Open Source Pixels

Kubuntu lead developer Jonathan Riddell has sent out an announcement that
Canonical will no longer be funding work on the KDE-based Kubuntu
distribution. “The practical changes are I won’t be able to work on KDE bits in my
work time after 12.04 and there won’t be paid support for versions
after 12.04. This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not
been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic
to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it.“

TAMS (Text Analysis Markup System) Analyzer is a qualitative or ethnographic coding and data extraction-analysis system.

Release Notes: Bugfixes, improvements to the interface, and the ability to export and import project resources.

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements, Major bugfixes

Tags: Other/Nonlisted Topic, Scientific/Engineering, Text Processing, Linguistic, Markup, qualitative, research

Licenses: GPL

fstransform is a tool to change a file-system from one format to another. For example, it can change from jfs, xfs, or reiser to ext2, ext3, or ext4. It works in-place and without the need for backup. It currently has been tested on Linux only. It uses a sparse file to create the new file-system image, moves all the files of the existing file-system into it, then remaps the sparse file to the original partition.

Release Notes: This release adds a configure script and portable Makefiles generated by GNU automake. It also includes stricter safety checks for devices whose length is not a multiple of file-system block size, and new –no-questions, –irreversible, and –show-time options to give users more control over fstransform execution. The fsmove program has been improved and now checks for free space at startup, and periodically shows progress percentage and estimated time remaining. Finally, a warning has been added to README with information about transforming an almost-full device to the ‘xfs’ filesystem.

Tags: Administration, File system, format conversion

Licenses: GPLv2

Trac is a minimalistic but highly useful issue tracker and
software project environment based around an integrated Wiki
engine. Features include an interface to Subversion (source
revision control), a bug/issue tracking database, and
convenient report facilities.

Release Notes: This maintenance release added support for Subversion 1.7, MySql 5.5.3 utf8mb4 character set, and jQuery 1.4.4. It contains a number of fixes, improving the stability and the correctness of the software.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor

Tags: Software Development, Quality Assurance, Information Management, Issue Tracking, Version Control, Bug Tracking

Licenses: BSD Revised

The Legend of Edgar is a 2D platform game with a persistent world. When Edgar’s father fails to return home after venturing out one dark and stormy night, Edgar fears the worst: he has been captured by the evil sorcerer who lives in a fortress beyond the forbidden swamp. In The Legend of Edgar, you take on the role of Edgar as he ventures across the world, battling fearsome creatures and solving puzzles while trying to find and rescue his father.

Release Notes: The next part of the optional quest was added. The Fortress Mine map and a puzzle in the Laboratory map were changed. A new medal was added: "Completed the game without continuing". Another cheat that prevents instant death in lava was added. Memory leaks in the menus were fixed and some spelling problems were corrected.

Tags: Games/Entertainment, Arcade

Licenses: GPL

Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: vectors, matrices, and related algorithms. It is versatile, fast, elegant and works on many platforms.

Release Notes: The key change in this release is the possibility to fall back to Intel MKL (or another external BLAS library) for a couple of operations. These completely optional backends can be enabled through some compile-time preprocessor directives.
This version also adds support for the Intel MKL PARDISO direct sparse solver., and provides improved performance for small matrix-matrix products, support for rank updates/downdates in LDLt and LLT, a new fast sparse matrix assembly interface from a random list of triplets, and many other minor improvements and fixes.

Release Tags: Major, Unstable

Tags: Scientific/Engineering, Visualization, Mathematics, Software Development, Libraries, Linear Algebra

Licenses: LGPLv3, GPLv2+

M.A.M.E. Catalog / Launcher II (also referred to as QMC2) is the successor of one of the first XMAME GUI frontends available, QMamecat (derived from MAMECAT, which was text-only). QMC2 has been rebuilt from scratch as a Qt 4 project. Parts of the design and code were inspired by its predecessor. The new design was made as flexible as possible to minimize dependencies from frontend- and CLI-related MAME changes, which was a major deficiency of QMamecat. QMC2 uses a template-based MAME configuration scheme, which can easily be enhanced with additional command line options (defined in an XML template file).

Release Notes: The most important highlights in this release include a major overhaul of the software list support, support for Emulator embedding on Windows, and a change to the MESS device configuration to offer available device instances based on the slot options specified. A semi-transparent overlay widget was added to the YouTube video player. Available driver information can be looked up in a MESS wiki (MESS targets only). Zip support was added for software snapshots.

Release Tags: Versioning pattern changed, many enhancements

Tags: Emulators

Licenses: GPL

Virtualmin is a Webmin module that simplifies the
process of setting up and managing virtual servers.
It can create Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS
domains, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and
set up Sendmail or Postfix to accept email for a
domain. It can also manage mailboxes and mail
aliases within a domain.

Release Notes: This new version improves the speed of restores by creating new meta-information files during backups, updates script installers, allows domain owners to restore backups made by root, improves SNI support, allows backup deletion policy to be set on a per-destination basis, adds the modify-proxy API command, and fixes several bugs.

Tags: Systems Administration

Licenses: GPL

gscan2pdf is a GUI to ease the process of producing PDFs from scanned documents. You scan in
one or several pages and create a PDF of selected
pages. Scanning is handled with SANE via scanimage. PDF conversion is done by PDF::API2. Perl is used for portability and ease of programming, with gtk2-perl for the GUI.

Release Notes: PDF metadata was fixed. PDFs are no longer bloated by embedding fonts multiple times. HTML entities returned by Ocropus are decoded. Saving of PS files was fixed. The viewer can optionally be started after saving. ‘Email as PDF’ was fixed. An error message when importing DjVu with spaces in the file name was fixed. Multiple sessions are supported. The SANE handle can optionally be cycled after a scan. Import of PDFs with greyscale and colour images was fixed. Opening of session files was fixed. The Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish, and Turkish translations were updated.

Tags: multimedia, Graphics, Capture, Scanners, Office/Business

Licenses: GPL

PEDSIM is a microscopic pedestrian crowd simulation system. The PEDSIM library allows you to use pedestrian dynamics in your own software. Based on pure C++/STL without additional packages, it runs virtually on every operating system. The PEDSIM Demo Application gives you a quick overview of the capabilities, and is a starting point for your own experiments. PEDSIM is suitable for use in crowd simulations (e.g. indoor evacuation simulation, large scale outdoor simulations), where one is interested in output like pedestrian density or evacuation time. Since the quality of the individual agent’s trajectory is high, PEDSIM can be used for creating massive pedestrian crowds in movies.

Release Notes: The spatial representation of the agents in the scene is now done using a quadtree. This improves performance if there are many agents. It is now also possible to define the scenario of the simulation in a config file. A simple XML syntax defines obstacles/walls, agents, and waypoints.

Release Tags: demoapp, libpedsim

Tags: Games/Entertainment, Simulation, Graphics, 3D Modeling, Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Computing

Licenses: GPL, Commercial