then you may have a means of distributing your tasks and interrupts in such a way that the issues discussed, again, are not important."

Embedded Linux Newsletter, December 14th, 2000 (LinuxDevices). This week's issue of the Embedded Linux Newsletter is out. Topics for the past week included PDA alternatives, point of sale terminals, and a slew of papers from the second annual Real-time Linux Workshop.

Games

Indrema updates open-source stance (LinuxDevices). Indrema, maker of an embedded Linux based game console has updated its position with regards to the open-source development model. "After extensive feedback from the open source community (most of whom were concerned about the conflicts of certification with the bazaar development model), Indrema has decided to change the freeware / Open Source portion of the certification plan to better accommodate independent developers, particularly Open Source developers."

Interoperability

Caldera sponsors Samba client library development. Caldera Systems has announced that it is sponsoring Samba developer Richard Sharpe to develop a new client library for the Samba system.

CodeWeavers Releases a Packaged Wine Preview (Linux Today). The Code Weavers have announced a packaged version of Wine that works with Gnome and KDE. A Wine Configuration Wizard, Wine Launcher, and the WineMaker porting tool are included in the package.

Wine Weekly News for December 18, 2000. The December 18, 2000 version of the Wine Weekly News has been published. This issue has an in-depth feature on dynamic loading in Wine as well as the usual project status information.

Network Management

OpenNMS Update, Volume 1, Issue 39 (December 20th, 2000). The latest OpenNMS Update has arrived. Version 0.4.1 of OpenNMS has been released and some common questions regarding it have been answered. Also included are a list of new features, a wish list, and some afterthoughts about productivity during the holidays.

Office Applications

LyX Development News for December 20th, 2000. A new issue, number 10, of the LyX Development News has been published. This edition covers the debate on keeping or dropping GUI independence for that application along with a brief history of the LyX name. The usual batch of development quotes and mail thread summaries are also included.

The Gimp version 1.1.31 is available. Developer's Version 1.1.31 of the Gimp is available for download. This follows last week's release of version 1.1.30 with a few more bug fixes. If this version proves to be stable, it will soon become Stable Version 1.2.

On the Desktop

XFree86 4.0.2 Released. The XFree86 Project, Inc has released XFree86 Version 4.0.2. This release brings X support to the Darwin/Mac OS X PowerPC platform, support for many new graphics cards, Render support, enhanced internationalization, and even an improved XTerm, among other things.

KDE 2.1 beta 1, Qt 2.2.3 released. The announcement for KDE 2.1 beta1 has gone out. This release contains a new theme manager, the Pixie image viewer/editor, the KDevelop C/C++ IDE, and more.

Also, Trolltech has announced the release of the Qt 2.2.3 GUI framework. This is a bugfix release.

10 Questions with Charles Northrup. Charles Northrup, CTO of Global Technologies Ltd. Inc and lead developer on their GNOME for Windows Project is interviewed by Linux Orbit's John Gowin.

"Linux Orbit: It was noted on the press release that work was being done on a KDE port as well. What's the timeline for the KDE port?

Charles Northrup: This is dependent on user demand mostly. We have not received any requests for KDE to date. If the requests come in, we will look at this effort more seriously."

The People Behind KDE: Luigi Genoni. The people section of dot.kde.org spotlights Luigi Genoni. "What is your role within KDE?
I'm the maintainer of knetfilter, a gui to set up and configure firewalls with Linux 2.4.0 and iptables. It is a marginal application in front of the KDE great stuff, but it is one of the many applications for sysadmins developed for KDE that, in my opinion, make KDE as rich and interesting as it is for the users."

Linux Accessibility Conference and GNOME. The Linux Accessibility Conference will take place during CSUN's Sixteenth Annual International Conference, March 22-23, 2001 at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton Hotel.

"The mission of the conference is twofold:
1) To demonstrate the potential of Linux and free software in the accessibility arena.
2) To formulate a course of action for advancing Linux accessibility and to begin to organize interested supporters and developers into working groups focusing on specific topics. These topics include: GNOME, KDE, X Windows, Console, Braille, Speech, Internationalization and Localization (i18n and l10n), Internet Applications (Mozilla), and Universal Accessibility Standard. "

Easy GUI programming with EasyGTK (IBM developerWorks). IBM's developerWorks is carrying a story on using EasyGTK, a wrapper library around GTK+ that purports to make writing GTK+ applications simpler. "The Gnome Toolkit (GTK+) is a free toolkit for creating great user interfaces. EasyGTK is a wrapper library that translates calls into GTK+, removing much of the effort and time needed to master GTK+." Gnome Toolkit? Try Gimp Toolkit, guys.

