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The current development kernel release is 2.5.6, which was released on March 8. The final release added
little to the prepatches; the main feature of this release from a user's
point of view remains the inclusion of IBM's JFS journaling filesystem.
The first 2.5.7 prepatch has been
released. It includes Rusty Russell's fast user-space semaphore patch
("futexes"), a thrashup of the VLAN code, the new wireless driver API, a
redesigned video device implementation, and numerous fixes and updates.
Dave Jones has released no "dj" patches over the last week. He has
presented excuses like moving into a new house as a reason for that.
Guillaume Boissiere's latest 2.5 status
summary is available.
The current stable kernel release is 2.4.18. The current 2.4.19
prepatch from Marcelo is 2.4.19-pre3. Along with the
usual array of fixes and updates it includes the "new" IDE code - in its
original form, not the increasingly reworked version found in the 2.5
kernel. In fact, the -pre3 version is missing some important fixes that went into 2.5 early on - it still
has the bug that caused 2.5 to destroy filesystems. There have been no
reports of corrupted filesystems with this prepatch, but it should be
approached with some care anyway.
Alan Cox's latest prepatch is 2.4.19-pre2-ac4. There is
a long list of fixes, but no amazing new features.
Alan has also announced the first 2.2.21
release candidate.
Other kernel trees. The day may yet come when the number of
available kernel trees exceeds the number of Linux users...
- Andrea Arcangeli's latest is 2.4.19-pre3-aa1. It
adds his latest VM implementation (vm-31), the X86-64 port, User-mode
Linux, and a number of fixes.
- J.A. Magallon has released 2.4.19-pre2-jam3 with
the latest VM code, the O(1) scheduler, the IDE patch, and other
performance-oriented fixes.
- Jörg Prante has released 2.4.19-pre2-jp7 includes
ALSA, the reverse mapping VM, the O(1) scheduler, the preempt patch,
the IDE patch, XFS, JFS, various crypto patches, and much more.
- 2.4.19-pre2-ac4-xfs-shawn10 from Shawn Starr
includes XFS, the reverse mapping VM, Jan Kara's reworked quota
system, and more.
- A new entry this week is 2.4.18-mcp3-WOLK from
Marc-Christian Petersen, which is inspired by the FOLK patch. It
throws in Win4Lin, the preempt patch, the international crypto patch,
the IDE patch, JFS, XFS, FreeS/WAN, NWFS, lm_sensors, and a great many
other patches.
Linus on BitKeeper. It was already clear, of course, that Linus is
not bothered by the BitKeeper license. For anybody who didn't know that,
however, he stated his views this week:
And I personally refuse to use inferior tools because of
ideology. In fact, I will go as far as saying that making excuses
for bad tools due to ideology is _stupid_, and people who do that
think with their gonads, not their brains.
Most of the developers seem to be at ease with his position. It is worth
pondering, however, on why so many of us insisted on using Linux systems in
the early 90's, when it was still clearly inferior to the numerous
proprietary Unix systems that were available at the time. Without a
certain amount of "gonad thinking," Linux might not have come so far so
quickly.
Meanwhile, there has been a small discussion of what features are offered
by BitKeeper that really make it worthwhile for the kernel developers.
Here's a partial list:
- Much nicer merging of patches. The three-way merge tool (screenshot) is
seriously slick. But the ability to carry merges forward through
multiple patch sets is just as important. Merging of patches can be a
painful task; having to only do it once can be a real relief.
- The ability to check in entire patch sets as a single operation.
- The distributed repository feature is a key to the whole thing.
BitKeeper works well with the kernel development style by allowing
each developer to set up independent trees and facilitating the
movement of patches between those trees.
- Understanding of directories and operations like renaming; CVS
does not handle these well at all.
There are developers out there who are talking about adding these features
to the existing free source management systems. It's a nontrivial task,
however; the first release is likely to be some time in the future. (Then
again, Hans Reiser wants to incorporate version
control into the filesystem, and plans to do so with a future ReiserFS
release. "Version control has to become just another expected
filesystem feature, and one that is so transparent to users that Mom uses
it without fear.")
The hostile takeover of the 2.5 IDE code is now officially complete:
Martin Dalecki's IDE 18 patch changed the
MAINTAINERS file to list him as the person in charge of that subsystem.
There were no immediate complaints, but things heated up a bit when he
released IDE 19. Therein were comments
like:
Apply Pavels Macheks patch for suspend support. Whatever some
persons argue that it's not fully implemented, I think that we are
in development series right now. I don't buy the mock-up examples
for problems with either outdated or broken hardware. Micro Drives
are for example expected to be drop in replacements for CF cards in
digital cameras and I would rather expect them to be very tolerant
about the driver in front of them.
