See also: last week's Development page.

Development projects

News and Editorials

The first beta of KDE 3.0 has been released.

A brief list of the new features to be found in KDE 3.0 include:

• A new Windows/Mac style clipboard in addition to the standard X window system style clipboard.
• A long list of new KMail features.
• KDevelop additions including Zaurus and iPAQ support.
• SSL certificate and CA management tools.
• A file dialog URL speed bar.
• Support for Konqueror sidebar actions.
• A long list of Konsole enhancements.
• Improvements to the KDE Library.

The main purpose of this release is to iron out any remaining problems before the official 3.0 release ( planned in February). "Beta1 is a stabilized snapshot of the current KDE 3 development branch and is meant for testers, developers and translators,"

The goals of the 3.0 beta release are as follows:

• Receive bug reports and constructive feedback from testers.
• Update and complete of the KDE 3 documentation.
• Establish a stable API to allow KDE 2 apps to be ported to KDE 3.
• Solicit feature requests from developers prior to freezing the KDE 3 API.
• Provide a stable snapshot for the language translation teams.

Audio Projects

The latest from LINUXMUSIC. The LINUXMUSIC site lists a number of new packages including a new version of Sox, several new Linux MIDI tools, and more.

Glame 0.6.0 released. Version 0.6.0 of the Glame audio file editor is available. This version is considered a stable branch and features realtime adjustable parameters, key bindings, better localization for French and German users, and more.

Ogg Vorbis RC3 available. A new release candidate, RC3, has been announced for the Ogg Vorbis audio compression suite. This version features better quality and improved bitrate management features.

Quick Toots from Dave Philips. Linux Audio guru Dave Philips has release the first article in a series known as Quick Toots. This article illustrates the creation of spectral displays of audio data using the Ceres3 spectral editor.

Education

SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report. The SEUL/edu Linux in Education Report for December 24 is out with the usual survey of happenings with Linux and the educational community.

Electronics

Xcircuit 2.5.2 released. Version 2.5.2 (beta) of the Xcircuit schematic drawing package has been released. The main new feature is support for displaying multiple instances of an object, with different parameters, on the same library page. There is also a new stable version, 2.3.5 which features bug fixes and enhancements to the Python interface.

PCB 1.7.3 alpha released. After a long period of little activity, a new version of PCB, an open source printed circuit drawing program has been released. The CHANGES are mostly in the area of improved Gerber file driver software.

Embedded Systems

Embedded Linux Newsletter (LinuxDevices). The LinuxDevices.com Embedded Linux Newsletter for December 20, 2001 is out, with the usual gathering of news from the embedded Linux community. Responses to Microsoft's attack on embedded Linux are the main topic this week.

Network Management

Automating Network Administration, Part One (O'Reilly). Luke A. Kanies discusses network administration automation on O'Reilly's ONLamp site. "I'm a sysadmin; it's my job to make sure my company's servers are doing what they're supposed to be doing when they are supposed to be doing it, and it's my job to solve any problems that interfere with that.
This job has given me what I call my Big Red Button Dream(tm): I dream of a separate entrance to my own office, with all of the monitors, servers, workstations, and whatever I need to do my job. No one sees me enter, no one sees me leave, no one knows if I'm working or sleeping. But when anything anywhere on the network breaks, a Big Red Button on the wall starts flashing to indicate a problem."

Printing Systems

LPRng 3.8.4 released. LPRng version 3.8.4 has been released. The CHANGES for this version include some bug fixes and a few new features.

Peer to Peer

Distributed Systems Topologies: Part 1 (OpenP2P.com). Nelson Minar discusses a number of Peer to Peer topologies in an O'Reilly OpenP2P article. "The peer-to-peer explosion has reminded people of the power of decentralized systems. The promise of robustness, open-endedness, and infinite scalability have made many people excited about decentralization. But in reality, most systems we build on the Internet are largely centralized."

Web-site Development

The latest Zope Members News. This week, the Zope Members News site looks at ZCGI, a package that allows CGI-BIN scripts to be run directly under Zope.

