LinuxWorld says “Nick Petreley gets specific: apt-get, Debian’s way of updating and upgrading, is the right way to resolve the dependency problems that plague the various distros and ultimately hobble Linux’s ability to take over the computing world.”

ZDNet reviews NuSphere MySQL: “By integrating the most popular open source Web development applications into a user-friendly bundle, Nusphere has strongly sounded the Linux gong in the battle for developer mindshare with Microsoft’s .Net.”

Microsoft’s software development division in South India is developing something called JUMP to .NET, aka the Java User Migration Path for Microsoft .NET. A beta release is on track for this summer. Full story at InfoWorld.

InfoWorld has an interesting article on the use of Java at major financial and stock trading firms. Apparently Java’s openness and portability are ideally suited to the constantly evolving needs of the financial markets. The next step for trading houses: wireless Java applications.

A few words on Unix in education from freebsdzine.org: “I work for one of the few universities in Australia
that teach Systems Administration as an elective course in an undergraduate Computer Science or
Information Systems degree. Currently, I have 22 students, and we are a third of the way through the
course. I thought I’d briefly describe how the course
is run, why I’m using FreeBSD, and how useful the
students are finding the course.”

BSD today coversa new NetBSD port by the name of hpcarm, designed to run on the Intel StrongARM-based personal digital assistants. The new port supports hardware with the
Microsoft’s Handheld PC (H/PC) and the H/PC Pro and Palmsized PC (PsPC) form factors, including Hewlett Packard’s Jornada 720 and the Compaq iPAQ H3600.

“The issue is related to ZClasses in that a user with through-the-web
scripting capabilities on a Zope site can view and assign class attributes
to ZClasses, possibly allowing them to make inappropriate changes to ZClass
instances.” The complete post has additional details and links to updated files.

“Updated analog packages are available which fix a buffer overflow
vulnerability. Previous releases of analog were vulnerable to a buffer overflow
vulnerability where a malicious user could use an ALIAS command to
construct very long strings which were not checked for length.” Details at LinuxToday.

A new version of the Lazarus IDE is available for download and
review.

Lazarus is a RAD Object Pascal Development IDE for use with Free Pascal. Version 0.7 has many more features available then the previous release. It now uses the latest release of SynEdit. The use of SynEdit is an indication of the ability of porting Delphi code to Lazarus.While many aspects of the product are being fined tuned here is a list of some of the things found in the IDE.

Form Designer

Object Inspector

Editor Options

Compiler Options

Environment Options

Project Options

Code Completion

Syntax Highlighting

The IDE is built with the Lazarus LCL (Lazarus Class Libraries) which is analogous to the Delphi VCL. The LCL is designed to be widget independent so it can be built and run with different API widgets sets. Currently most development work is being done using GTK+ and the IDE can be run in Linux and to a certain extent in Win32. The problems with Win32 are related to the GTK+ version for Win32. Interfaces for the native Windows API and Qt are also under development. In the future interfaces for KDE, Gnome and other libraries will be available. The widget set used is determined by which one you compile and link against. No changes to your source code are required.

Lazarus is designed to work with Free Pascal. This means that any platform where Free Pascal can run you can build and use Lazarus. To date version of Lazarus have been built on Linux, Win32, and FreeBSD. The IDE looks and operates in much the same fashion as the Delphi IDE. If you are familiar with Delphi then you will immediately understand the Lazarus IDE. A screen shot of the IDE can be seen here. Unit information is saved in .PP files and Form layouts are saved in .LFM files. The .LFM files are similar to the .DFM files found in Delphi. The only difference is that the .LFM file needs to be first turned into a .LRS file before compiling the code. In the future this step will be incorporated into the IDE itself. This step allows the Form data to be streamed into the code.

The documentation for the source code is built nightly and you can download nightly builds of the Linux version of the IDE. ftp://lazarus.freepascal.org/lazarus/lazaruslinux.tar.gz. We would appreciate any and all help with development or testing of the IDE.
While the ability to use the IDE itself is limited the mere fact that the IDE can be built and run at all indicates the level of the LCL and the ability it provides to write Delphi like applications for Linux.

Zack Brown posts this week’s topics from the linux-kernel mailing list. Covered: “Hot-swapping CPUs in 2.4.1” … “Kernel debugger in 2.4.x?” … “Video drivers in the kernel,” and of course, much more.