Martin has also been heard to say:
"Breakage is the price you have to pay for advancements."
It turns out that some kernel developers are not entirely pleased with the
idea of "breakage" in the IDE code - they like their disks to work. There
is a feeling that it is better to follow the standards than to expect
drives "to be very tolerant about the driver in front of them." Few people
have come out in defense of the existing code, but some feel that the
current approach to "cleaning up" the IDE code is negligent to the point of
carelessness.
The discussion, in fact, involved some of the most unpleasant personal
attacks seen on linux-kernel for some time. It also appears to have
changed little; Martin continues to crank out IDE patches, and Linus
continues to accept them. Perhaps Martin has received a message, however,
that standards compliance and stability are important. When it comes to
disks, people are not willing to pay for their advancements with any great
amount of breakage.
On the future of IDE taskfile commands. The IDE taskfile ioctl
(which allows passing arbitrary low-level commands to IDE peripherals) has
generally been the source of no end of inflammatory discussions in its own
right. Compared to the other IDE threads, however, the current taskfile
discussion seems like a new height of civility and technical content.
The issue is not whether low-level commands should be allowed - there is
widespread agreement that this capability is occasionally required.
Diagnostic code needs it, if nothing else. But when Andre Hedrick first
implemented the taskfile capability, he included an IDE command parser to
ensure that all commands passed to the drives were legal according to the
standards. There never has been a consensus on whether this sort of
command filtering is appropriate.
Those in favor of filtering point out that the consequences of executing a
malformed IDE command can be severe: loss of data or, in the worst case,
having to throw away a brick that was once a working drive. Filtering can
thus protect against both programming errors and deliberate attacks.
Proponents of filtering also see it as a possible way of defeating future
"digital rights management" schemes which may depend on new, undocumented
IDE commands.
The opposition points out that most drives have some unique,
vendor-specific commands. Unless somebody wants to build (and maintain) a
table of all such commands, any filtering is certain to block legitimate
commands for some users. The protection against attacks is seen as being
weak at best, since a process which is able to execute taskfile commands
can also just go and pound on the I/O ports directly. And dealing with DRM
schemes is probably not going to be so simple.
For all these reasons, Linus has generally been against IDE command
filtering. He also points out that the
IDE layer should not be performing any such filtering in any case. The IDE
layer, after all, is a driver for the IDE host controller; the commands to
be filtered are, instead, aimed at IDE disks. Linus compares IDE filtering
to having a network adapter driver perform validity testing and filtering
for network protocols.
There are some things that need to be done with low-level commands,
however. At a minimum, the buffers they use must be verified. But it
would also be a very good idea to better sequence their execution with all
of the other IDE commands that may be running at the same time.
So Linus has proposed a new scheme for the handling
(and possible filtering) of low-level IDE commands. These
commands would be moved out of the IDE driver, into a separate loadable
module. Paranoid administrators who do not want those commands executed at
all could simply remove the module from their systems entirely. The rest
could configure a module which did as much (or little) filtering as they
wanted.
This module would not talk directly with the IDE subsystem. Instead, any
low-level commands would be run through the drive's request queue along
with all the other drive operations. This scheme forces low-level
commands to be sequenced along with any other disk activity, and should
help ensure that they are executed in a way that doesn't interfere with the
other things the system is trying to do.
There have been very few complaints about this proposal. It's
implementation would be some work, but there may just be a solution to the
problem of the taskfile commands and filtering in sight.
Going for the fastest kernel compile. Martin Bligh posted an interesting note this week. He started
with the 2.4.18 kernel and a 16-node NUMA system using 700MHz P3
processors. With that system, he was able to build a kernel in
47 seconds, which would make most of us reasonably happy. Martin
wasn't satisfied with that, though, so he applied a series of patches to
bring that time down:
- Various NUMA memory allocation fixes: 27 seconds.
- The O(1) scheduler from 2.5: 25 seconds.
- A NUMA-oriented scheduler patch: 24 seconds.
- A dcache patch which improves cache behavior: 23 seconds.
Compiling a kernel in 23 seconds isn't bad - it looks like a record.
Records, though, are meant to be broken. So Anton Blanchard rose to the challenge with a 24-node "logical
partition" on a PowerPC64 system running a patched version of 2.5.6.
Building a kernel with the same configuration as Martin's, above, he got
the job done in 10.3 seconds. That will be a hard performance to beat, but
somebody, somewhere, is certainly working on it.
