Planet GNU

GNU Parallel 20100722 has been released. It is available for
download at: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parallel/

New in this release:

• Arguments can now be given on the command line. Example:

parallel bzip2 ::: *.txt

• xapply like functionality. Example:

parallel diff {1} {2} :::: filelist1 filelist2
parallel diff {1} {2} ">"{1.}-{2.}.diff :::: filelist1 filelist2

• Arch Linux package. Thanks to Peter Simons <simons at cryp dot to>

• Mandriva package. Thanks to Sandro Cazzaniga <kharec at mandriva dot org>

• -L -l -n -s now implies -X unless -m is set

About GNU Parallel

GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one
or more machines. A job is typically a single command or a small
script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The
typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a
list of URLs, or a list of tables.

If you use xargs today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as
GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you
write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to
replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several
jobs in parallel. If you use ppss or pexec you will find GNU Parallel
will often make the command easier to read.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as
you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it
possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

You can find more about GNU Parallel at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ or
at http://tinyogg.com/watch/TORaR/ and http://tinyogg.com/watch/hfxKj/

I am pleased to announce the new version of the GNU IceCat web browser.

GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.

This new version includes all changes made upstream in Firefox 3.6.7.

It is available for download here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/icecat-3.6.7-686.tar.xz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/icecat-3.6.7.tar.xz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/privacy_ext.xpi

http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/freeipmi/0.8.8/

FreeIPMI 0.8.8 - 07/20/10
-------------------------
o Support Supermicro 'get-bmc-services-status' and
'set-bmc-services-status' in ipmi-oem.
o Support bmc-watchdog 'ignorestateflag' workaround around more
issues.
o Support Open Session Privilege Workaround around more related
compliance issues.
o Fix bmc-watchdog --version option.
o Fix legacy workaround corner case in channel detection for
Intel nodes.
o Support Quanta reset-to-defaults command in ipmi-oem.
o Modify ipmiconsole protocol to not deactivate SOL protocol is
SOL is already deactivated.
o Modify ipmiconsole protocol to not error out under several
malformed packet scenarios.
o Fix ipmiping/rmcpping command line parsing corner case.
o Minor documentation updates.
o Minor error message output fixes.
o Support --without-random-device configure option for some
embedded systems.

Hi Guys,

  Here are the highlights from this month's merge:

    * GCC understands two new pragmas to save and restore the current diagnostic state.  For example:

       #pragma GCC diagnostic error "-Wuninitialized"
      
       foo (a);                                 /* An error will be generated here.  */

       #pragma GCC diagnostic push               /* The new pragma.  */
      
       #pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "-Wuninitialized"

       foo (b);                               /* No error will be generated here.  */

       #pragma GCC diagnostic pop               /* The new pragma.  */

       foo (c);                               /* An error will be generated here.  */

    * A new warning has been added to GCC: "-Wtrampolines".  This issues a warning message whenever gcc generates a trampoline, which is a small piece of code that is needed whenever the address of a nested function is taken.  Since this piece of code is created at run time on the stack, it requires an executable stack in order work.  This might be a problem for the target execution environment.

    * A new optimization has been added to GCC: "-ftree-loop-if-convert".  This attempts to transform conditional jumps in innermost loops into branch-less equivalents.  The intent is to remove control-flow from the innermost loops in order to improve the ability of the vectorization pass to handle these loops.  This optimization is enabled by default if vectorization is enabled.

    * Another new optimization has been added as well: "-fpartial-inlining".   This optimization will inline parts of functions.  Only the most used parts are inlined, the rest are left in their own function body.  This optimization is enabled by default at -O2.

    * The x86 backend to GCC now has support for the FSGSBASE, RDRND and F16C extensions to the instruction set.

    * Support for the maxq-coff target has been completely removed from the binutils.

    * GAS now supports a new command line option "--compress-debug-sections" which compresses DWARF debug sections in the output file. Compressed debug sections are currently supported by readelf, objdump, and gold, but not, at the moment, by Gnu ld.

Cheers
  Nick

This week… 3273 commits, in 181 projects, by 295 happy hackers (and 427 were translation commits).

