Standardizing a BROWSER environment variable. Eric Raymond is promoting the use of a new environment variable, BROWSER, to complement the existing PAGER, MAILER, and EDITOR variables. This effort is being tested as an experiment in hacking social systems.
The Browser War: Nobody's fault but yours. Scott Andrew presents some interesting ideas on web applications versus web pages and how to avoid domination of new web standards by a single corporation: "Netscape 6, Mozilla, Opera -- any browser that supports DOM/CSS -- should be regarded as application browsers. This is different than a web browser. A web browser is designed to view pages on the Web. An application browser is specialized. It's made for working with web applications."
Galeon 0.9 pre3 available. Version 0.9 pre3 of the Galeon Browser is available on Sourceforge. Enhancements in this version include open url dialog autocompletion support, customization options for tabbed browsing, session saving, and a lot of bugfixes
GGradebook 0.91 (Ofset). Version 0.91 of GGradebook, a gradebook program that runs under GNOME, is now available.
Xcircuit 2.2.0. Version 2.2.0 of the Xcircuit schematic drawing program is available as a stable release. This version has pcb compatible netlist file outputs, a whole new set of menus, circuit elements with electrical parameters, and more.
Embedded Linux Newsletter for Jan. 25, 2001 (LinuxDevices.com). Rick Lehrbaum has posted the latest edition of the Embedded Linux Newsletter to the LinuxDevices.com site. Highlights include a review of the results from last year Embedded Linux Survey and Lineo's trio of Embedix SDK advancements.
Atlas C++ 0.40 released. A new, stable release of Atlas C++, version 0.40, has been released. Atlas C++ is a library that implements the Atlas object-oriented protocol for interprocess communications, it is a key component of the WorldForge game architecture. See the Atlas Tutorial for more information on the Atlas protocol.
Wine Weekly News for January 29, 2001. Issue 80 of the Wine Weekly News is available. Check it out for the latest developments in the Wine world.
Eazel releases Nautilus Preview 3. As seen on the GNOME news site: Eazel has released the third and final preview version of its Nautilus desktop. Warning, the installation takes a 32MB bite out of your hard drive and may take a small eternity to download on a slow link.
GNOME Office page gets a facelift. The GNOME Office meta-project's web page has had a face lift. The new page offers a quick description of the various GNOME Office components as well as links to the project web pages. (Thanks to David Wheeler)
The Gmail email client. Robert Bernstein writes about Gmail in an Earthweb article. " An MUA (Mail User Agent) featuring an innovative approach to email message storage is now under development, and it bodes well for those email users who number their messages in the thousands. Gmail (http://gmail.linuxpower.org/), the brainchild of Wayne Schuller, a young Australian programmer, uses the MySQL database server, and retrieves, sorts and displays messages via SQL, the well known 'Structured Query Language.'"
ANNOUNCE: Mr Project (Gnotices). A new project management application known as Mr Project has been announced. "Mr Project is a project management program that can help build project plans, and track the progress of a project."
The People behind KDE: Wolfram Diestel. This week's People Behind KDE features an interview of Wolfram Diestel, a rather humorous picture is included.
New KDE Tutorials. Several new and/or improved KDE tutorials have been published, Richard Moore has written one on Kpart Plugins for KDE2, and Antonio Larrosa Jimènez has updated his info on developing KDE2 applications.
A developer's perspective on the GPLing of Qt (LinuxDevices.com). LinuxDevices.com reopens the whole Qt licensing debate. "Regardless of whether you accept this 'infant industry' justification for initially releasing software under proprietary licenses, from a software developer's point of view it now seems hard to improve upon Trolltech's licensing."
Berlin: A replacement for X? (LinuxToday). LinuxToday has posted a discussion by "Hawkeyes" that discusses Berlin, an alternative to the X window system. "Many people complain about the X-windows standard. It's clearly not the perfect way to bring a graphical user interface to Linux, and it's been around for such a long time. Recently XFree86 has become hardware accelerated, in version 4.0.x, but in many ways it is still dragging user interface designers down. The lack of a single uniform toolkit, lack of support for alpha transparency and sluggish/heavy network transparency have always been problems in X." Check out the Berlin web site as well.
Talking with John Heard of Sun about GNOME. LinuxPower talks with John Heard about Sun's membership in the GNOME Foundation.
Christian: I would guess that partaking in free software development needs a different workform than in-house development. What measures are being put in place to ensure real engagement with the community on issues instead of needing to wait for slow bureaucratic wrangling before announcing contributions ?John Heard: This is an extremely important consideration for us at Sun. We have been particularly focused upon considering our normal "workform" and seeing how it needs to be modified to achieve the right interactions with the communities we have become involved with. I personally believe that this is a very valuable path upon which we in Sun are able to evolve our software development practices, but just as importantly to also bring valuable contributions towards the onwards co-evolving of the open source community development "workform". The core principle which is starting to develop between Sun and community is that of communication. I think you can already see that numerous members of Sun's technical and marketing staff are beginning to participate more freely. We have encouraged our teams to "lurk" for a while on the lists to gain familiarity with the practices and then to participate where they can add value. I am sure you are aware that Sun has been a consistent contributer of code to open systems, and we are continuing this same strategy, aligned to the trends of current open source practices.
Gnome Installation Guide. Karsten Reincke has recently published a Gnome Installation Guide that presents lots of useful information to those who wish to install development versions of GNOME from source code.
CUPS v1.16 is available. Version 1.16 of CUPS, the Common Unix Print System, is available. Lots of bugs have been fixed in this release.
Getting to know Midgard (IBM developerWorks). IBM's developerWorks site has put up a detailed article on getting started with the Midgard application server.
On a very basic technical level, Midgard provides a content management API for PHP that makes managing such articles a whole lot easier and administering them a snap. It introduces some of its own content management concepts to help you organize articles more logically and deal with them easily. It can implement security, allowing only authorized users to update or view content, and recording personal information about users.
(Thanks to Henri Bergius).
Midgard Weekly Summary. The Midgard Weekly Summary for January 26 is out. Among other things, it includes an interview with Midgard founder Henri Bergius.
Zope 2.3.0 released. Zope 2.3.0 final has been released. There is quite a bit of new stuff in this release; see the announcement for details.
Perl scripting available for Zope. Digital Creations and ActiveState have announced the first release from the "Perl for Zope" project. Zope scripting is no longer limited to the Python language.
Section Editor: Forrest Cook