Other patches and updates released this week include:
Core kernel code:
- Robert Love has posted a new version of
his system call allowing processes to set their processor affinity.
- A new version of the delayed allocation patch has been posted by Andrew Morton. He might just be
looking for people to try it out: "Does anyone know what 'CFT'
means? It means 'call for testers'. It doesn't mean 'woo-hoo, it'll
be neat when that's merged <delete>'. It means 'help, help - there's
no point in just one guy testing this'."
- Larry Kessler has released an
implementation of POSIX event logging for the 2.5.6 and 2.4.18
kernels.
- Rik van Riel has released a kernel with
the reverse mapping VM in RPM format.
- Erich Focht has posted a new
version of his NUMA scheduler.
Development tools:
- The Linux Test Project ltp-20020307 release
is available. Numerous new tests have been added.
- Keith Owens has released kdb
2.1-2.4.18 for the Sparc64 architecture.
Device drivers
- The seventh test release of the new Tigon3
driver has been announced by David Miller.
- A new beta Conexant HCF "linmodem" driver has been announced by Marc Boucher.
Filesystems and related:
- Kevin Corry has announced version 0.9.2 of
the Enterprise Volume Management System.
- A new, vastly reworked disk quota system has been posted by Jan Kara.
- Steve Best has announced the release of JFS
1.0.16.
- Andreas Gruenbacher has released version
0.8.20 of the access control list patch.
Miscellaneous:
- Rusty Russell has posted a fast
userspace read/write lock ("furwock") implementation based on
futexes. He has also posted an
explanation of how futexes work.
Networking:
- This week's release of the Affix BlueTooth stack is version 0_94.
- Alexander Viro has posted an implementation
of the "nfsd" filesystem - a new way of communicating with the NFS
server process to perform tasks like exporting filesystems.
Ports:
- James Bottomley has posted a new version
of his port to the NCR Voyager architecture.
Section Editor: Jonathan Corbet
|
March 14, 2002
Sections:
Main page
Security
Kernel
Distributions
Development
Commerce
Linux in the news
Announcements
Letters
See also: last week's Distributions page.
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Please note that security updates from the various
distributions are covered in the security section.
News and Editorials
Debian Project Leader Elections.
Most readers of this column will already be aware that the Debian Project
elects a new leader each year. Also that Debian Project Leader (DPL)
elections are currently underway. The DPL guides Debian policy and
Debian development, over the course of his term. Last week we announced
the candidates and a panel was selected for the upcoming debate between
the candidates. The debate will be held on IRC and has been tentatively
scheduled for March 23rd 04:00 UTC. There is a call for questions out now.
Each of the three candidates has written a platform statement which can
be found here.
We will also provide a summary of the platforms here. It is not too
surprising that all three candidates address the release schedule and
have some ideas about how to accomplish more frequent releases. They are
also all staunch believers in free software and the principles behind the
open source movement. But they are also individuals with their own ideas
of what it means to the DPL. So, here are the candidates, listed in
alphabetical order.
Bdale Garbee joined the Debian community in early 1995, and has been
contributing to the project in a variety of ways ever since. In May of
2001 he accepted employment with Hewlett-Packard, as an
Engineer/Scientist in the Linux Systems Operation (LSO). Debian is the
development platform within the LSO for the kernel and related work
required to enable Linux support on HP's hardware, so he spends part of
his time working on Debian, particularly the IA-64 port. The job also
includes:
* helping make sure HP participates as a good citizen in the Debian and
larger Open Source communities
* architecting solutions that enable multi-architecture,
multi-distribution Linux installation and support on HP hardware
* leading technical development of HP's Linux Enablement Kit products
* helping form HP Linux strategy
He also gets to travel to and speak at a variety of Linux
conferences.
Bdale is a strong believer in Free Software and the Community Development
Model, and maintains a vision of Debian as a universal operating system.
A universal operating system that runs on many platforms and contains
quality code that "just works", with a more predictable release schedule.
As DPL he would also work to improve Debian infrastructure, security and
Linux Standards Base compliance.
Raphaël Hertzog is a student at "INSA de Lyon" (in France) where
he is part of the computer science department. He plans on receiving an
engineering degree this summer, after which he'll be looking for a job
related to free software. (Hopefully one that will leave time for Debian
work). His first contact with Linux was with Debian 1.3, in 1997. Since
then he tried a few other distributions before coming back to Debian. He
has been a Debian developer since 1998. Raphaël is very interested in
Debian Quality Assurance and is the instigator behind new maintainer
sponsorship policy, Perl policy, and the package tracking system. He has
a lengthy list of projects he would like to manage during the next year
to improve Debian organization, and its internal and external
communications.
