See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

Fortunately, as of this Tuesday, the FSF and FSMLabs managed to resolve the issue quickly with the FSMLabs RTLinux Open Patent License being modified to be fully GPL compliant as a result.

In the Linux Devices coverage of the issue, Victor Yodaiken said that they: "were happy to have this settled and go back to our business. There seems to have been some miscommunication, and it's good to see that we can get past it." The quick resolution was very fortunate, the GPL software world can do without a nasty court battle right now.

For a good view of the Free Software Foundation's stance on GPL, see GPL counsel Eben Moglen's paper on Enforcing the GPL, Part One and Part Two. Software developers who are mixing proprietary and GPL software should make it their business to be informed on the issues here.

Audio

New RPMs available for Ogg Vorbis. The Ogg Vorbis site lists some updated RC2 RPMs that replace broken RPMs which were built with a funky version of GCC.

Databases

New SapDB available. A new release of SapDB is available. From the release notes, this appears to be version 7.3.00.15, which includes numerous bug fixes.

Education

SEUL/edu report for September 17, 2001. The September 17, 2001 edition of the SEUL/edu Linux in education report is out, with stories about Linux in Greek and Australian schools, Guatemalan and Belize school systems who are looking at Linux. The long list of software projects listed this week include some utilities for tracking student enrollment and accounting information, schedule planning, and much more.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter. A new issue of the Embedded Linux Newsletter is out, this edition includes a review of leading Embedded Linux toolkits, news of Lineo's downsizing, and Red Hat's choice of RTLinux.

Robots marching into open source (IBM developerWorks). Darrick Addison gives an overview of robot technology in an IBM developerWorks article. "The word "robot" originates from the Czech word for forced labor, or serf. It was introduced by playwright Karel Capek, whose fictional robotic inventions were much like Dr. Frankenstein's monster -- creatures created by chemical and biological, rather than mechanical, methods. But the current mechanical robots of popular culture are not much different from these fictional biological creations."

Filesystems

Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Part 3 (developerWorks). In part 3 of this series from developerWorks, titled " Using the virtual memory (VM) filesystem and bind mounts", the author looks at the advantages of tmpfs and bind mounts now available with kernel 2.4.
Part 4 of the series is also available and covers devfs, the Device Filesystem. "These days, Linux supports a lot of different kinds of hardware. This means that most of us have literally hundreds of special files in /dev to represent all of these devices. Not only that, but most of these special files don't even map to an existing device on our system (but they need to be there just in case we eventually add new hardware/drivers to our system), making things even more confusing.
From just this one aspect, we can see that /dev is in need of an overhaul, and devfs was created with the express purpose of whipping /dev back into shape."

Games

SDL Game Contest. No Starch Press is running another Linux game developer's contest. Entries should be submitted by December 1, 2001.

Interoperability

Wine Weekly News for September 12, 2001. The September 12, 2001 edition of the Wine Weekly News is out. Topics include a discussion on implementing the advapi32.dll crypto api, dealing with bugs in Specmaker and with keyboards, and more.

Printing Systems

Omni version 0.4.3 released. A new version of the Omni printer driver was recently released. Version 0.4.3 adds patches for ghostscript 6.51 and 5.50, and brings with it the latest Foomatic enablement code.

Science

Introduction to Quantum Computing (IBM developerWorks). Brad Huntting and David Mertz discuss quantum computing as a way to solve a certain class of difficult computational problems. "In the next few decades, quantum computers are likely to move out of science fiction and research labs (largely at IBM) and into practical applications. A class of problems surrounding complex combinatorics that plague deterministic computers can be solved efficiently on Quantum Computers (QCs). This article, which builds on a basic knowledge of the mathematics of vectors, gives an introduction to quantum computing."

Web-site Development

The MEMS Exchange Architecture. Andrew Kuchling has written a paper describing the web architecture used in the design of the MEMS Exchange, a project in distributed microfabrication.

The latest Zope News. The latest news from the Zope project includes news of release 0.9.2. of My Media Manager, release 4.2.0 of ZStyleSheet, with support for Konqueror and MS IE6, and more.

Convergence of Peer and Web Services (O'Reilly). Jeff Schneider looks at similarities between Peer and Web Services in an O'Reilly article. "Two of the hottest topics in computing in the new millennium have been peer services and Web services. Although these concepts have a significant amount of overlap, their current manifestations remain very different. In reviewing the types of problems that these systems solve and their method for solving them, it is very possible that the two will converge, producing a single hybrid solution."

Window Systems

XFree86 DRI team released by VA Linux. The members of the DRI team, including Brian Paul who authored the Mesa OpenGL-clone library, have been laid off from VA Linux. While this won't stop development, it may slow it for a time while developers find their way into new employment. (Thanks to Guido Guenther.)

Miscellaneous

Software Carpentry Spin Offs (O'Reilly). Even though The Software Carpentry project seems to have fallen by the wayside, some of the projects that were inspired by it live on. Stephen Figgins examines several of the successful software engineering tools that resulted from the project.

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

Caml

Caml Weekly News. The September 12 through 19 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out. Topics include the Ensemble distributed communication system, a tutorial on phantom types, and a new FORT mailing list.

FORTRAN

Progress continues on G95. The G95 FORTRAN compiler project continues to make progress towards a working compiler. A binary parser for Linux X86 is currently available for download.

Java

Java-GNOME 0.7.0 Released. Java-GNOME 0.7.0 has been released. "The Java-GNOME team is pleased to announce the next release of the bindings. This release delivers native compilation using gcj 3.0 or higher."

Clustering with JBoss/Jetty (O'Reilly). Bill Burke looks at JBoss/Jetty for the development of a scalable e-commerce site and discusses workarounds for some missing features.

Lisp

OpenMCL 0.7 has been released. Version 0.7 of OpenMCL has been released. This release features a BSD sockets interface, primitives for manipulating shared libraries and doing multiple i/o, and bug fixes. OpenMCL runs under LinuxPPC.

Perl

Perl 6 Porters for September 8, 2001. The September 8, 2001 edition of Perl 6 Porters is out. This issue covers the new %MY:: interface, runtime prototype checking, new documentation, and progress on the Parrot interpreter.

Python

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!. This week's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! includes the first discussion on the Python language newsgroup on what .Net means to Python.

The Architecture of Python. Jim Jackson and Kar-Han Tan have written The Architecture of Python, an online overview of the Python language.

Python 101 (part 8): An Exceptionally Clever Snake (Developer Shed). Vikram Vaswani Melonfire examines Python exceptions in part 8 of his series on Python. "Normally, when a Python program encounters an error, be it syntactical or logical, it exits the program at that stage itself with a message indicating the cause of the error. Now, while this behaviour is acceptable during the development phase, it cannot continue once a Python program has been released to actual users. In these "live" situations, it is unprofessional to display cryptic error messages (which are usually incomprehensible to non-technical users); rather, it is more professional to intercept these errors and either resolve them (if resolution is possible), or notify the user with a clear error message (if not)."

Ruby

Ruby Garden News. The latest news from the Ruby Garden includes an announcement for Ruby 1.6.5, Jruby, a pure Java implementation of Ruby, discussions of various Ruby language features, and a new Visual Tk interface for Ruby.

Tcl/Tk

Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!. Tcl-URL! this week covers topics such as the use of canvases and scaling, Tk fonts under Windows, and more license questions.

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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