FreeSoftNews

Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Helio Chissini de Castro

In this interview we talk with Helio Chissini de Castro. In specific, we talk about:

* The open source environment in Brazil
* The strengths of Mandriva Linux
* Organization and maintenance of Mandriva
* The future of open source software in Latin America

Sean Campbell: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, both with open source and outside of that?

Helio Chissini de Castro: Sure. I started in open source 10 years ago, when I finished university in a computer science major. I joined a company that works on desktop development called Choose, which works with ILOG tools. They work on Windows and UNIX C++ software, and they really have nothing to do with Linux and open source at all.

Read more at How Software is Built

A recent report claims that one of the fundamental benefits of open-source development, the co-called Law of Many Eyes is wrong. The idea behind the law is that since anyone can read the source code and find problems with it, they can then either fix them or report them back to the community. The end result is that you get better software.

The study, by Fortify Software, a company that makes development tools for checking security, found that many popular open source software programs contain significant security holes. I can’t take this study too seriously. After all, what else is Fortify going to say? “Open-source’s Law of Many Eyes works great. You don’t need our products?” I don’t think so.

Read more at Computer World

Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the brackets): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc. As a software developer, I feel that a dictator is absolutely necessary in every free software project. Here is why.
Respect earned by the BDFL

The first reason is probably the most important one: respect. The benevolent dictator for life (BDFL from now on) needs to make decisions — in fact, a lot of decisions — and at the same time maintain other people’s respect. Decisions are not always popular, and are not always right (especially in other people’s eyes).
Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine

GTK+ 2.13.5 is now available for download at:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/2.13/

gtk+-2.13.5.tar.bz2 md5sum: 19a9127ec1d072444068acc90aca8085
gtk+-2.13.5.tar.gz md5sum: 91c1171c1407cc49af98f8fad1f4305c

This is the sixth development release leading up to GTK+ 2.14.

Notes:

* This is unstable development release. While it has had
a bit of testing, there are certainly plenty of bugs
remaining to be found. This release should not be used
in production.

* Installing this version will overwrite your existing
copy of GTK+. If you have problems, you’ll need
to reinstall GTK+ 2.12.

• Read more: GTK+ 2.13.5 released

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing Ruby, Python, C#, Lua and PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked.

Python and Ruby are in a very good shape and stable for being used in application development using Qt and KDE facilities, while Qyoto, the C# binding is well on its way to providing the same level of completeness and stability. PHP will try to fill the gap between Desktop and Web Applications using the powerful technologies in the Qt toolkit, such as QtWebKit for instance. An interesting new star on the bindings horizon is Lua, which is widely used for scripting some well known computer games and other applications.

Read more at KDE.news

Hi,

KDiff3 is back and ready for KDE4. Although the status is still beta I think
it is very usable already.

My thanks go especially to Valentin Rusu who volunteered to do the porting of
the build system to cmake and made the program compile again.
More thanks go to Albert Astals Cid and David Faure who helped with the
kdiff3-plugin.

• Read more: KDiff3 is back in extragear

2ndQuadrant is now announcing a new course on PostgreSQL Administration
using the popular Navicat, a powerful administration and development
frontend tool.

This is an important step in increasing the diversity of the PostgreSQL
ecosystem. Navicat is an important tool for both PostgreSQL and MySQL,
so supporting customer’s existing tool choices makes co-existence or
conversion/migration to PostgreSQL a cheaper and smoother experience.

• Read more: PostgreSQL Administration using Navicat

Evgeniy Polyakov announced the latest release of his Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System, POHMELFS. He noted that the big new feature in this release is strong crypto support, “one can specify [an] encryption method (like cbc(aes), hash or digest, or all of them to be performed on [the] whole data channel (except headers).” In his blog, Evgeniy adds, “Cryptography support is [an] essential addition to the POHMELFS core. It was implemented with performance in mind, so that processing speeds would not drop noticeably even [during] very CPU-hungry operations”. He explained, “POHMELFS utilizes [a configurable number of] pools of crypto threads, which perform data crypto processing and submit it either to [the] network or VFS layer.” He included results from some performance benchmarks.

Read more at Kernel Trap

Hello all,
We are proud to announce the release of LDTP 1.2.0. This release features number of important breakthroughs in LDTP as well as in the field of Test Automation. This release note covers a brief introduction on LDTP followed by the list of new features and major bug fixes which makes this new version of LDTP the best of the breed. Useful references have been included at the end of this article for those who wish to hack / use LDTP.

About LDTP
==========

Linux Desktop Testing Project is aimed at producing high quality test automation framework (C / Python) and cutting-edge tools that can be used to test Linux Desktop and improve it. It uses the Accessibility libraries to poke through the application’s user interface. The framework also has tools to record test-cases based on user events in the interface of the application which is under testing. We strive to help in building a quality desktop.

• Read more: Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) 1.2.0 released

The MonoDevelop team is proud to announce the release of MonoDevelop
2.0 alpha 1 (1.9). This is the first release of a series of releases
that will lead to MonoDevelop 2.0, hopefully around the end of the year.

MonoDevelop is a GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET
languages. 

• Read more: MonoDevelop 2.0 Alpha 1 released

GTK+ 2.12.11 is now available for download at:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk+/2.12/

gtk+-2.12.11.tar.bz2 md5sum: f7aab88e856a813386f797aade5867ad
gtk+-2.12.11.tar.gz md5sum: 98ff001a7321a4c93cda83d635449dc3

This is a bug fix release in the 2.12 series.