Branden Robinson has been a Debian Developer since early 1998. He
is, perhaps, best known as the maintainer of the XFree86 packages. He is
also the Treasurer of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI),
Debian's legal parent organization and manager of the Debian Project's
assets. He is also employed as a free software developer. Branden has
some very specific ideas about the role of the DPL, and what he would do
if elected. These include listening to the ideas of others before making
decisions, delegating responsibility where feasible, and consensus
building among active Debian developers. Another goal is to better
track the active developers, and weed out those who are no longer active.
In order to have better Debian representation at events, he would
delegate regional Event Coordinators. These people would be responsible
for keeping track of trade shows, major Linux User Group events, etc., at
which Debian should have a presence and to ensure that someone is
available to provide that presence. As DPL he would recruit volunteers
on behalf of SPI and attempt to grow the organization. He plans to
revitalize the Technical Committee and improve the release cycle as
well. Other goals include the initiation of a Debian Legal Team,
revision of the Debian Machine Usage Policy, providing a greater "Debian
Voice" in the greater political machine, and steering development away from
non-free software.
New Distributions
Arch Linux.
Arch Linux is an i686-optimized
Linux distribution. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable
versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a
package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades. Arch is
designed to be streamlined while allowing for a customized configuration,
with newer features such as reiserfs/ext3 and devfs. The initial release
0.1 became available
March 11, 2002.
Distribution News
More Debian News.
Here's the Debian Weekly News for March 6. It
looks at the second Debian Conference (Toronto, July 5-7), the Debian
leader election, Woody's release status, and more.
Here, also, is the March 10 Woody Release
Status Update.
Linux From Scratch. Linux From Scratch has
released stable version
3.2 with major bug fixes.
Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter.
The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for March
5 is available. It looks at the release of Mandrake Linux 8.2
beta 4, a new training offering, MandrakeSoft at CeBIT, and more.
The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter for
March 12 is also out. It looks at the availability of 8.2 RC1,
a legislative alert, and more.
SuSE Linux 8.0 Available on April 22nd.
SuSE has announced that SuSE Linux 8.0
will hit the shelves on April 22. New features include more
security products (i.e.IPSec), a three-step installation procedure, and
KDE 3. (Update: SuSE has since sent us a second release with more details on the new
features in 8.0).
Minor Distribution updates
Astaro Security Linux. Astaro Security
Linux has released 3.031 (Beta) which
contains major bug fixes.
ClumpOS. ClumpOS has released R5.4 with major feature
enhancements.
Fd Linux. Fd Linux has released 2.1-0 with major feature
enhancements.
floppyfw. floppyfw has released development version
1.9.19 which updates the kernel to 2.4.18, and contains minor bug
fixes.
LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall). LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance
Firewall) has released beta-4 (Bering).
Leka Rescue Floppy. Leka Rescue Floppy has released
version 0.5.2 with
minor feature enhancements.
Recovery Is Possible. Recovery
Is Possible (RIP) released version 50, with minor feature
enhancements.
Distribution Reviews
Linux Orbit Reviews Lycoris Desktop/LX distribution. Linux Orbit reviews
the Lycoris Desktop/LX distribution. "Lycoris Desktop/LX has really
raised the bar for simple Linux installations. What they've done for
convenience however may not make an experienced Linux user happy. The
number of choices you have for your configuration are limited to those
needed to set up a Linux workstation. This is a distribution clearly
focused at current Windows users or Linux newbies looking to get the
Microsoft license monkey off their back, which is really original for
Linux distributions when you think about it."
Section Editor: Rebecca Sobol
|
March 14, 2002
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Distribution Lists:
LWN List
DistroWatch
ibiblio
Linux.com
LinuxLinks
Woven Goods
| | | | |
Sections:
Main page
Security
Kernel
Distributions
Development
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Linux in the news
Announcements
Letters
See also: last week's Development page.
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News and Editorials
GTK+ 2.0 Released
Version 2.0 of GTK+, the Gimp Toolkit
widget set is available. GTK+ was originally developed for The GIMP image manipulation system. It
now sees wide use as the toolkit for the popular GNOME desktop.
Some of the more popular GTK+ based applications include the GIMP,
the AbiWord word processor, the Dia drawing program, the Glade user
interface builder, the GnuCash financial program, and the Gnumeric
spreadsheet.
