The initial release of DevHelp, a GNOME-based documentation system for developers, was announced today. Complete details below.

The initial release of DevHelp, 0.1.0 is now available.

DevHelp is GNOME based documentation system for developers.
Cool technologies such as Bonobo, GnomeVFS, Gnome-print, GtkHTML used
and therefor required.

Features:
Tree & function indexing API docs in XML
HTML viewer (GtkHTML).
Search by function, struct, macro etc.
Auto completion.
Transparent HTTP support powered by GnomeVFS.
Commandline search powered by bonobo, with nice emacs integration.
Simple installer for books.
Print support.
5 zoom levels.

DevHelp can be downloaded gnome cvs (module devhelp) or from:
http://people.codefactory.se/~micke/devhelp/

And required books from:
http://people.codefactory.se/~micke/devhelp/books/

Enjoy,
DevHelp Team (Johan, Mikael, Richard)

An IDG item on CNN reports that Japanese researchers have made considerable progress in creating a personal digital assistant on a single sheet of glass. It’s very possible that your circa-2003 PDA will more closely resemble something out of Star Trek if this project is successful.

The Register: “Protests against the arrest of jailed Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov have
spread oversees. The US Embassy lobby in London will be the focus of a
demonstration this coming Friday August 3.”

“On Tuesday, a member of the Bugtraq mailing list, which
boasts upwards of 50,000 subscribers, posted an exploit —
developed by TESO — which takes advantage of [a telnet]
vulnerability, despite the fact that the exploit’s header forbade
distribution of the exploit, and gave mailing lists and Bugtraq in
particular as examples.” TESO is none too thrilled about this development and is considering some sort of legal action. We do hope that TESO understands that it probably won’t be able to remain “pseudonymous” in a courtroom. Item at InternetNews.com.

From a press release at LinuxPR: “This book is probably the first serious attempt at answering the most fundamental
question affecting Unix/Linux users: why do most people seem to prefer an
expensive and largely disfunctional desktop, and even server, environment to one
that works cheaply and effectively?”

In this edition of Debian Weekly News: Start dreaming of a woody Christmas; small script gems on debian-devel; and a quibble about the quality of bug reports.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/18/
Debian Weekly News - July 31st, 2001
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                    
Base bugs and the freeze. Anthony Towns has posted yet another base
bugs report[1]. It says that we have most of the base bugs fixed. The
architectures which will be released seems to be ARM, i386, m68k,
PowerPC, Sparc, HPPA and IA-64. Alpha doesn't have boot-floppies yet,
while mips and mipsel are being considered. We also need to decide on
crypto in main. The process concerning this has a deadline August 4th.
If everything goes better than planned then we will have woody
released before Christmas.

Mips and mipsel for woody? We hear interesting and promising news from
our mips ports. Henning Heinold has reported a partial success[2]
story for boot-floppies on a MIPS machine (big endian, binary-mips).
The installer is loaded via NFS-Root. Karsten Merker and Martin 'Joey'
Schulze have managed[3] to get a DECstation (little endian,
binary-mipsel) boot the Debian installer through a kernel with an
appended ramdisk which is loaded via TFTP. The porters hope that these
steps classify for an inclusion in woody. Here is Karsten's
report[4].

Useful utilities on debian-devel. Small script gems keep popping out
on debian-devel. You have probably su'ed to root in order to run an X
program and then discovered that you only got a message like xterm Xt
error: Can't open display: 0:0. Then you got around it in some way,
either by running xhost, or ssh -X -l root localhost. Now, Francois
Gouget has made a tool which solves the problem. It's called sux[5]
(su-with-x). Here is his announcement[6].

Sponsoring problems. For people who are in the New Maintainer Queue,
there is a way to get a package into Debian. That is to get a sponsor,
who checks the package and uploads it on behalf of the person being
sponsored. Lately, there has been some problems with the Debian
Developer not checking the package well enough. As usualy, this
spawned off a big discussion on debian-devel, and Anthony Towns
proposed[7] a way for the sponsor to become more involved with the
packages she is sponsoring.

