General Development Archive

After two and a half years of work, autopackage 1.0 has finally escaped into the wild. It has a fundamentally new design, and offers an alternative system of software distribution and management on Linux. This article will talk about what this means for the Linux community, and what new directions and possibilities it opens up. It'll talk about problems remaining to be solved, and finally it will propose solutions for them. If you just want to see what autopackage is like, check out the screenshots or the Flash demo, available from the website.

With Autopackage officially declared stable, there is now an easy way for developers to create up to date, easy installable packages. Expect an Autopackage article later this week at OSNews.

Falko Timme wrote a tutorial describing how to create images of your Linux system with SystemImager. SystemImager lets you create images of your installations. So you can make a backup of your systems, clone your systems (if you have to maintain more than one machine with exactly the same software), or even distribute your software over the internet. To do so, you need an image server (should have enough disk space to store your images) and a so-called golden client (i.e., your "perfect system" of which you want to make an image).

Though great advances in Linux Desktop usability have been made in recent years, one rather large area of difficulty still exists, posing some serious issues on the ease-of-use front. There is, however, a little-known solution to these problems...

Xactium has published a white paper on Language Driven Development (LDD). LDD is a revolutionary approach to designing and implementing software and systems. LDD makes huge productivity gains by bridging the gap between the way developers think about their problem domain, and the languages and tools that implement the solution.

The entire realm of open-source software could get a performance boost if all goes well with a plan to overhaul a crucial programming tool called GCC.

This chapter will help you, the algorithm designer, to leave the parallel algorithm design abstract enough to support portability while ensuring that it can eventually be implemented effectively for the parallel systems on which it will be executed.

Most grub documentation is difficult for those not familiar with grub. Grub from the ground up is different.

Over 100 Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) have signed an online petition that demands Redmond resume development and support of "classic" Visual Basic, a-k-a VB6. The MVPs are calling for all VB developers and IT leaders to review and consider signing the petition.

I've been a professional software engineer for close to ten years. Based on my experience, I recently attempted to enumerate the ten worst engineering "traps" most developers seem (for whatever reason) prone to fall into. Here's the list I came up with. It should be noted that wherever two of these come into conflict, the item close to the top of the list wins.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) provides a flexible and efficient way to store, transmit, and express data. The open source community has produced an impressive lineup of XML editing utilities. In this article Ryan Paul takes a look at some of the most useful.

In many embedded systems, memory is severely constrained. RAM sizes on the order of a few hundreds of bytes or less is very common. Full multithreading may not be an option because of the memory required for thread stacks. For such systems, the newly released Protothreads Library provides a very lightweight alternative: protothreads are a stackless type of threads with only two bytes of RAM overhead per protothread. The library is implemented in pure C without any machine specific code. Protothreads are currently used in the Contiki OS and will be used in the upcoming version of the uIP embedded TCP/IP stack.

With the recent (or not so recent, I am a very slow writer) interest in database file systems, I've been thinking about what a typical user really wants from such a system. What would they use it for? What would we need to do to help them get the most from it? Are there any precedents that show how useful a database file system could be? If not, could we invent one? This lead me to some "gedanken solutions" (like gedanken experiments, just with software) that I thought I'd distract you with.

T2 is a system development environment. It provides a self-contained distribution build kit based on sources with an up-to-date development toolchain (gcc, glibc, uclibc, dietlibc, X.org, KDE, GNOME, etc.).