• Toms Bauģis added to hamster he possibility to click on a time bar in the overview to get to the detailed day view . (GNOME bug 623872)
• The Bastard Mode option of Quadrapassel has been renamed to “choose difficult blocks”, but it’s still a real bastard.
• Fernando Herrera added Mallard documentation to Dots, the interactive braille transcribing application.
• The calendar backend in evolution-mapi has been made fully asynchronous.
• Thomas Wood added region and city comboboxes to the new date and time control center panel.
• Aleksander Morgado contributed a feature to enable or disable selected books in devhelp . (GNOME bug 619202)
• Nate Stedman replaced the system() call by the usage of libarchive when saving documents in Ease.
• GThumb has been updated to preserve the EXIF data after lossless rotations.
• Vinagre has been migrated to GtkApplication . (GNOME bug 596733)
• Arx Cruz added a new password dialog to Zenity.
• The three-point-oh branch of cheese has been merged, rewriting Cheese in Vala and making advantage of Clutter.
• Paolo Bacchilega ported file-roller to use GSettings.
• Seed has been updated to build against the gtk 2 or gtk 3 versions of WebKit, at user choice.
• John Stowers created a gtk-3.0 branch of pygtk, to prepare a pygtk version that, while not based on gobject introspection, would still be a step towards GNOME 3.
• Aaron Bockover changed the Amazon proxy URIs of Banshee to some supporting geo-IP redirection, redirecting users to the Amazon stores appropriate for their countries.
• Benjamin Otte has been working hard on the “rendering-cleanup” branch of GTK+ 3, chopping much of the old drawing system, where cairo usage is more appropriate now.
• In GSOC land, Dragos Dena finished the snippets editor for Anjuta, Jamie Nicol almost finished implementing Last.fm radio playback in Rhythmbox, Luca Invernizzi completed the couchdb backend of Getting Things GNOME, and others also worked, of course…

This is an artefact of monkey-bubble importing libgnome and libgnomeui history to get a copy of gnome-scores.c

There are now 47 people registered, making this the biggest GNU Hackers meeting yet (full list and schedule).

It's still possible to register but priority for the few remaining spaces will be given to GNU contributors and related free-software projects (free distros, etc). If you want to attend, please email ghm-registration AT gnu.org as soon as possible to confirm your place.

An email with full event details (locations, times, contact numbers, etc) is going out in the next few days to everyone who registered.

The third pretest release of GNU RCS (Revision Control System) is available at:

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/rcs/

NEWS since 5.7.91:

• configuration handles missing _Exit (stdlib.h)

This week… 1620 commits, in 162 projects, by 206 happy hackers (and 232 were translation commits).

• Yuvaraj Pandian T enhanced the speed of swtiching to the effects brower in his Cheese three-point-oh branch.
• Shaun McCance added a (roughly) topological page sort for Mallard documents.
• Evince, GNOME Shell, Brasero and Empathy all have been switched to GTK+ 3.
• Jakub Steiner commited new symbolic icons, forcopy, cut, paste and more.
• Support for non-GObject fundamental objects has been added to gobject-introspection; it is mostly interesting for being able to support GstMiniObject’s which are extensivly used in GStreamer.
• Peter Bloomfield has added support for older IMAP servers, that do not advertise the “RIGHTS=” capability, to Balsa.
• Robert Ancell added support for enumerations in dconf-editor.
• Johan Dahlin pushed a llvm branch into pygobject, he explains the purpose on his website, in Using LLVM to speed up function invocation in a dynamic language binding post.
• A backend for tasks has been pushed into evolution-couchdb.
• Enrico Minack added currency support to the Invest applet . (GNOME bug 339127, GNOME bug 609547).
• The feature_backup2 branch of glom got created, which adds support for making backups, and restore, of glom databases.
• Aaron Bockover added handling of Amazon MP3 store music previews and samples to Banshee.
• The ability to sort by image/video dimensions has been added into gthumb.
• Last, the summers of code are still making improvements, for example Luca Invernizzi started working on both a remember the milk and a couchdb plugins for Getting Things GNOME, and Michal Hruby spent time improving Sezen, etc.

Hello

I am happy to announce the next release of GNU Motti.
This release is numbered 3.0.0 .

Description
===========
GNU motti is a simple multiplayer strategy game.
The objective of the game is to conquer enemies' capitals by occupying and encircling their territories.
The game map is an array of square cells.