Printing Systems

Cups V1.1.5 released. Version 1.1.5 of the Common Unix Print System (CUPS) has been announced. A huge list of changes are listed including security fixes, installation improvements, more USB support, new documentation, and lots of other stuff.

LPRng 3.7.2 available. Version 3.7.2 of the LPRng enhanced print spooler is available for download. Information on this release is somewhat sparse at this time.

Science

SpaceChart 3D starmapping for Gnome. A new version of SpaceChart has been released. " SpaceChart is a program that allows you to see the stars in glorious 3D and rotate them to see them from any point of view. You can also limit which stars you want to see, according to their spectral class and luminosity, and draw links between all stars closer than a certain distance. "

Systems Administration

Interview with David Cantrell (Userlocal.com). Userlocal.com interviews David Cantrell, a noted Slackware developer. "Using the CHECKSUMS.md5 files that we provide in the distribution, autoslack will look at your machine and a distribution tree of your choice and tell you what packages can be removed, upgrade, or new ones that can be installed. Optionally it can download those packages and/or perform the actual package operation."

Web-site Development

Midgard Weekly Summary, December 20th, 2000. The Midgard Weekly Summary has been posted. Features include the upcoming final 1.4 candidate, the implementation of a nightly build system, and Midgard 2.0 schedules.

ZopeLDAP 1.1.0 released. A new version of ZopeLDAP is now available. This release brings the ability to run in a non-transactional mode, a Python friendly Entry object API, and improved documentation.

Zope Weekly News for December 14, 2000. The December 14, 2000 edition of the Zope Weekly News has been published. News includes the release of Zope 2.3 Alpha 1 and the upcoming release of Zope 2.2.5.

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

Assembly Language

The new Amiga: VP assembly code demo (developerWorks). It's not Linux specific, but Amiga's cross platform development environment - the Tao Group's Virtual Processor (VP) technology - is intriguing on it's own. IBM's developerWorks is carrying a story showing an example application written in this new, "hardware independent", assembly language. " VP code is, in a nutshell, the ideal assemble language. In fact, it's such an improvement over traditional non-virtual assembly language that it needs to be seen and understood in order to be appreciated. Just to highlight a few of its strong points: it has an unlimited number of integer and floating-point registers [and] you can use high-level looping constructs (similar to those in a higher-level language like C)."

Java

Building Servelets with Session Tracking (IBM developerWorks). IBM's developerWorks is running a tutorial on Building servlets with session tracking by Jeanne Murray. "This tutorial teaches techniques for building Internet applications using servlet and JSP technology. A key point is to enable session handling, so the servlet knows which user is doing what. The tutorial shows a URL bookmarking system in which multiple users access a system to add, remove, and update an HTML listing of bookmarks. The servlet uses JSP technology to handle the user interaction." Registration is required.

Perl

Perl 5.6.1 TRIAL1 Released (Use Perl). Release 5.6.1 TRIAL1 of Perl has been released. This is a trial version, it's not ready for production yet.

Perljvm Under Active Development Again (Use Perl). The Perljvm project, which aims to port Perl to the Java Virtual Machine, is under active development again.

PHP

PHP 4.0.4 released. PHP version 4.0.4 has been released as of December 19, 2000. This version contains a ton of bug fixes as well as a few new features.

Introduction to PHP (IBM developerWorks). IBM's developerWorks has run an introduction to PHP that describes the PHP web scripting language. "PHP is a scripting language that is embedded in HTML and interpreted by the server. It can be used to manage dynamic content, work with databases, handle session tracking, and even build entire e-commerce sites. It works well with a number of popular databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Microsoft SQL Server."

Python

Python-URL! for December 18th, 2000. The latest Python-URL! has hit the ether, with topics covering the use of Python in cryptography and math, variable/parameter/assignment semantics, and using Python to access the parallel port lines under Windows 95.

Jython 2.0a2 released. Version 2.0a2 of Jython is available. Jython is an implementation of the Python language written in Java.

Smalltalk

Bistro 3.4 available. Nik Boyd has announced the availability of Bistro 3.4. Bistro is a variation of Smalltalk that runs on top of the Java VM.

Tcl/tk

Scripted wrappers for legacy applications (REGULAR EXPRESSIONS). In a REGULAR EXPRESSONS article, Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz show us how to use Perl and Tk to build a gui wrapper around a C program.

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! for December 18th, 2000. The weekly edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! has been published. Featured topics include authenticating usernames and passwords in URLs, handling background errors, and a comparison of Tcl to other scripting languages.

Tcl/Tk 2001 Conference Announcement. The Tcl/Tk 2001 Conference has been announced for July 23-27, 2001 in SanDiego, California.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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