GTK+ consists of three libraries:
- GLib "is the low-level core library that forms the basis
of GTK+ and GNOME. It provides data structure handling
for C, portability wrappers, and interfaces for such
runtime functionality as an event loop, threads,
dynamic loading, and an object system."
- Pango "is a library for layout and rendering of text, with
an emphasis on internationalization. It forms the core
of text and font handling for GTK+-2.0."
- ATK is the library that "provides a set of interfaces for
accessibility. By supporting the ATK interfaces, an
application or toolkit can be used with such tools as
screen readers, magnifiers, and alternative input
devices."
GTK+ works with C, C++, Perl, Python, Objective C, and O'Caml, as well as
other languages. It is designed to make the addition of support for
other languages easy. See the GTK+
FAQ for more information.
GTK+ 2.0 Features
The announcement for GTK+ version 2.0 lists these new features:
- Enhanced internalization with full Unicode support.
- A text widget that supports multiple views of a buffer, styled
text, and internationalization capabilities.
- A powerful tree and list display widget.
- Improved accessibility support via ATK.
- The ability to load and manipulate images via gdk-pixbuf.
- Improved programming interfaces as a result of developer feedback.
- Improved usability including better keyboard navigation.
- A new default appearance.
- Type and object abstraction for wider use.
- A preview version of the Microsoft Windows port.
- A simplified and enhanced API which is the result of developer feedback.
It is good to see that the GTK+ developers are taking developer feedback
into consideration, the temporary instabilities caused by the changes
should be outweighed by the eventual gains in coding efficiency.
(Thanks to Joel Becker.)
GNOME 2.0 Beta 2.
The second beta of the GNOME 2.0 desktop, which uses GTK+ 2.0, also has been
released for testing. The developers are looking for testers to
find and fix bugs.
Databases
SAPDB Version 7.3.00.21 available.
Version 7.3.00.21 of the
SAPDB relational database
is available. See the
release notes for all of the details.
Embedded Systems
The birth of the Embedded Linux Specification.
LinuxDevices.com is carrying a call to
all Embedded Linux companies to attend the Embedded Linux Consortium
meeting on March 12 in San Francisco (during the Embedded Systems
Conference). The purpose of the meeting is to start work on the Embedded
Linux Specification, a standards effort which looks much like the Linux
Standard Base for embedded systems.
Imaging
Graphics programming with libtiff (IBM developerWorks).
Michael Still
introduces libtiff, a C library that implements the TIFF graphics
standard. "TIFF (Tag Image File Format) is a raster image format that
was originally produced by Adobe. Raster image formats store the picture
as a bitmap describing the state of pixels, as opposed to recording the
length and locations of primitives such as lines and curves. Libtiff is
one of the standard implementations of the TIFF specification and is in
wide use today because of its speed, power, and easy source
availability."
Mail Software
Python milter v0.4.0 released (Milter).
A new version of Python
milter, a mail filtering utility,
has been announced. This version features bug fixes and simplified
content scanning in the mime module.
Peer to Peer
Expanding ChatBot's Repertoire (O'Reilly).
DJ Adams continues
his article on Chatbot, a Perl-based Jabber bot. "Rather than
write a silly function that doesn't do much more than say 'Hello World,'
let's look at giving ChatBot a facility that has some use beyond this
article. Despite the arrival of the Euro currency in Europe, currency
conversion still has its uses, especially for those countries (like my
homeland) that have not yet taken the plunge. Another use of currency
conversion is it allows for discussion of prices of items essential for
everyday life, such as MP3 hardware, between the U.K. and the U.S."
Printing Software
LPRng-3.8.9 has been released.
Version 3.8.9 of the LPRng print spooling system
is available. The
changes include bug fixes and new documentation.
Science
XML Biometrics Standards Committee Forms (LinuxMedNews).
LinuxMedNews
reports on a new standards committee that has formed to define an
XML-based standard for biometric information.
Web-site Development
New version of PHP Review.
A new version of the PHP Review book review system
is available
and includes a couple of bug fixes.
Zope Members' News.
The latest Zope Members' News
includes a report on the rapid growth of FreeZope.org, an announcement
for the Zope BBQ, and takes a look at NuxDocument 0.9 and ZCVSFolder
0.2.7b1.
asp2php Version 0.76.1 released.
A new version of asp2php
is available. This version features a newly rewritten
program core. More changes are on the way.
|
March 14, 2002
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
| | | | |
|
Audio Applications
mpg321 0.2.9 Released.