Changes in 3.0.0: Saturday July 10
==========================

• New Code
• New Menu
• Save/load of games

Download
========
Gzipped tarballs are available from

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/motti/
or
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/motti/

and its mirror sites. SHA1 sums may be found there as well.

The web site of GNU motti is at:

http://www.gnu.org/software/motti/

For bugs , use the savannah site:http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=motti&func=additem

Sébastien DIAZ <sebastien.diaz@gmail.com>
GNU Motti Maintainer

A provisional timetable of talks at the upcoming Hague meeting (24-25 July) is now available on http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/denhaag/. Speakers include Paolo Carlini (C++0x), Martin Pool (Bazaar), Christian Grothoff (GNUnet), Ralf Wildenhues (Autotools), Steven Bosscher (GCC Link time optimisation), Karl Goetz (GNewSense) and Sylvain Beucler (Distributed Bug Trackers), among others. If you want to attend it is still possible to register for the event.

A month of the Hurd: Debian Installer, clustered page-in, and a bunch of bug fixing. Details.

A bunch of patches have hit the mailing lists and source code repositories:

Jérémie Koenig posted a preliminary patch to add initrd (initial ramdisk) support in GNU Mach for his Google Summer of Code 2010 project: Debian Installer. With this patch, and some other patches that are still in flux, he ended up being able to install a Debian GNU/Hurd system using the Debian Installer -- which is the goal of his project. Patches being in flux means that there's still work left to be done to properly solve some issues, so there's no need to worry that Jérémie wouldn't have any work left until the GSoC ends.

Karim Allah Amed came up with the first patch for porting the clustered paging-in code from OSF Mach to GNU Mach, which should improve the virtual memory performance of the Hurd.

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort got a bug in glibc fixed, which unblocks a problem we've seen in coreutils' ln, and also continued to make progress on other grounds.

Zheng Da began to commit patches to make his DDE project support block device drivers, apart from fixing some other issues, too.

Samuel Thibault fixed memory leaks in pfinet, which is the Hurd's TCP/IP networking unit. Even though that a crashed pfinet server will be restarted upon its next use, having it eat up all system memory is to be avoided, of course -- and is corrected with these patches.

Carl Fredrik Hammar submitted patches to improve the stability of the auth server (rendezvous port death / invalid rendezvous ports).

Lastly, if you haven't seen it already: Richard Hillesley has posted an article GNU HURD: Altered visions and lost promise that caused quite a bunch of discussion -- some of it valid and constructive criticism, some of it less so. If you want to come in contact with us GNU Hurd developers, there are numerous options to contact us!

Get Denemo 0.8.18 http://denemo.org/index.php/Get_Denemo

Release Notes:

-Default behavior is now non-modal
-- You can choose one out of four Shortcut systems, including the "Classic" one.
-- an easy to understand and very slick interface via keyboard
-- seamless integration with MIDI controllers

-Better Paste command.
-Musical Snippets - store musical riffs/motifs to be pasted at will or as rhythmic templates for playing over.

Maximize the space for the score (with/without user's choice of menus).
-- Standard View - window size, zoom, number of systems etc
-- No-Menu version of this view
-- Page View - user chooses a window size, zoom and number of systems, which is stored with the movement for instant recall.
-- Single keyboard shortcut for toggling between these views (Esc by default).

-MIDI transport work for JACK users.
-Fix Chord Symbols for music starting with triplets, grace notes etc.
-Fix display of dotted rests
-Arbitrary Tuplets built in: correct MIDI output as well as engraving, of course.
-Diatonic Transposition: Shift notes and chords up and down respecting the current key signature.
-Support for figured bass extenders, including those with no starting figure.
-Cursor can be highlighted, making it easier to locate
-Page turning is animated: as the last line starts to play, the page visibly turns at the top.
-Purely rhythmic notes playback using percussion - click tracks more easily generated.
-Split Notes and Chords to smaller notes while preserving the original duration (make a quarter note two 8th or tuplet of 8th or 7-tuplet)
-Duplicate a Note or Chord as command
-Command line interface for interactive scheme use
-Support for the "French" clef (G on bottom line)

John Barlow’s new Bazaar TFS plugin adds support for Microsoft Team Foundation Server repositories, allowing one to use Bazaar to branch, merge, and commit code to remote TFS repositories.

