General Development Archive

Here is a tutorial about apt on rpm-based distributions. This tutorial is split into two parts: in the first it demonstrates how to install and use apt based on an example (apt on SUSE 9.2), and in the second part it will give you an overview of the packages to install and the package repositories for each distribution mentioned above.

Most times when an object shows up for work, it's capable of performing as required, because its capabilities are advertised explicitly in its interface. However, life is not always that straightforward. This chapter will help you learn what to do when capabilities aren't readily apparent.

Visual Basic developers who are being left behind with Microsoft's discontinuing of "classic" VB have a short time to take advantage of an interesting offer. The makers of REALBasic will give registered VB6 users a free license to their software.

This chapter looks at a practical example from science and engineering that can find applications in almost any numerical code. Along the way, you'll learn some important new concepts and get a taste of metaprogramming at a high level using the MPL. Also, this chapter explains the difference between assignment and initialization in C++ in simple terms, with examples to illustrate each.

Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless type of threads written in portable C code. Protothreads provide blocked waiting and sequential code execution on top of event-driven systems, without the overhead of full multithreading or per-thread stacks. They are designed for severely memory constrained systems, has a very low RAM overhead, and can be used with or without an underlying OS. New in version 1.1 is the PT_YIELD() operation that allows a protothread to yield the CPU.

A new programming language has been sighted, it goes by the affectionate name "nessie" and it claims to be the loch ness monster of programming languages.

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.