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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Wolvix Size: 242.82 MB Status: 3 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2006-09-03 18:39:21

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: VideoLinux Size: 100.81 MB Status: 2 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2006-09-03 17:28:42

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Magic Size: 100.81 MB Status: 3 seeders and no leecher Added: 2006-09-03 10:30:40

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Mandriva Size: 2.05 GB Status: 2 seeders and no leecher Added: 2006-09-03 09:55:43

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: eLive Size: 697.50 MB Status: 4 seeders and 2 leechers Added: 2006-09-03 08:34:47

Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: ZenWalk Size: 438.29 MB Status: 7 seeders and 1 leechers Added: 2006-09-03 06:37:52

Source: ubuntuce

Version 1.2 of Ubuntu Christian Edition (Ubuntu CE) has been released: "We have just released Ubuntu Christian Edition v1.2! We have added the GnuCash financial management software as well as the very popular Ubuntu customization tool, Automatix. There are also some smaller additions such as the new Daily .

Source: wolvix

Wolvix is a SLAX-based live CD designed for a range of common desktop configurations. The development of the upcoming version 1.0.5 has started with the small "Cub" edition: "Wolvix Cub is a smaller version of Wolvix, designed to fit on 256MB USB removable media and it will serve .

Source: slackware

Patrick Volkerding has announced that "current" branch of Slackware Linux has reached release candidate 4 status: "I wasn't planning a Slackware 11.0 release candidate 4, but here we go." The new -- and unusually verbose -- entry in the changelog tell us that: udev's log level has been .

Source: Linux Today

As an experiment, I recently set out to install Mambo, an open source content management system, on a PC running Windows XP Professional

Source: Linux Today

Skype on Aug. 31 introduced a pair of cordless VoIP phones that work without being connected to a computer, via a DECT basestation that attaches directly to broadband and POTS lines

Source: Linux Today

In less than a decade, the playing field has gone from one company shouting into the wind to a market that had no idea what it was talking about to a packed arena--both in the stands and on the field

Source: Linux Today

Bill Gates has called the pro-open source campaigners as modern day communists and Shai Agassi from SAP management team has compared open source with socialism

Source: Linux Today

A few years ago, when you wanted to use a GNU/Linux distribution for your desktop computer, you still needed to concede a part of your freedom to open some PDF files, run most Java programs, or all Flash animations

Source: Linux Today

If 'a year of GNU/Linux on the desktop' is defined as a year when GNU/Linux has finally started its steady encroachment to the desktop then 2006 is the year

Source: Slashdot: Linux

hausmasta writes "HowtoForge has published a walkthrough to show you how to store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. It will not show how to install particular packages, as it is distribution/system dependent, instead it will focus on pure configuration of all components needed to have LDAP authentication/storage of users. The howto assumes that you are migrating from a regular passwd/shadow authentication, but it is also suitable for people who do it from scratch."

Source: Slashdot: Linux

Linux.com is reporting that Matthew Garrett, one of the more active Debian developers, has called some ongoing problems with the Debian project into focus with his resignation. While he didn't hold any actual office, many prominent Debian developers described Garrett as "high profile". From the article: "In his own blog, Garrett relates his gradual discovery that Debian's free-for-all discussions were making him intensely irritable and unhappy with other members of the community. He contrasts Debian's organization with Ubuntu's more formal structure. In particular, he mentions Ubuntu's code of conduct, which is enforced on the distribution's mailing lists, suggesting that it 'helps a great deal in ensuring that discussions mostly remain technical.' He also approves of Ubuntu's more formal structure as 'a pretty explicit acknowledgment that not all developers are equal and some are possibly more worth listening to than others.' Then, in reference to Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and funder of Ubuntu, Garrett says, 'At the end of the day, having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases.'"

Source: Slashdot: Linux

slimrabbit writes "LinuxDevices is reporting on a truly silent home theater PC that comes with its own Fedora 5 based quick install Linux DVD capable of installing a fully-configured FC5 system with LIRC, KDETV, TV-Time and Kradio in about 15 minutes. The most notable features are its "church mouse quiet" 14dba power supply, TV-Out (SVideo and composite), component video, DVI and VGA out, and hardware MPEG support(XvMC). The company also supports and engages the Linux community through its sponsorship program. It is sponsoring knoppmyth and the Debian User Project and makes the mechanical drawings of its face plates available under the GPL."

Source: Python DevCenter

This week on the Perl 6 mailing lists
“I once saw an overfilled waterbed that was almost as tall as I am. I
would have called it PHP, but it didn’t explode and throw cold water
all over the house.”