We’re going to release bzr 2.2b4 this week, which will be the final beta for the bzr 2.2 series and the start of the 2.2 release branch.  From this point on the 2.2 will be an API freeze, so that any plugins that are updated to work with 2.2b4 will also work with 2.2.0 and future bugfix updates.  We plan to do 2.2.0 at the end of July.

2.2 brings a bunch of performance, correctness and usability improvements.

Do you know how sometimes there is something old at the back of your fridge that you are scared to take out because it probably smells super bad? And you know how it doesn’t get any better with time as you think “if it wasn’t nasty last month, it has to be nasty now!”.

That is sometimes how I feel about my blog, if last month I didn’t blog in a long time, today I didn’t blog in a really really long time! So I am probably officially not a blogger any more.

I still owe some obligatory posts, specifically about my day job, and about the fact that  and giving a prez there.

But now let’s talk about my new toy. Did I need it? Probably not. My T400 is a portable workstation that gives me everything I need. But every 2 years or so I decide to splurge on a new machine, and I am happy to say that I have become increasingly satisfied with my choices each time. My T400 refuses to die or become obsolete, it’s black unimpressive looks doesn’t allow it to get stolen. But it’s been 2 years!

I have been looking at the Thinkpad X series for a while, and debating whether the X201 was ergonomically large enough for full days of work. The X300/X301, priced north of 3k, always seemed obscenely expensive, but I was curious what made it so (is it the whale penis leather exterior?). It’s been lauded as Lenovo’s answer to the Macbook Air, but I have seen those in reality, they looked paper thin. The X301 does not look as miraculous, not even in the sales photos.

One day, while reading the interblogs, I came across a $1,700 discount for the X301. I impulsively clicked “checkout” (after clicking “add 2 year warranty” and “add to basket”). Then came my favorite part about ordering a Thinkpad: the weeks long wait for them to assemble it, ship it, get through customs, and hoping the UPS does not lose it in the back of a truck in rural Wisconsin. After this period, you are sure that the UPS guy is going to deliver pure joy to your doorstep, as this photo suggests:

It’s a pretty nice machine, everything I liked about my T400 in a reduced package. Large enough to work on, but extremely light. Is it worth the $3,000 price tag? No. $1,300? Yes.

My favorite feature is not the 128 GB solid state drive, it’s the fact that the earphone jack is on the side, and not in front like in the T400. The front jack just didn’t work for me, it was super awkward.

My biggest disappointed has been the fingerprint reader. It does not work on Linux, what’s up with that? Are we in 1995? I really looked forward to unlocking my GNOME key ring with my middle finger, that would be so cool.

OK, enough with this guilty materialistic blogging. Next post will either be about my upcoming GUADEC talk about universal design, my fun happy times working on Telepathy and friends, or Israel’s rapid decline from nationalist chauvinism to overt fascism.

!fsfstatus: libreplanet.org (a/k/a groups.fsf.org) is back up again

!fsfstatus: we are working on a problem with login to libreplanet.org; we apologize for the inconvenience

Hello,

Liquid War 6 0.0.8beta has been released today, game is now packaged for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and MaOS/X. Has a bunch of new features including multiple layers, auto speed-calibration, a (totally useless!) splash screen and comes with some music. Network still not working, but getting closer and closer.

Enjoy!

Christian.

Hi everybody,

Mathieu and I are proud to announce the first release
of the GNU Lightning binding for GNU Smalltalk. GNU
lightning exposes a portable interface for generating
machine language at run-time. GNU lightning is fast and
tries to be as little intrusive as possible, so that the
generated code can also be optimized easily. So far,
it has been ported to the x86, SPARC and PowerPC
architecture.

You can find the source code here:

 http://github.com/MrGwen/gst-lightning

To install it:

git clone git://github.com/MrGwen/gst-lightning.git
autoreconf -vi
./configure

read more

The 11th Libre Software Meeting (aka. RMLL) begins this Tuesday, July 6th, in Bordeaux, France. A small group of GNU hackers will be present and a GNU developers room will be available for discussions and lightning talks.

See http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/rmll/ for details and updates. GNU hackers who will attend and are not listed there are welcome to get in touch with us at -unavailable- or ludo@gnu.org!

This week… 2192 commits, in 173 projects, by 235 happy hackers (and 293 were translation commits).