Version 0.2.9 of mpg321, the free replacement for mpg123, has been released. Highlights of this version include
Shoutcast support, ID3 tag support, a bug fix for gtoaster, improved
network support, and more.
AlsaPlayer 0.99.56 released.
Version 0.99.56 of the AlsaPlayer PCM player
is available.
This release features "lots of small bugfixes".
Web Browsers
Encompass 0.4.99.14 Alpha Release 2 (Gnotices).
A second alpha release of the Encompass web browser for GNOME
has been announced. "This version contains preliminary support
for HTTP POST, HTTP Authentication, and HTTP Proxy via the http_proxy
environment variable."
Mozilla 0.9.9 released.
Version 0.9.9 of Mozilla has been
released. This version now supports MathML by default, it also has
an improved JavaScript debugger, SOAP support, TrueType font support, and
the ability to disable pop-up messages, as well as many other features.
A fix for the recent zlib security vulnerability is also included.
Galeon 1.2 released.
Following quickly after Mozilla 0.9.9, it didn't take long for Galeon
version 1.2 to be released. Check out the announcement and then hit the Galeon home page for your
download.
MozillaZine.
The latest MozillaZine looks at
Mozilla 0.9.9, the new Mozbot 2.2 IRC bot, and more.
Desktop Environments
GNOME Summary.
The GNOME Summary for March 2 is
available. Covered topics include the new GNOME software map, reviews of
Evolution, Galeon, and Gnumeric, and more.
NEW GNOME Installation Guide And Review For GNOME 2.0 Published.
A new version of the Gnome Installation Guide
has been announced, this edition features new information on GNOME 2.0.
GARNOME Preview Four: 'Perdon; estoy buscando mis pantalones.'.
GARNOME 0.8.0, "the bad-ass, bleeding edge GNOME distribution for testers
and tweakers everywhere," has been
released. Here's a (relatively) easy opportunity to test out the
upcoming GNOME 2.0 desktop and find any remaining problems.
New KDE documentation site.
By way of KDE.News, we've
learned of the launch of docs.kde.org,
a new, comprehensive documentation site for the KDE desktop.
People of KDE: Neil Stevens.
This week's People of KDE features Neil Stevens, the person
in charge of "Kit, Kaboodle, Megami, and a bunch of hard-to-translate
Noatun plugins".
LinuxQuestions Members Choice Awards: KDE Kleans Up.
LinuxQuestions.org has picked
KDE as their favorite desktop. Applications such as Konqueror and
KMail also received high scores.
Games
The Chopping Block for March, 2002.
The March, 2002 issue of
The Chopping Block is available on the WorldForge Game site.
Articles include a description of the WorldForge project, a look at the
COAL map handling library, a review of the Kings Feast project, and talk
on licensing issues.
Pygame: BOMBERS.
This week, the Pygame site features BOMBERS 0.7, a
"space shootem up" game.
Graphics
Gimp 1.3.4 released.
Gimp version 1.3.4, which is "targetted for developers and curious
users" and not for daily work, has
been announced. See the README for
details.
GUI Packages
New fltk applications.
The FLTK site lists two new
applications, SpiralSynthModular 0.0.8, an object oriented modular
softsynth / sequencer / sampler, and FL-Inventor 0.9.1, a 3D VR
applications toolkit.
Interoperability
Wine 20020310 announced.
A new version of Wine
has been announced. Version 20020310 is identical to the previous
version, except for the change to the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Wine Weekly News.
The March 8, 2002
edition of the Wine Weekly News has been published. Topics include
Crossover 1.1.0, Wine licensing, an X11-licensed fork, and more.
Samba 2.2.3a released.
Version 2.2.3a of Samba
has been released. It includes a bug fix for a Windows Explorer bug
that showed up in the 2.2.3 release. Upgrades are recommended.
Multimedia
GStreamer 'GUADEC By Foot' 0.3.3 released (Gnotices).
Version 0.3.3 of the GStreamer Multimedia framework
has been released. "This release contains a lot of nice fixes and
updates including a new cothread system, a new autoplugger, many new
plugins and more."
Office Applications
Release of GnuCash 1.6.6 (Gnotices).
A new version of GnuCash
has
been released. Version 1.6.6 features new and updated translations,
improved exchange rate calculations, bug fixes, and other features.
Two new Gnumeric releases.
Gnumeric 1.0.5, a bugfix version of the stable release , has been announced.
Gnumeric 1.1.1, from the development branch, has also been announced, the claim is that this version works
as well as stable version 1.0.
Kernel Cousin GNUe #19.