– chromatic

Language
clarifying the spec for 'ref'
Last week,
Mark Stosberg wanted Perl 6 to retain the Perl 5 responses to ref or justify
the change in the documentation. Larry Wall explained that ref will not
exist in Perl 6; instead, it will be something like .what, which will return
the type itself, rather than a string.

The thread then moved on to subclassing, after Luke Palmer suggested that
Array would be a subtype of Array::Const, after Larry had stated the
reverse. This led to a lengthy discussion on the subject.

This week, Richard Hainsworth tried to analyze situations involving classes
and roles using sets and subsets. He started a new thread for the topic,
Classes / roles as sets / subsets.

Same-named arguments
In the previous week’s summary, it was reported that
Michael Snoyman asked whether or not arguments of the same name but a different
sigil, e.g. sub foo ( $foo, @foo ) will clash. Luke Palmer thought it was
going to be a compile time error, due the to the arguments do not have the
sigil as part of their long name. Mark J. Reed wondered whether or not that is
consistent with the rest of Perl 6. Audrey Tang then explained the syntactic
difference between pairs and named arguments with regard to barewords and
quoted strings.

On August 27th, Michael repeated a friend’s suggestion of making the
sigil on the name optional for disambiguation. Mark Reed also made a
proposal, which included having the sigil be optional in some cases.

Implicit current-index variable, scoped inside for-loops
Carl Mäsak reported a conversation from #perl6. There was a suggestion
for a special variable which would carry the loop index.
Ruud H.G. van Tol thought that if the block had a label you
could have multiple indices attached to the name. Mark A. Biggar
noted that it should also work for grep and map. There were some
further discussions of syntax. Jonathan Scott Duff thought it would
be too much sugar.

Classes / roles as sets / subsets
Continuing from his earlier message in thread
clarifying the spec for ‘ref’, Richard Hainsworth continued his
quest to completely understand classes in Perl 6. Daniel Hulme made
a suggestion on the diagrams.

In Fwd: Classes / roles as sets / subsets,
Jonathan Lang responded to Richard’s questions and tried to answer them.
chromatic brought up the question of the relationship between OO and
inheritance.

return Types: what are the enforcement details?
Mark Stosberg wanted to write tests for ‘return types’ but wanted
documentation on what cases (of a different type returned)
should give errors. He also wanted to know if they are declarations
or contracts. Yuval Kogman replied that of is the contractual
form, while returns is a constraint which is more like a cast.
He also took a guess at what results were appropriate.

named arguments: What's the signature?
Mark Stosberg felt that information on the signature to use to declare
an arbitrary number of named arguments is missing from S06. Trey Harris
thought that the description of slurpy parameters already covered the
subject. Stuart Cook suggested reading ‘List parameters’, which he
thought should be cross-referenced under ‘Named parameters’.

A suggestion for a new closure trait.
Joe Gottman suggested a block closure trait RESUME, which would be
called at the beginning of each loop iteration other than the first.
Jonathan Lang asked if the relationship between RESUME and FIRST
would be the same as NEXT to LAST.

could 'given' blocks have a return value?
Mark Stosberg wanted to use given to populate with whatever value was
returned from when {} or default {}. He noted that Pugs allows this
when you wrap a block in an anonymous sub, but suggested that the syntax
could be cleaner.

Jonathan Lang thought that the last expression evaluated within a closure
is returned by the closure, and that given is just another closure.
Agent Zhang reported that S04 states given {} cannot be used directly
as an expression, but offered alternate syntax. It was concluded that
do given is probably the best way to do this, and it should be documented.

Questions about statement modifiers
Agent Zhang wanted more information about statement modifiers than
appears in S04 and included some code snippets, asking if they were
valid Perl 6. Larry Wall clarified, and agreed to add the information
to S04.

derived class generators and introspection
Darren Duncan described his thoughts on the subject of implementing
a relational database in Perl 6. Nigel Hamilton had some questions on
disk access and data storage.

Naming the method form of s///
Mark J. Reed noted that according to S05, the string method equivalent of
s/// is subst. He felt it might be easily confused with substr
and suggested replace.

A long discussion on how the method would actually work followed.

Uncaught exceptions
Andrew Suffield asked how an uncaught exception should react in certain
situations. He was unable to find anything in the synopses on the
subject.

Nested statement modifiers.
Paul Seamons wondered if there was a reason why Perl 6 would not allow nested
statement modifiers. Trey Harris reported that it was rejected by Larry
in 2002 and gave a link. Jerry Gay thought a sentence on the subject
should be added to S04. Trey noted that the synopses only address changes
from Perl 5, and Perl 5 only allows one statement modifier.