AxKit 1.5 Released (use Perl). Version 1.5 of AxKit has been announced. "For those not in the know, AxKit is an XML application server - allowing you to generate applications in an Apache server using various XML technologies such as XSLT and eXtensible Server Pages." AxKit is built with Perl, mod_perl, and XS.

Protozilla: Pipes, Protocols and the Web Browser (Linux Journal). The Linux Journal looks at Protozilla, essentially a browser-side CGI implementation. "The main goal of the Protozilla project is to make it easy for the browser to interact with existing software, without the need for extensive modifications to conform to any browser-specific interface. The client-side CGI feature of Protozilla essentially allows any command-line program to be invoked within the browser." Yes, they do discuss the scary security implications of this capability.

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

Desktop Development

Web Browsers

Mozilla 0.9.7 released. Mozilla 0.9.7 is available. The release notes list a number of new features including a fully implemented Labels feature in Mail&News, SMIME functionality, a new Document Inspector, a new advanced preference panel for fine-grained JavaScript control, and lots more.

Galeon 1.0.2 released. Progress continues on the Galeon web browser, Version 1.0.2 of the stable branch features a few bug fixes and compatibility with Mozilla 0.9.7.

There is also a review of Galeon 1.0.2 on the technologyreview.org site.

Desktop Environments

People of KDE: Meni Livne. This week's People of KDE features Meni Livne, maintainer of the KDE Israel website.

Mosfet Contributes Code to KDE (Again). After a bit of a break, long time KDE hacker Mosfet has contributed a number of new effects to KDE/Qt. "The new effects include normalize, equalize, solarize, threshold, emboss, despeckle, charcoal, rotate, sample, addNoise, blur, edge, implode, oil paint, sharpen, spread, shade, swirl, wave, and contrastHSV"

Gnome Installation Guide 1/2002 has been published. A new edition of the GNOME Installation Guide has been announced. The new edition is available here.

GNOMEnclature: Getting ready for GNOME 2, Part 1 (IBM developerWorks). Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult present the first in a series of articles on GNOME 2. "Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult of CodeFactory will give you the inside information you need to make the best use of the new GNOME 2 platform. In this series, you'll learn how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, panel applets, and much more."

FLTK v1.1.0b8 Released. A new version of FLTK, the Fast Light ToolKit has been released. Several new component packages are also available.

Games

Pygame Review (O'Reilly). Gareth Noyce reviews PyGame on O'Reilly. "Pygame is a lightweight wrapper around the Simple DirectMedia Layer(SDL) -- stay with me here! -- a cross-platform library for accessing low-level graphics programming routines available under Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and BSD (amongst others). Think 'DirectX' and you'd be close enough, except the beauty of SDL is it's free, non-proprietary, and extremely powerful."

Meanwhile, PyGame 1.3 and some new tutorials have been released.

Interoperability

Kernel Cousin Wine #111. Issue 111 of Kernel Cousin Wine has been published. Topics include a possible Wine license change, a working NetBSD port, a Crypto API, Windows Screensavers, and more.

Office Applications

Gnumeric 1.0.0 released. The long-awaited Gnumeric 1.0.0 release has happened. See the announcement for a description of the capabilities in this release; it is truly a fully-featured spreadsheet program. Congratulations to the Gnumeric team.

Bluefish 0.7 HTML editor released. Version 0.7 of the Bluefish HTML editor is available. Features include "numerous small updates and improvements, more translations the custom menu now is extended for custom search and replace macro's, some small memory leaks fixed and better handling for file history. For the brave: there is autocompletion in progress ".

Miscellaneous

KC GNUe #8. Issue number eight of Kernel Cousin GNUe is available. Check it out for all of the latest GNU Enterprise developments.

The year in DotGNU. For the new year, the DotGNU Newsletter takes on an annual perspective. It is a lengthy and interesting publication, with several articles on what DotGNU can provide now, and where the project intends to go.

Programming Languages

C

GCC 3.0.3 released. Version 3.0.3 of the GNU Compiler Collection, GCC, has been released. This is a bug-fix release that fixes, among other things, a bug that showed up when compiling the Linux kernel.