What is GTK+
============

GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user
interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for
projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application
suites.

GTK+ has been designed from the ground up to support a range of
languages, not only C/C++. Using GTK+ from languages such as Perl and
Python (especially in combination with the Glade GUI builder) provides
an effective method of rapid application development.

• Read more: GTK+ 2.12.11 released

HOW many Linux users do you know who, once they have installed a new distribution, are so happy with its default appearance that they leave it alone?
I’m guessing here, but I think those people are in the minority.
If you’re anything like me you will follow the same procedure.
Once I have a distribution I am happy with, in terms of its performance and stability, I always spend an hour or two getting it to look exactly how I want.
This can mean anything from changing the default icons, to altering the default font and window borders, and almost always involves getting rid of the default desktop wallpaper.
It doesn’t even matter if you are using a distribution known for its good looks - and I fully expect an argument here - like Mandriva, or PCLinuxOS, or Fedora, you’ll still have the irresistible urge to change something.

Read more at Red Devil’s Tech Blog

I’ve been getting told that my recent review of KDE 4 wasn’t fair because KDE 4 isn’t really ready for prime time. My response: “When is any program, especially an open-source program, ready?”

I’m not making light of this criticism of my review. WINE, everyone’s favorite way to run Windows programs on Linux, just reached 1.0 status after 15-years in the making. Its developers freely admit that while it’s very, very good at what it does, it’s far from perfect. None-the-less, many of us, including yours truly, have been using WINE for more than a decade.

Read more at Practical Technology

At the Geek Ranch we recently made a decision to implement
some software in Python. Or, more accurately, I decided and there
was no disagreement. Then Python gets picked as the best scripting
language in the LJ Readers’ Choice survey. That inspired me to
write this article (and get ready for Perl and Ruby fans to start
yelling at me).

Read more at Linux Journal

Trolltech today announced the launch of Qt Jambi 4.4 – the latest version of its application framework for Java development. Qt Jambi is based on the recently-launched Qt 4.4, and brings its benefits to Java developers: including the ability to develop web and multimedia enriched applications across desktop operating systems.

Among the new features in Qt Jambi 4.4 you can find:

Read more at KDE.news

Anybody who spends time trying new free software applications and distributions will soon notice that version numbering and labeling is next to meaningless. These days, versioning rarely gives an accurate idea of the state of development, except relative to other builds of the same project. It is simply a label that distinguishes one build from another. That’s too bad, because a properly labeled release can give users a sense of how advanced the build actually is.

The problem is not that several different versioning systems exist. Once you realize there are variations, you should have no trouble picking up on the fact that the odd-numbered GNOME releases are development builds and even-numbered ones are official releases. Nor are you likely to mistake KOffice 1.9.95-4 for a late version of KOffice 1.0 for more than a moment before you realize that it is an early version 2.0 build. Anyone familiar enough with free software to be trying the latest builds knows that getting all of a large project’s developers to agree on anything besides their mistrust of Microsoft is impossible. We learn to allow for idiosyncrasies.

Read more at Linux.com

GCC 4.3.1 has been released.

GCC 4.3.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC
4.3.0 relative to previous GCC releases.

See:

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html

and particularly

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.3/changes.html#4.3.1

for more information about changes in GCC 4.3.1.

This release is available from the FTP servers listed here:

http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

The release is in gcc/gcc-4.3.1/ subdirectory.

As always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release — far
too many to thank individually!

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we spoke to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, and in this article we chat to Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

Bash, or the Bourne-Again Shell is a Unix shell created in 1987 by Brian Fox. According to Wikipedia, the name is a pun on an earlier Unix shell by Stephen Bourne (called the Bourne shell), which was distributed with Version 7 Unix in 1978.

In 1990, Chet Ramey, Manager of the Network Engineering and Security Group in Technology Infrastructure Services at Case Western Reserve University, became the primary maintainer of the language.

Read more at LinuxWorld

GTK+ 2.13.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk+/2.13/

gtk+-2.13.1.tar.bz2 md5sum: 16f57400a352aadda4b19f95aed14d0c
gtk+-2.13.1.tar.gz md5sum: 19875a16e2b1db06ac4d0e9744f0c3a4

This is the second development release leading up to GTK+ 2.14.

Notes:

* This is unstable development release. While it has had
a bit of testing, there are certainly plenty of bugs
remaining to be found. This release should not be used
in production.

* Installing this version will overwrite your existing
copy of GTK+. If you have problems, you’ll need
to reinstall GTK+ 2.12.

• Read more: GTK+ 2.13.1 released

Earlier this month, we released the single, largest release of Qt since the 4.0.0 release two years ago. Qt 4.4.0 is the result of 10 months of hard work by the Trolls, including numerous distractions. And while it’s being digested by our clients and users, we’re working on Qt 4.4.1, which will include fixes for bugs that were already known at the time of the 4.4.0 release, as well as some that people have reported.

In the meantime, we take two steps back, to the 4.3.x series, and then one step forward: we’re releasing today Qt version 4.3.5. This release is meant for those who cannot upgrade to Qt 4.4.0 yet, but need fixes for some important issues. All of the changes done for 4.3.5 will be present in 4.4.1 and some are even part of 4.4.0 already.

Read more at Trolltech Labs