• Jim Evins added native support for SVG images to glabels.
• Ignacio Casal Quinteiro continued porting gedit plugins to libpeas, and Philip Withnall ported totem plugins.
• The possibility to edit metadata of many images is now possible again in gthumb (GNOME bug 618187)
• Ryan Lortie added a GSettings port of Cheese, in the gsettings branch.
• Vinagre got support for RDP connections, wrapping the rdesktop program . (GNOME bug 503456)
• Matthias Clasen added bash completion support for gsettings.
• Nate Stedman added possiblity for the user to insert images into ease.
• Support for OSSv4 and SunAudio has been added to gstreamer-properties . (GNOME bug 618402)
• Shaun McCance finished the transition to GDBus of yelp.
• In the various Summer of Code Jamie Nicol has been making progress on Last.fm radio playback in rhythmbox, Luca Invernizzi finished the first version of a Launchpad backend for Getting Things GNOME, etc.

There are only 7 failing standards compliance tests to pass before I will do the Alpha release of GNU Prolog for Java version 0.2.5.

I would like to thank Michiel Hendriks for writing a lot of the code that makes this possible.

Also the test suites from http://pauillac.inria.fr/~deransar/prolog/suites.html by J.P.E Hodgson have been immensely helpful in finding bugs and unfinished features.

Now RMS can play GNU FreeDink too :)
http://www.freedink.org/screenshots/lemote-yeeloong.jpg

This is Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" and its vanilla 'freedink' package.

From Version 0.8.18 (the next release) on Denemo is going to be GPL v3 (or later) instead of GPL v2.

This is the official license page:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Releases prior to 0.8.18 are still GPLv2.

If you have any questions or problems with the license upgrade please contact the Denemo mailing list: http://denemo.org/index.php/Community

Further discussion about licenses and music notation is welcome in our IRC channel (under the above link). And don't forget our Facebook Group, the perfect place for ranting and argument!
http://de-de.facebook.com/group.php?gid=109406932408728

We will be present at the Libre Software Meeting 2010 in Bordeaux, France (also known at RMLL).

There will be one talk about Savannah and one about Savane, on Wednesday 7th:
http://2010.rmll.info/GNU-Savannah-100-Libre-hosting-platform.html
http://2010.rmll.info/A-new-Savane.html

See you there!

It's unfortunate that SCOTUS has ruled as it has on In Re: Bilski since this was a landmark opportunity to strike down the patentability of software.   Instead they bowed to business as usual and decided to preserve the patentability of software, so our fight goes on with respect to fighting this.

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/06/bilski-v-kappos-business-methods-out-software-still-patentable.html

While it does seem to make software harder to patent, it doesn't go far enough and it seems to be too little too late.   More on this is here:

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0a681b87-8340-4759-8de9-1dd495a405e7
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100628100422167

This is a frustrating day for me and many others, since it seems to make very little change to the status quo.   As others have said, this is a "no-op" and we're back to where we were before Bilski was even started.

Do you want to present something at FSCONS? File a proposal here: http://wiki.fscons.org/page/Call_for_participation_2010 When looking at the submissions so far I can say it’s going to be a great conference this year too. We are in contact with some really skilled hackers and just a few details away from getting them to come over

GWorkspace 0.8.8 is out! Many thanks to all those who helped with testing or contributed with patches.

GWorkspace is GNUstep's standard workspace manager.

Among the improvements:

• the GWMetadata subproject is now controlled by a configure option. This means 
  that sqlite is no longer a hard dependency if live folders and search
  functionality is not desired. It also means that if selected, it will be really
  configured, built and installed (up to now it was manual).
• portability issues fixed (SPARC crashes, HURD constants)
• builds on Windows (MinGW)
• clean-ups and updates in the build system
• extensive warning fixing and code clean-up (like header imports)
• use standard classes and functions (NSProgressIndicator, info panel...)
• improved terminal services interface and interaction
• improvements with the detection of optional PDFkit for the PDF contents inspector

The compulsory screenshot shows GWorkspace running with the Neos theme from GAP.

The June issue of the Free Software Supporter is out -- you can read it and subscribe to receive future monthly issues by e-mail.

I've recently been getting a lot of spam on my site, so I'm changing it so that only members can make comments.   I apologize for any inconvenience.