Open Source Pixels

This weekend at FOSDEM 2012 what Kristian Hogsberg is expected to say in Brussels will surprise many of you: Wayland 1.0 is gearing up for release as their first stable release. Wayland [a new X server for Linux] is supposed to be ready to take on the Linux desktop world.

When the Raspberry Pi ships later this year, it will be delivered to your door as a finished unit. The more adventurous tinkerers among you, as well as adept system builders, have asked the Raspberry Pi Foundation why they can’t get them in kit form instead. The reason why that wasn’t considered is demonstrated in an image released by Broadcom . . . they are tiny. And unlike a typical system build using an x86 chip that just slots into place, installing these chips requires a very steady hand and just the right amount of solder.

ike your RHEL on your servers just the way it is? That’s fine by Red Hat, which has extended its flagship Linux operating system’s lifecycle to ten years.

Bluelog is a Bluetooth site survey tool, designed to tell you how many discoverable devices there are in an area as quickly as possible. Bluelog differs from most Bluetooth scanners in that it prioritizes speed of reporting over anything else (i.e. it doesn’t spend time trying to pull detailed data from a device) and doesn’t require any user intervention to function. As the name implies, its primary function is to log discovered devices to file rather than to be used interactively. Bluelog could run on a system unattended for long periods of time to collect data. In addition to basic scanning, Bluelog also has a unique feature called "Bluelog Live", which puts results in a constantly updating Web page which you can serve with your HTTP daemon of choice.

Release Notes: This is a minor release in response to the Linux 3.0.x bug that prevents Bluetooth scanning from working. Bluelog will now give a descriptive error message when failing on a 3.0.x system.

Release Tags: Minor, Stable

Tags: Scanner, Logger, bluetooth, Wireless, Security

Licenses: GPLv2

JPPF enables applications with large processing power requirements to be run on any number of computers, in order to dramatically reduce their processing time. This is done by splitting an application into smaller parts that can be executed simultaneously on different machines.

Release Notes: This release brings incredible improvements in ease of use, stability, reliability and flexibility. The configuration was simplified and improved. Job recovery was improved and job failover was added on the client side. New, fully documented class loading extensions were added. New extension points are now available. The administration console, management, and monitoring features have received new capabilities and improvements. Four full-fledged examples applications were added.

Release Tags: major features

Tags: GRID, grid computing, cloud, cloud computing, Java, Parallel processing, Parallel Computing, Distributed Computing, Open Source

Licenses: Apache 2.0

Jipes is a Java library that allows you to efficiently compute audio features. Possible uses for these features are general music information retrieval (MIR) applications or, more specifically, personal music software. Unlike many other digital signal processing (DSP) libraries or frameworks, Jipes is not meant for real time processing of a single audio stream that is manipulated and eventually played back. Instead, it focuses on efficiently executing mutiple processing pipelines that transform a signal into a feature or feature set. Since Jipes focuses on features instead of the raw, untyped signal streams, it supports rich types to be used, where other frameworks only offer arrays of raw data. Also, by using Java generics, many core interfaces and classes can be typed to whatever class you see fit for the purpose. However, Jipes also comes with useful pre-defined types and support for raw arrays.

Release Notes: This release features a couple of small performance improvements, mainly through the re-use of buffers.

Tags: Audio, information retrieval, DSP, signal processing

Licenses: LGPL

Guile is a portable, embeddable Scheme implementation written in C. Guile provides a machine independent execution platform that can be linked in as a library when building extensible programs.

Release Notes: New features include Cross-compilation, backwards compatible local-eval, syntax-parameters, new macros ‘when’ and "unless’, default values for fluids, garbage collector tuning, a current-warning-port, locale-aware command line parsing, and of course the usual host of bugfixes.

Tags: Software Development, Interpreters, Libraries

Licenses: LGPLv3

Erasm++, the Embedded Runtime Assembler in C++, is an Embedded Domain Specific Language (EDSL) in C++ for runtime code generation. It supports complete compile-time syntax checking, and its code generators run very quickly because necessary data are computed statically. Also included is GenericDsm, a fast and generic instruction decoder library which supports "pattern matching" against the decoded instructions. Only the Intel 64 and IA-32 architectures are supported.

Release Notes: This release fixes bugs in the demo programs and the manual.

Release Tags: Minor bugfixes

Tags: Software Development, Libraries, C++, Assemblers, Disassemblers, EDSL, metaprogramming

Licenses: GPLv3

The ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software) project is an ongoing research effort focusing on applying empirical techniques in order to provide portable performance. It provides C and Fortran77 interfaces to a portably efficient BLAS implementation, as well as a few routines from LAPACK.

Release Notes: This release updates the API of the test harness to work with current LAPACK. It reworks LAPACK bindings accordingly (which breaks compatibility with versions of LAPACK prior to 3.4.0). There are assorted bugfixes.

Release Tags: API update, Bugfixes

Tags: Scientific/Engineering, Mathematics, Software Development, Libraries

Licenses: BSD Original

GNU libmicrohttpd is a small C library for
embedding HTTP server functionality into other
applications. It is reentrant, fast, supports HTTP
1.1, and permits listening on multiple ports. The
API is simple and still powerful enough to allow
programmers to use the entire HTTP feature set.
SSL/TLS support is available as an option.

Release Notes: This release fixes handling of certain (rare) boundary formats in the post processor (now tolerating quotes and garbage data before multi-part boundaries). On systems where "sin_len" is part of "struct sockaddr" (such as FreeBSD), the field is now properly initialized.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Internet, Web, HTTP Servers, Software Development, Libraries

Licenses: LGPL