Category: Open Source

This is a very cool little press release:

Denver, CO – July 21, 2003 – The Jabber Software Foundation (JSF), the organization that manages open messaging powered by the IETF’s extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP), today announced continued vendor adoption of Mono to provide cross platform .NET collaboration.

It looks like both Winfessor and Tipic are working on apps that use mono for cross-platformedness.  Jabber on!

OSNews:

DistroWatch published the release notes of Red Hat Linux “Severn” 9.0.93.

Looks like there’s a new beta around the corner and a possible new release in the next few months.

Linux Journal posted an interview with Moshe “OpenMosix” Bar.  I really like this answer:

MB: Most “clustering” companies really are cluster management companies. The reason why so few do real clustering engines is it is difficult to do them well. A few dozen Ph.D.s were done on openMosix over the last 20 years, and it shows in the quality of the code and its efficiency during operation.

Sourceforge:

Version 1.0.10 of FPC has been released and uploaded to SourceForge. This will be the last 1.0.x version; we will now concentrate on the 1.1 branch, which will end in 1.2 or 2.0. The Free Pascal Compiler is a 32-bit Pascal Compiler for AmigaOS, DOS, Linux, *BSD, OS/2 and Win32; semantically compatible with Borland Pascal 7 with additional features such as operator overloading. The compiler itself is written in Pascal.

I’m sure many of us have done at least some time in Pascal or a similar language.  I remember spending some time in it back in middle school.  Pascal was a great learning language back then.  Now I think that Python fits that role much better, but it’s nice to know that there are some free alternatives out there if I ever want to play in Pascal again.

CNet:

Torvalds, who founded the Linux kernel project in the early 1990s, on Thursday finalized the 2.5.75 kernel, which he said would be the last in the series. The 2.5 kernel, a development project aimed at experimenting with new technologies, will be integrated into the 2.6 kernel for use in finished products.

Forward motion is good.  There are many goodies in 2.5 that I can’t wait to see on mainstream Linux desktops.

Netcraft has released their fastest and most reliable hosting company list for June.  Here’s an interesting note:

Intriguingly, all of the Top 5 placed sites run the FreeBSD operating system, but in other respects the Top 10 come from all segments of the industry from shared hosting through to high end colocation services.

Steve Gillmor via Hack the Planet:

Now if we can get Apple to open up Rendezvous across the Net.

From what I recall, Rendezvous is completely open.  You can download Apple’s reference implementation at their website under the Apple Public Source License.  All the information is at the Rendezvous project page.  Also of note is the Rendezvous developer page.  It’s also known as ZeroConf outside of Mac circles.

Rendezvous is open indeed.

Kerneltrap:

A CVS version of the yet to be released GCC 3.4 is reaching parity with ICC on floating point performance according to SPECFP2000. SPECINT still isn’t as good however GCC is making big improvements there too. I hope that this is an indication of things to come. Congratulations to the GCC team are in order.

This is excellent.  Any bets on how soon you’ll be able to build a Gentoo distro around GCC 3.4?

DTDDoc sounds interesting to me:

DTDDoc is designed to help document your DTDs efficiently. It is a straightforward extension of the Javadoc concept, and a not so straightforward implementation of some of the concepts solidified by Donald E. Knuth.

I haven’t seen this project before on freshmeat, but here’s what’s new in version 0.0.5:

New display of element/attribute parent, and a new ability to configure the title that is displayed on top of the index.

The example output comes with both html-ized javadoc-like human-readable output (too many dashes there), as well as a good old DTD that can be used to validate stuff.  Quite a slick little project.

From the Mono site:

• Mark Crichton has completed his OpenGL/GLUT bindings for Gnome. A screenshot can be seen here. The bindings are available on the Mono CVS repository on the module `glgen’. This is a straight binding to the C API.
• Marco has posted an update on the current state of the free VB.NET compiler for Mono.
• We are looking for contributors and maintainers to the JavaScript compiler as well (Janet)

The news is a few days old, but for some reason it just showed up in my aggregator and must be spread.

I might have figured out what to do with some of the old hardware I have kicking around.  It involves 2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux:

2-Disk X window embedded Linux is a tiny net-centric Linux that aims at portable secure remote system usage. It contains many utilities including: X Windows, vncviewer, rdesktop, a Web browser, a file manager, a text editor, a terminal, a window manager, a menu system, a dialog system, X scripting facilities, and many others. It aims to work from 1 or 2 floppy disks in any remote location.

Note to open source developers: take advantage of hosting provided by Sourceforge or others.  Swatting popups when looking at free software isn’t too much fun.

Joao Seabra wrote an article posted at freshmeat about GCC that was enlightning:

Since my good old Pentium 166 days, I’ve liked to search for the best optimizations possible so programs can take the maximum advantage of hardware/CPU cycles. If I have a nice piece of hardware, why not run it at its full power, using every little feature? Shouldn’t we all try to get the best results from the money invested in our machines?

It has a lot of interesting info for anyone who’s trying to tailor a build to their particluar hardware.  I like the bits about -march implying -mcpu but the myth debunking section rocks too.

Les has unleashed Agent Frank, his Personal Web Proxy.  Russ likes the idea, but:

Later… Urgh! It’s GPLed! Bleh!

You’ve got to have a good sense of software license humor when you’re in the software/open-source biz.