Paul noted that the object syntax and the Perl 6 grammar have changed
since 2002 and wondered if the reasoning was still the same.
Randal Schwartz thought that Larry’s reasoning was that he had seen
this feature abused in other languages. Paul agreed that there are
few instances where it would be useful but still wanted the opportunity
to abuse it.

Parrot Porters
PMC Methods, Inheritance, and User-visible Classes
Matt Diephouse plans to work on AbstractPMCArray PMC class
which can provide some default array vtable functions other PMCs
can inherit. He was not certain how to best handle sort methods,
which could potentially end up being visible to the user. He asked
for opinions. Joshua Juran suggested requiring array classes to
implement swap() and implementing sort algorithms in terms of that.
Matt felt that this would not handle the underlying problem of methods
not available in a given language becoming available to users.

Watson Ladd wondered if it was bad to add functionality to a language,
and chromatic responded. This led to a discussion on what exactly
is wrong with PHP.

#ParrotSketch Meeting 29AUG06
Will Coleda posted the URL of the 29 August
#ParrotSketch log.

[perl #40253] [PATCH] always cast printf("%p") to (void *)
In [perl #40253], Will Coleda supplied a patch to change printfs
arguments to avoid compiler warnings. However, the patch caused some
test failures. Joshua Hoblitt wanted to know what compiler was generating
the warnings. It was gcc 4.0.1.

Why does writing PMCs suck?
Matt Diephouse put out a call for comments on what people do not like
about writing PMCs. He started the list with two complaints. chromatic
added three.

Proposed patch
Mark J. Reed reported that compilation fails on OS X 10.3
with gcc 3.3 because -bundle is misinterpreted. He supplied
a patch to change the order of arguments which fixes the problem.

Error Recovery in Parrot
Alberto Simões tried to create an RT ticket but it was not added, so he
reported the problem to the newsgroup. He finds it problematic that
Parrot stops with the first error it encounters and doesn’t report any
other errors which may exist. He offered a patch and gave people a few
days to object. Jerry Gay suggested applying it, and reported the RT
problem.

PGE bug?
Will Coleda posted his attempt at implementing a JSON parser in PGE.
He later found the bug that was causing him problems.

Users
multi subs with identical signatures: should be a warning ?
Mark Stosberg wanted to know where he should read to learn how the
dispatching to the correct multi sub is resolved. Markus Laire suggested
looking at S12 and possibly S06.

re: Announcing the Perl 6 and Parrot wiki workspaces
Conrad Schneiker announced that he had added some information to the
wiki. He felt that the interface was easy to use, and wondered what
other people’s experiences were. There was some discussion on why
the connection was slow, and the reason seemed to be that it runs
on Andy Lester’s home machine. Andy tried to adjust his connection,
and Juerd offered to host it on feather.

Writing modules
Michael Snoyman wondered how a to create a makefile and run tests for
a module which wouldn’t exist in the Pugs source tree.
Gaal Yahas suggested not worrying about the makefile unless the module
is intended for distribution. He suggested that Test.pm should be
used for testing, and that the Pugs distribution has good examples of
functional tests.

Stubborn coworkers
Jeff Stampes wondered how he could interest his coworkers in Perl 6
topics, given some resistance to the syntax. Fagyal Csongor replied
that the syntax is indeed full, because Perl 6–like Perl 5–tries to
handle many different things. However, people need only learn a
relevant subset. Amir E. Aharoni offered a link to samples of Perl 5
and Perl 6 code, where the latter was much cleaner.

Jonathan Scott Duff agreed with Fagyal, noting that the default syntax
is clean. He suggested the fear may come from the possibility of changing
the rules. A. Pagaltzis disagreed that the coworker’s assertion that
Perl 6 resembles Lisp and Forth. Steffen Schwigon suggested comparing
Perl 6 to Perl 5. Several other people also contributed to the thread.

Help getting pugs working?
Jeff Stampes ran in to difficulties getting Pugs running on Red Hat
Enterprise 4. Steffen Schwigon wondered if Jeff had tried one of the
binaries. Later Jeff reported that he had it working.

Acknowlegements
This summary was prepared using
Mail::Summary::Tools,
now available on CPAN. A big thank-you to Yuval Kogman.

If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl
Foundation to help support the
development of Perl.

Thank you to everyone who has pointed out mistakes and offered
suggestions for improving this series. Comments on this summary can be
sent to Ann Barcomb, kudra@domaintje.com.

Distribution
This summary can be found in the following places:


use.perl.org
The Pugs blog
The perl6-announce mailing
list
ONLamp


See Also

Perl Foundation activities
Perl 6 Development
Planet Perl Six