Caml

Caml Weekly News for January 1, 2001. The Caml Weekly News for December 19, 2001 through January 1, 2002 is out. Topics include Ensemble 1.34, Cameleon 0.2, MacroHTML, OCaml on the iPAQ, and more.

New Caml Hump additions. This week, The Caml Hump takes a look at Camomile, a module set for multi-lingual processing, MacroHTML, an HTML macro processor, the Cameleon OCaml IDE, and more.

Java

Java3D 1.2.1_03 and 1.3-beta1. The Blackdown Java-Linux Team has released version 1.2.1_03 of its Java3D API implementation. It is a bug fix release; the more adventurous, however, should note that the first beta of Java3D 1.3 is also available.

Rock 'em, sock 'em Robocode! (IBM developerWorks). Sing Li talks about Robocode, a Java 2 graphical robotics battle simulator. "Is it possible to learn inheritance, polymorphism, event handling, and inner classes, all while dodging bullets and executing precision attack maneuvers? A surprisingly addictive teaching-tool-turned-game-craze called Robocode is about to make this a reality for Java developers worldwide."

Perl

Parrot's now officially functional (use Perl). The new Perl 6 Parrot interpreter is now functional.

Perl 6 Porters for December 29, 2001. The December 29, 2001 edition of Perl 6 Porters is out. This issue looks at JIT, output primitives, and the Perl Development Grant Fund.

PHP

PHP 4.1.1 released. A new version of PHP is available. Version 4.1.1 fixes a few minor bugs that showed up in version 4.1.0, see the release notes for all of the details.

PHP Weekly Summary for December 31, 2001. The latest PHP Summary looks at several proposed changes to PHP, a number of new bug fixes, and other PHP issues.

Python

Python 2.2. Guido van Rossum has announced the release of Python 2.2, "just in time to be placed under the Christmas tree."

This week's Python-URL. Here's Dr. Dobb's Python-URL for January 2, 2002, with the latest in happenings from the Python community.

The latest Daily Python-URL entries. Recent additions to the Daily Python-URL includes a look at a Python comment extractor called HappyDoc 2.0, a Doc format e-book publisher known as Pyrite Publisher 2.0, and new release of the online book Thinking in Python.

Jython 2.1 released. A new version of Jython, a Python interpreter written in Java, has been released. See the Jython NEWS document for all of the details.

Ruby

This Week's Ruby Garden. This week, the Ruby Garden features discussions on integer division, Ruby bindings for libGMP, the RubyGems 0.4 library packaging system, the new Ruby 1.6.6 release, and more. Also, check out the new Ruby Weekly News from the Ruby Garden folks.

Tcl/Tk

This week's Tcl-URL. Two new editions of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL are available, the December 24, 2001 issue, and the the usual gathering of interesting tidbits from the Tcl/Tk community. January 1, 2002 issue.

XML

Clark Challenges the XML Community (XML.com). Edd Dumbill discusses James Clark's opening keynote at the recent IDEAlliance XML 2001 Conference in Orlando, Florida. "Though at the center of the development of XML 1.0 and XSLT, and much SGML technology before that, Clark has recently become an increasingly dissenting voice at the World Wide Web Consortium. He used his speech to set out his concerns about the position that the guardians of XML now find themselves in."

Working XML: Compiling the paths and automating tests (IBM developerWorks). Benoit Marchal writes about HC, the SAX content Handler Compiler on IBM's developer Works. "Each month in the Working XML column, Benoit Marchal discusses the progress of his open-source projects for XML developers, from design decisions to coding challenges. The new project called HC (short for Handler Compiler) will take some drudgery out of event-based XML parsing by automatically generating the SAX ContentHandler for a list of XPaths."

Versioning Problems (XML.com). Leigh Dodds brings up some issues with the first Working Draft of XML 1.1. "Since before the XML-Deviant column started in January 2000, many in the community have expressed an interest in the creation of a new version of XML. Some considered XML too complex and wanted it simplified--a recurring theme over the last two years. Others have wanted to see more substantial revisions to incorporate other specifications that have become part of the XML 'core.'"

Section Editor: Forrest Cook

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