Issue #19 of
Kernel Cousin GNUe has discussions on the GNUe Application Server
v2 (GEAS), using analysis patterns for module proposals, integrating
Zope and GNUe, data protection, databases, and more.
AbiWord Weekly News #83.
Issue #83 of the
AbiWord Weekly News covers the latest developments on the AbiWord
word processor.
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Desktop Environments
GNOME
GNUstep
KDE
XFce
XFree86
Window Managers
Afterstep
Enlightenment
FVMW2
IceWM
Sawfish
WindowMaker
Widget Sets
GTK+
Qt
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Caml
Caml Weekly News.
The March 12, 2002 edition of the Caml Weekly
News looks at WhizzyTeX 1.0 and an ssl library for Ocaml.
FORTRAN
g95 status.
Progress continues on the g95
FORTRAN compiler project, the current goal is to finish the type
resolution system. A Linux binary is available if you want to see how
g95 reacts to your FORTRAN code.
HTML
Cache-Friendly Web Pages (O'Reilly).
Jennifer Vesperman
explains the HTML Expires and Cache-Control headers on O'Reilly's
Linux Devcenter. "There are a lot of HTTP caches out there. How long
are they holding your pages? How long should they hold your pages? RFC
2616 (HTTP/1.1) specifies that caches must obey Expires and Cache-Control
headers--but do your pages have them? How do you add them? What happens
to your pages if you don't?"
Java
Merlin brings nonblocking I/O to the Java platform (IBM developerWorks).
Aruna Kalagnanam and Balu G
write about nonblocking I/O in Merlin. "Until JDK 1.4 (aka
Merlin), the Java platform did not support nonblocking I/O calls. With an
almost one-to-one ratio of threads to clients, servers written in the
Java language were susceptible to enormous thread overhead, which
resulted in both performance problems and lack of scalability."
Top Ten Cool New Features of Java 2SE 1.4 (O'Reilly).
David Flanagan
examines Java 2SE 1.4 on O'Reilly's OnJava site. For the impatient,
the covered features are: Parsing XML, Transforming XML, Preferences,
Logging, Secure Sockets and HTTPS, LinkedHashMap, FileChannel,
Non-Blocking I/O, Regular Expressions, and Assertions.
Lisp
Free The X3J Thirteen! for February, 2002.
The February, 2002 edition of
Free The X3J Thirteen! is out. "This issue covers a new
vendor-neutral package format for cCLan, MK:DEFSYSTEM 4 and CLAWK, the
Common Lisp Cookbook project, the SPARC and Alpha ports of SBCL, a new
version of CL-PDF, and the forthcoming releases of CMU CL and CLISP."
Universal Foreign Function Interface.
UFFI, the Universal Foreign Function Interface is
available. UFFI is a tool for interfacing Common Lisp to C-language
compatible libraries.
Perl
Rindolf Specification Document v0.1.12.
A new version of the
Rindolf Specification Document has been
published by Shlomi Fish. Rindolf is a dialect of Perl. Briefly,
"Rindolf aims to be an improved and re-engineered Perl 5".
Perl 6 Porters.
The March 12, 2002
Perl 6 Porters looks at an effort to redesign printf, Parrot 0.0.4,
version 1 of the proposed Assembler PDD, and multi-method dispatch in
Parrot.
PHP
PHP Weekly Summary.
The March 11, 2002
edition of the PHP Weekly Summary looks at the NAPA XSLT processor,
socket re-work, an aggregation function bug, the new build system, a new
Universe CORBA extension, the path to version 4.2.0, and more.
Python
The Parade of PEPs.
Guido van Rossum has posted The Parade of the
PEPs, a look at outstanding Python enhancement proposals and his
frank opinion on what should happen with each. It's an interesting read
for those following the development of the Python language.
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!.
The March 11, 2002
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is out.
Topics include seeking fame and fortune developing Python,
the Disipyl Python interface to DISLIN, RPy, for interfacing
to the R language, processing volume images with BBLImage,
the lfm v0.8 midnight commander clone, and more.
Text Processing In Python draft available.
David Mertz has announced that a draft of his
upcoming book Text Processing In Python, (to be published by
Addison Wesley) is available on the web. He is looking for feedback on
ways to improve the book, of course.
The Daily Python-URL.
This week's accumulation of articles on
The Daily Python-URL
include an announcement for a new Python Imaging Library,
the EDDIE Tool systems administration helper, the disipyl DISLIN wrapper,
the BBLimage image processing tools, and more.
Ruby
The Ruby Garden.