Say cheese. Or APT. Debian has the best packaging system around, but
not everybody knows which utility to use when. Is dpkg it dpkg
--reconfigure or dpkg-reconfigure? (It's the latter, but to be
confused with dpkg --configure.) Joe[8] Wreschnig wrote a small
frontend to apt, called FETA[9] (Front End To Apt), which looks cute.

Quality of bug reports. Anthony Towns has posted a little
complaint[10] about the quality of bug reports. "If we get more and
more users, or more and more newbie users, or more and more users who
want an information appliance instead of a computer, I can only see
this getting worse." This seems to be a result of the increased
pupularity of Debian GNU and our encouragement to send bug reports
while tools like bug(1) and reportbug(1) make it quite easy to submit
new bug reports, even it the problem is PEBKAC[11]. The discussion
quickly lead into technical proposals to cope with the number of bug
reports and their classification. Matt Zimmerman came up with a
bugzilla-like[12] proposal (even with a flow chart), while Anthony
introduced[13] new tags.

Size of the Debian Archive. Marcelo Magallon has studied the size of
the Debian archive for over one month and has summarized[14] it on a
graphic[15]. It shows a steady increase in size of the Debian archive.
New architectures which are catching up quickly like S/390, HP PA-RISC
and both MIPS architectures, let the size increase fast.

New packages this week
  * rdesktop[16] -- RDP client for Windows NT/2000 Terminal Server
  * gnulpr[17] -- GNUlpr printing system.
  * junior-system[18] -- Debian Jr. System tools
  * python-xlib[19] -- Interface for Python to the X11 Protocol
  * s3switch[20] -- Manage the output device on S3 Savage chips
  * toppler[21] -- A clone of the "Nebulous" game on old 8 and 16 bit
    machines.
  * x86info[22] -- Display diagnostic information about i386 CPUs
  * apt-howto[23] -- A Guide to APT
  * clara[24] -- Free OCR program for Unix Systems
  * innovation3d[25] -- I3D modeler
  * tsocks[26] -- Transparent network access through a SOCKS 4 or 5
    proxy
  * update-cluster[27] -- System to update configuration files for
    clusters automatically

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
  1. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce-0107/msg00011.html
  2. http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot-0106/msg00295.html
  3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-mips-0107/msg00081.html
  4. http://lists.debian.org/debian-mips-0107/msg00087.html
  5. http://fgouget.free.fr/sux/
  6. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0107/msg00008.html
  7. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0107/msg01342.html
  8. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0107/msg01614.html
  9. http://www.sacredchao.net/software/feta/
  10. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0107/msg00058.html
  11. http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=pebkac
  12. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0107/msg00060.html
  13. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project-0107/msg00062.html
  14. http://lists.debian.org/debian-mirrors-0107/msg00000.html
  15. http://auric.debian.org/~mmagallo/archive-size.png
  16. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/non-us/rdesktop.html
  17. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/gnulpr.html
  18. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/misc/junior-system.html
  19. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/x11/python-xlib.html
  20. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/utils/s3switch.html
  21. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/games/toppler.html
  22. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/x86info.html
  23. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/doc/apt-howto.html
  24. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/text/clara.html
  25. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/graphics/innovation3d.html
  26. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/net/tsocks.html
  27. http://www.debian.org/Packages/unstable/admin/update-cluster.html

-- 
Debian Weekly News is edited by 
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, Jean-Christophe Helary and Tollef Fog Heen

Version 0.9.0 of AbiWord, a cross-platform Open Source word processor has been released. The release notes and changelog are included below. Happy downloading.Release Notes:

The AbiWord team is proud to announce the release of version 0.9.0 of AbiWord. The
release marks the count down to version 1.0. While we are not in feature freeze, we will
no longer make substantial changes to the tree. We anticipate making a number of more
rapid releases as we squash bugs on the way to version 1.0.

Users will find this release is much faster and uses far fewer resources. There have
also been a number of bug fixes and feature additions over 0.7.14.

Multi-lingual users will find the on-the-fly spell checking particularly useful for
spell checking documents written in several languages.

