General Development Archive

Advanced filesystem implementor’s guide, Part 13

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-21 General Development 4 Comments

In the Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Daniel Robbins shows you how to use the latest filesystem technologies in Linux 2.4. In this conclusion to the AFIG series, Daniel continues his discussion of the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, or EVMS. He shows you how to use evmsn to take a new hard drive, partition it, and create LVM volumes on it. Along the way, he fills you in on important EVMS concepts that you'll find essential as you continue your exploration of this powerful technology.

GCC 3.2.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-20 General Development 13 Comments

The GCC 3.2.1 release is to provide a stable platform for OS distributors to use building their next OS releases. A primary objective was to stabilize the C++ ABI.

Programming and Other Articles at InformIT

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-19 General Development No Comments

Some interesting programming and other articles are to be found this way round at InformIT. Read more for a list of the articles (free registration required).

The Infrastructure and Advances in ReiserFS 4

Submitted by Rayiner Hashem 2002-11-19 General Development 19 Comments

This is an informative article about the upcoming Reiser4 filesystem. It covers a lot of the performance improvements in Reiser4 along with a lot of ideas about a database filesystem.

Introducing ColorForth

Submitted by bland est 2002-11-12 General Development 27 Comments

Forth has been a recognized programming language since the 1970's. ColorForth is a redesign of this classic language for the 21st century. It also draws upon a 20-year evolution of minimal instruction-set microprocessors. Now implemented on modern PCs, it runs stand-alone without an operating system. Applications are recompiled from source with a simple optimizing compiler.

Single-User Subversion

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-06 General Development 16 Comments

"Subversion is an open source revision control system, similar in purpose to the well-known, widely deployed, and aging CVS. It is designed to provide state-of-the-art versioning, built from modern technologies. Subversion is still in development and has not reached version 1.0 yet. However, it's pretty stable and you can use it right now." Read the article at OnLamp.

Review: Kylix 3 has Plenty of Programming Power

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-05 General Development 15 Comments

"It is not as if I am new to Kylix. I am a Delphi programmer since version 1, and I always keep my C++ skills up. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the release of Borland's Kylix 3, the Rapid Application Development environment for Linux that includes both Delphi language and C++ IDE's (integrated development environment). The code produced with Kylix can be recompiled with minimal changes under Microsoft Windows using either Delphi for Windows version 6 or greater, or C++ Builder version 6 or greater." Read the review at NewsForge.

Developing Applications for Gnome with Python, Part 3

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-04 General Development 9 Comments

This series of articles is specially written for newbie programmers using Gnome and GNU/Linux. Python, the chosen language for development, avoids the usual overhead of compiled languages like C. Read it at LinuxFocus.org. Previous articles in the series: first article, second article.

Advanced Filesystem Implementor’s Guide, Part 12

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-31 General Development 2 Comments

In this article, Daniel Robbins introduces the Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) for Linux. He explains what EVMS is, why it is so desperately needed, and why it will very likely transform the way storage is managed on Linux systems.

Poll: Can you Use Programming Languages?

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-30 General Development 85 Comments

Here is a poll we put together to better understand the nature of the OSNews readers. Please tell us about the level of experience you got with programming.

The /opt and /usr Issue Revisited

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-23 General Development 29 Comments

"I suppose it's a losing battle, but it's one worth fighting, anyway. What makes me think of it is a thread I noticed on the freedesktop.org mailing list. In that thread, Andreas Pour, with whom I do not agree about much, defends obvious common sense against what over the last couple of years has been a growing onslaught. He's absolutely right, but that isn't always enough." Read it at LinuxAndMain.

Borland’s Bird’s Eye View

Submitted by rajan r 2002-10-19 General Development 7 Comments

In this second and final part of my interview with Ted Shelton, Borland's chief strategy officer, Shelton focuses on Microsoft .Net's support for multiple languages and reveals a hidden .Net stumbling block. First part here.

UNIX To Windows Code Migration Guide

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-16 General Development 30 Comments

This document illustrates guidelines and best practices required to port existing UNIX applications to the Windows environment, which can potentially reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with a traditionally painful migration process. This guide covers planning and practical issues involved in migration or co-existence between UNIX and Windows and provides a review of the different ways in which such a migration can be done. Ideal for both UNIX programmers as well as Windows programmers, this is a valuable source of information for anyone looking to take advantage of Windows.

Make Python Run as Fast as C with Psyco

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-15 General Development 12 Comments

Psyco is a Python specializing compiler and is an external module, but it could someday be included in Python itself. With only a tiny amount of extra programming, Psyco can often be used to increase the speed of Python code by orders of magnitude. This article looks at what Psyco is, and tests it in various applications.

GNU C library 2.3 Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-10-04 General Development 17 Comments

Glibc 2.3 is out and prelinking support was added for ELF targets, startup times are significantly reduced (C++ and Qt/KDE applications will be most benefited from this - with this support on glibc there is no reason to revert to manual prelinking KDE which reportedly created stability issues). Read-only stdio streams now use mmap to speed up operation. The malloc functions were completely rewritten. The runtime now can handle the ELF thread-local storage (TLS) ABI on some platforms. This release has been ported to PowerPC64/Linux. Download it in a bz2 (13 MB) or gunzip (17.5 MB) tarball formats.

Linus Merges XFS on Kernel 2.5.36

Eugenia Loli 2002-09-17 General Development 14 Comments

From LWN: "Linus has just merged the XFS filesystem into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in the 2.5.36 kernel. XFS is a high-performance, journaling filesystem from SGI; it now becomes the fourth journaling filesystem (alongside ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS) supported by the Linux kernel. (Other stuff which has been merged, so far, for 2.5.36 includes an IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") update, the next big set of IDE patches, the "huge page" patch for i386 systems, and a number of other tweaks)."

Objective-C: the More Flexible C++

Eugenia Loli 2002-09-16 General Development 64 Comments

"It is a surprising fact that anyone studying GNUstep or the Cocoa Framework will notice they are nearly identical to the NEXTSTEP APIs that were defined ten years ago. A decade is an eternity in the software industry. If the framework (and its programming language--Objective C) came through untouched these past ten years, there must be something special about it. And Objective-C has done more than survive; some famous games including Quake and NuclearStrike were developed using Objective-C." Read the introduction to Objective-C at LinuxJournal.

SharpDEvelop 0.90 is Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-09-06 General Development No Comments

Code Completion is now back, in the new version of SharpDevelop.The forms designer received a major working over and now can handle invisible controls and autogenerates C# and VB.NET code for the forms. Stability overall also has improved. In similar news, Borland Software Corp will increase its support for .NET with development tools the company believes will win corporate backing despite reduced IT spending, Gavin Clarke writes.

Rational Releases PurifyPlus for Linux

Eugenia Loli 2002-09-05 General Development 27 Comments

Exceptionally good news for the commercial Linux developers. Rational has released PurifyPlus for Linux. For hobby developers, the free Valgrind is better than nothing, but for commercial projects and for projects that require a full featured memory management tool, PurifyPlus has no match. Demo available.

SciTech to GPL its Proprietary Device Driver Architecture

Submitted by Kelie O\'Niel 2002-08-29 General Development 12 Comments

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced the intention to release the bulk of its proprietary device driver development tools under a new dual license structure. SciTech’s commercially available graphics driver pack, SciTech SNAP Graphics, currently supports nearly 180 graphics chip sets on multiple OS’es with full 2D acceleration. Access to all existing SciTech SNAP drivers will remain available under SciTech’s commercial license and will not be Open Sourced due to existing NDA’s with chip vendors.