This week's Ruby Garden looks at
BioRuby.org, which features Ruby libraries for working with DNA data.
The Ruby Weekly News.
The March 11, 2002 edition of the Ruby Weekly
News looks at DBTalk 0.5, an interactive GUI based tool for database
querying, programming, and administration, the RDoc documentation tool,
Ruby/SMB, and more.
Tcl/Tk
Dr. Dobbs' Tcl-URL! for March 11.
The March 11, 2002 edition of Dr. Dobbs'
Tcl-URL! is out. Topics include a cash register application in Tcl,
Tcl in embedded systems, the Tk look and feel, garbage collection, and
more.
XML
Donald Eastlake on XML Digital Signatures (IBM developerWorks).
Larry Loeb
interviews Donald Eastlake, editor of the XML Digital Signature
(XMLDSIG) RFC. "What is 'truly secure XML?' The phrase is meaningless
without a definition of what security properties you are trying to
achieve and what your threat model is. XMLDISG provides a building
block. It is a flexible mechanism for the cryptographic binding of data
to a key."
Integrated Development Environments
GNUstep Weekly Editorial.
The GNUstep Weekly Editorial for March 8,
2002 is available. Topics include the CDPlayer application,
Objective-C++ support, a gnustep-make roadmap, and more.
Software Testing
oprofile version 0.1 released.
Version 0.1 of the oprofile code profiler is available. The
release notes lists reporting of more symbols and a better output
report, in addition to lots of bug fixes.
Miscellaneous
Valgrind memory debugger.
Valgrind is a memory debugging tool for
C/C++ on the x86 platform, it has been used by the KDE development
community for debugging libraries and applications. Valgrind has been
released under the GPL. (Thanks to Julian Seward.)
Section Editor: Forrest Cook
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Language Links
Caml
Caml Hump
Tiny COBOL
Erlang
g95 Fortran
Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC)
Gnu Compiler for the Java Language (GCJ)
Guile
Haskell
IBM Java Zone
Jython
Free the X3J Thirteen (Lisp)
Use Perl
O'Reilly's perl.com
Dr. Dobbs' Perl
PHP
PHP Weekly Summary
Daily Python-URL
Python.org
Python.faqts
Python Eggs
Ruby
Ruby Garden
MIT Scheme
Schemers
Squeak
Smalltalk
Why Smalltalk
Tcl Developer Xchange
Tcl-tk.net
O'Reilly's XML.com
Regular Expressions
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Sections:
Main page
Security
Kernel
Distributions
Development
Commerce
Linux in the news
Announcements
Letters
See also: last week's Commerce page.
|
HP Announces Global Consortium to Enable New Linux
Capabilities for Academic and Industrial Research.
Hewlett-Packard Company announced
the formation of the Gelato Federation, a worldwide consortium focused on
enabling open source Linux-based Intel(R) Itanium(TM) Processor Family
computing solutions for academic, government and industrial research.
Embedded Linux Market enters era of standardization.
The Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) held an open
technical meeting in San Francisco, to discuss the creation of a
unified Embedded Linux "platform specification".
Panasonic Invests in MontaVista Software.
MontaVista Software has received an equity
investment from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (MEI)
through its subsidiary, Panasonic Digital Concepts Center (PDCC).
Linux for the Sony Playstation.
A Linux for Playstation 2 kit is being
offered for the Sony Playstation 2 game platform. "The LINUX (FOR
PLAYSTATION 2) accessory kit allows you to utilize the PlayStation 2
console as a fully-functional desktop computer. Download a wealth of
Linux programs -- HTML editors, multimedia players, office solutions and
more -- or program your own software to run in the PlayStation 2 Linux
environment." Some familiarity with the Linux operating system is
recommended. (Thanks to Joe Klemmer.)
LPI holds its annual board election.
The Linux Professional Institute has held its annual board election. Jon 'Maddog' Hall will be replacing Tom
Peters. CeBit attendants can visit the LPI booth and take discounted
exams next week.
Free as in Freedom.
O'Reilly is promoting their new biography on
Richard Stallman, "Free as in Freedom". "Why would Microsoft
executives lie awake at night worrying about the antics of a long-haired,
renegade hacker named Richard Stallman? Why do some of the smartest
programmers on the planet revere this man as 'St. Ignucius'?"
Linux Stock Index for March 08 to March 13, 2002.
LSI at closing on March 08, 2002 ... 28.40
LSI at closing on March 13, 2002 ... 28.26
The high for the week was 28.90
The low for the week was 28.24
Press Releases:
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