All Platforms:

• Fully Customizable Styles: Martin, Dom
• Multi-Lingual Spell checking (Spell check in multiple languages) Dom, Thomas Fletcher.
• Language Dialog: Dom,
• ispell checker improvements: Thomas Fletcher, Dom, Vlad, Hub
• pspell checker fixes: Frodo
• Line Based Tables: Martin
• Tab Bar types: Martin, rms
• Scrolling Speedups: Martin, Joaquin.
• Speed Ups for Large Documents: Martin, Joaquin
• Major Back End Reworks: Dom, Mike Nordell, Pat Lam
• Automatic Numbered Headings: Martin
• Drag bars for vertical margins: Pat Lam
• RTF import/export improvements: Hub, Martin, Dom
• XHTML import/export improvements: John Clark.
• MS Word Improvements: Dom
• Human Readable Text Export: David Given
• XSO-FO Export: Dom
• Applix Words Import/Export: Hub, Dom
• Multiple Encoded text import/export: Andrew Dunbar
• Support for almost all worlds Languages in Windows Build : Andrew Dunbar
• Preview as Web, Dom
• AutoConf build system: Sam, Frodo, Aaron Lehmann, Hub, Alec Wolman
• Tons of Locale definitions: Dom and intrepid Abi contributors.
• Export to AbiWord templates. Dom.
• Plugin Architecture: Dom
• Left Ruler fixes: Dom, Pat Lam
• AutoSaves ofdocument: Joaquin, Martin
• Major Encoding fixes and Improvements: Andrew Dunbar, Tomas Frydrych, Joaquín, Dom,
• New and Improved Artwork and icons: Jakub Steiner, Tigert
• Encoding Manager Dialog: Andrew Dunbar
• Improved Bugzilla and Webpage: Sam TH, Jesper Skov

Tons of Bug fixes.

119 , 157, 158, 293, 323, 336, 348, 397, 412, 427, 445, 477, 478, 509, 528, 635, 649,
685, 694, 700, 717, 751, 762, 766, 771, 780, 801, 832, 836, 845, 846, 864, 877, 882, 884,
892, 902, 905, 908, 911, 921, 937, 962, 964, 967, 1001, 1008, 1011, 1036, 1056, 1066,
1087, 1089, 1090, 1100, 1101, 1119, 1120, 1121, 1128, 1148, 1155, 1158, 1179, 1182, 1208,
1229, 1240, 1254, 1255, 1260, 1265, 1266, 1267, 1269, 1275, 1277, 1280, 1291, 1296, 1298,
1303, 1304, 1305, 1306, 1307, 1312, 1313, 1314, 1315, 1318, 1320, 1322, 1323, 1325, 1326,
1334, 1339, 1344, 1347, 1349, 1354, 1355, 1357, 1361, 1364, 1368, 1375, 1378, 1380, 1382,
1383, 1391, 1392, 1393, 1406, 1408, 1416, 1417, 1420, 1424, 1428, 1430, 1431, 1436, 1443,
1445, 1446, 1449, 1450, 1451, 1452, 1453, 1455, 1457, 1459, 1461, 1466, 1468, 1469, 1471,
1472, 1473, 1475, 1476, 1479, 1480, 1482, 1484, 1486, 1488, 1489, 1490, 1493, 1496, 1498,
1499, 1500, 1501, 1502, 1504, 1505, 1506, 1508, 1512, 1514, 1515, 1516, 1517, 1520, 1521,
1522, 1523, 1524, 1526, 1529, 1530, 1533, 1534, 1535, 1536, 1541, 1542, 1543, 1544, 1546,
1547, 1550, 1551, 1552, 1553, 1554, 1555, 1556, 1557, 1558, 1561, 1562, 1567, 1568, 1570,
1571, 1572, 1574, 1575, 1577, 1578, 1579, 1580, 1581, 1582, 1584, 1585, 1586, 1587, 1589,
1591, 1592, 1593, 1594, 1595, 1596, 1598, 1599, 1611, 1612, 1614, 1615, 1616, 1617, 1618,
1623, 1624, 1626, 1627, 1628, 1629, 1630, 1632, 1633, 1634, 1637, 1638, 1639, 1640, 1641,
1642, 1643, 1644, 1645, 1647, 1649, 1651, 1653, 1655, 1656, 1659, 1661, 1662, 1663, 1664,
1666, 1667, 1668, 1669, 1670, 1671, 1672, 1673, 1676, 1677, 1678, 1681, 1682, 1683, 1687,
1691, 1692, 1693, 1694, 1695, 1696, 1697, 1699, 1700, 1703, 1704, 1705, 1706, 1707, 1710,
1711, 1712, 1713, 1714, 1715, 1716, 1722, 1725, 1727, 1728, 1729, 1733, 1735, 1737, 1741,
1746, 1749, 1753, 1754, 1755, 1761, 1763, 1767, 1771, 1772, 1773

The whole Abi team.

Unix Platform:

• Styles Dialog: Martin, Dom, John Clark
• Repaint speedups and cleanups: Martin
• Color Pickers Toolbar buttons: Martin
• Language Dialog: Dom
• Nifty mouse pointer changes: Martin
• Perl Bindings for AbiWord: Joaquin, Paolo
• AbiWord Widget build (Start of embedable AbiWord): Dom
• Substantial reduction in usage of X resources: Martin
• Context Menu stays active on release of right button: Martin
• Encoding Manager Dialog: Dom
• Updated our Distrubuted Type 1 Fonts: Martin
• Fix Irix build:
• Fix HPUX build: Kevin Vajk’
• Fix Solaris build: Hub
• Add IBM 390 build:
• CJK fixes: Ha Shao

Gnome:

• Clip Art dialog: Dom
• Major gnome-print fixes (Proper WYSIWYG in Gnome-print, print preview and print Symbol and Dingbat fonts): Martin

QNX:

• Styles Dialog: Thomas Fletcher:
• Color Pickers Toolbar buttons: Thomas
• Encoding Manager Dialog: Thomas
• Plugin Dialog: Thomas
• Language Dialog: Thomas

Windows:

• Lists Dialog: Michael Pritchett, Mike Nordell
• Styles Dialog: Bruce Pearson, Michael Pritchett
• Language Dialog: Andrew Dunbar.
• Encoding Manager Dialog: Andrew, Mike Nordell
• Support for all the world’s Languages: Andrew Dunbar.

BEOS:

• Various fixes: Jamie Montgomerie, Stephane Fritsch

  Mac

  • Lots more progress, AbiWord Frame now runs: Hub

  New and Updated Translations:

  • Turkish translation Görkem Çetin
  • Norwegian updates Karl Ove Hufthammer
  • Italian updates: Marco Innocenti
  • British English: Alan Horkan
  • Irish Gaelic: Alan Horkan
  • Swedish Update: rms
  • Porugese Update: rms
  • Catalan Update: Jesús Corrius
  • German Help: Ralf Müller
  • Slovenian Translation: Andraz Tori
  • French update: Gilles Saint-Denis
  • German Update: Ralf Müller, Christain Meyer, Harald Fernengel
  • Hungarian Translation: Tamas Decsi

  Special Thanks to:
  David Chart, Alan Horkan, Tim Da Luca for great QA work with Bugzilla. These were really useful contributions.

Network World Fusion: “Graphics chip designer Intergraph filed a
lawsuit against Intel Monday, claiming that
Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chip architecture violates
two Intergraph patents, Intergraph said in a
statement issued late in the day.”

PC World: “To prevent slowdowns as hard drive transfer rates climb, Maxtor unveils Tuesday
its new Ultra Advanced Technology Attachment/133 standard.

The new standard, dubbed “Fast Drives,” builds upon the existing Ultra ATA/100, but offers transfer rates at
133MBps. That’s a 33 percent increase, says Simon Broadbent, technical marketing manager at Maxtor.

Best of all, the new standard should represent a relatively painless move, as it is completely backward compatible
with the existing ATA/66 and ATA/100 standards, he says. You can even use the same cable.”

According to former FCC chief Thomas W. Hazlett, the biggest obstacles to broadband deployment in the United States are local and national regulatory agencies. Open access rules, opines Hazlett, have caused more problems than they have solved: “Despite early projections that DSL’s “open” platform would trounce “closed” cable modems,
cable had 4.7 million subscribers in Dec. 2000 to just 1.7 million for DSL. With multiple vendors
required to service each customer, an artifact of “unbundling” regulation, network build-out
moves slowly.” Read the full essay at ZDNet.