106gnuworlded.qxd 02.03.2001 14:39 Uhr Seite 106 COMMUNITY BRAVE GNU WORLD BRAVE GNU WORLD GEORG C. F. GREVE Welcome to Georg’s Brave GNU World. I can hardly believe that it is already the two year anniversary of the GNU World Web site. Of course, I’d like to say a few things about that. But first I have an interesting mix of different topics for this month’s issue. GNU Paint dormant for a while. But now GNATS has also found a new maintainer in Milan Zamazal and we GNU Paint (gpaint) by Andy Tai is a port of the should therefore expect to see a new stable release xpaint program to the GTK+ toolkit and the soon. GNOME libraries. It deliberately avoids competing The main problem for the two new maintainers with GIMP, which is more of a high-end program. and the group of volunteers is the inclusion of all Instead GNU Paint concentrates on being very lean the patches that have been written in past years. and easy to use in order to also allow beginners to There will most probably always be problems but manipulate it. the loss of know-how should be avoided. So Gerald The strong GNOME-integration of GNU Paint is is still looking for more developers interested in this a desirable feature because it seeks to be an task. extension of the GNOME desktop. One of its future plans is to make gpaint a Bonobo-component. That Fcron way, other GNOME applications like gnumeric can share the functionality of gpaint. Fcron aims to be a replacement for the wide-spread Being an official GNU Project it comes as no daemons Vixie cron and anacron. The function of surprise that GNU Paint is distributed under the so-called cron-daemons is to start programs at GNU General Public License. As far as further predefined times and they are essential for system development is concerned, Andy would like to maintenance. receive more help from translators to expand the Typically, the daemons allow users to start internationalization; the program itself is otherwise specific programs at a certain time, date and/ or day very usable . of week and send the user a mail upon completion with the result of the program. They normally also Gnatsweb support periodical time specifications like every 2 hours or every minute. Fcron by Thibault Godouet Gnatsweb, a Web-based front-end for the GNU Bug expands this in several interesting ways. First of all it Tracking System, has found a new maintainer in is also possible to make the program start Gerald Pfeifer. dependent on the system-load, which is an The GNU Bug Tracking System is one of the indicator for how busy the system is. It also supports most robust bug-tracking systems available and is in the specification of a field that specifies the use by projects and companies around the world. Its recipient of the mail sent upon completion – mails function is to give users an easy way to report bugs do not have to go to the user running the program. that can then be fixed by developers. One of the Furthermore, there is a field for nice-values that core features is the coordination of cooperative can be used to determine the priority of the work. This reduces the danger of simultaneous program directly. Also very interesting is the solutions for the developers whilst users can check capability to also specify how often a program whether an error is already known or even fixed. should be started. This makes it possible to specify The last stable version of GNATS was released in something like ‘start it once a day either between 1993 and the official development has been 3:00 and 6:00 or 19:00 and 22:00.’ 106 LINUX MAGAZINE 7 · 2001 106gnuworlded.qxd 02.03.2001 14:39 Uhr Seite 107 BRAVE GNU WORLD COMMUNITY Especially for computers that are not running permanently, the execution intervals can be keyed to the uptime instead of the normal time. So a program could be run all 24 hours of uptime, for instance. In order to avoid making the configuration file obscure, it is possible to have entries being valid for multiple lines and jobs can be serialized to prevent them from running in parallel. Currently, fcron is still in the beta-test phase but it is already rather stable. So the current goal is to test it thoroughly and to release a stable version. Thibault is still looking for volunteers, especially for testing under different environments and situations. Euklides Euklides is an extension of LaTeX under the GNU General Public License that provides a command- language to create Euclidean geometry. Christian Obrecht, author of Euklides, sees LaTeX-using maths teachers like himself as the plans on writing a GTK+ based front-end – this will biggest target audience. But every pupil and allow users to change figures interactively. student can probably benefit from it. Thanks to the The next project could be especially interesting included euk2ps shell-script it is possible to create to users reading their mail with EMACS. encapsulated postscript files, which can be viewed with Ghostview, directly out of the Euklides- Etach commands. The advantage of Euklides in comparison with John M. Rulnick wrote Etach, which is an EMACS other programs like DrGeo or Kseg is that Euklides is extension for easy and comfortable use of MIME- not limited to WYSIWYG interfaces like those attachments in email. programs are, because WYSIWYG is not necessarily Although there are several projects in this area, John the best method to describe geometrical figures. wasn’t really satisfied by any of them, so he finally But since a GUI can be very helpful sometimes, he started writing his own. His prime incentive was to 7 · 2001 LINUX MAGAZINE 107 106gnuworlded.qxd 02.03.2001 14:39 Uhr Seite 108 COMMUNITY BRAVE GNU WORLD make it as easy as possible to attach MIME GNU Serveez provides routines and help for IP- attachments when composing mail and saving based servers (TCP, UDP and ICMP) as well as MIME attachments to disk in incoming mail. For this named pipes for all connection-based protocols. It reason Etach was written so that some often- demonstrates in a portable manner the different needed tasks are easy to do, whilst offering multiple aspects of network programming and is reported to options for customization to your own needs. run on GNU/Linux and other 32-bit and 64-bit Etach works together with versions of EMACS Unices as well as Microsoft Windows and has no limiting dependencies. This makes it (9x/ME/NT/2000). Among the funniest experiences easy to install – which should encourage EMACS- during development accordingly to the developers beginners especially to check it out. are the built-in restriction of some Windows- The status of etach is ‘almost finished’, as John Systems. Windows 95 for instance can only have up himself does not plan any more extensions although to 100 TCP-connections system-wide. he is open to suggestions and willing to implement Users can implement their own servers with them. Although etach is officially available as beta- GNU Serveez or use it to understand how a server release, there has been no bug-report filed for several works. The servers included in GNU Serveez can be months so it is probably ready to be considered stable. used as examples for this. The servers included are, for example, a very fast and easy to configure HTTP- server, an extremely clean IRC server or a Gnutella GNU Serveez spider. Since GNU Serveez is entirely covered under NU Serveez is a server-framework originally written the GNU General Public Licence, routines can also by Martin Grabmüller and now maintained by be used directly in own projects. Raimund Jacob and Stefan Jahn. People especially interested in the exotic should take a look at GNU Serveez. There is for instance a very well functioning TCP-over-ICMP tunnel and all protocols included in GNU Serveez can run on a single port. The easy configuration and installation especially, have been a prime goal of the developers in order to allow normal users to benefit from GNU Serveez. To keep this up and/or to improve it even further is very high on the list for further development. There are plans to put the functionality into a libserveez library so other projects can use it and to make the server extensible with the help of dynamically loaded modules. The developers are also considering moving the configuration language from Scheme to Guile. People running a network at home could be interested to hear that the plans for further servers also include an easy to configure DNS-server that can modify its functionality accordingly to the online/offline status of the local network. But now I would like to introduce a project that I consider extremely important. GNU Enterprise The GNU Enterprise project has been started by Derek A. Neighbors and has the goal of covering 108 LINUX MAGAZINE 7 · 2001 106gnuworlded.qxd 02.03.2001 14:39 Uhr Seite 109 BRAVE GNU WORLD COMMUNITY the complete area of tasks normally needed by But the column has not only survived, it is still enterprises under the GNU General Public Licence. growing. Two Korean translators – Lee Jong Keun The project is modular and several of the and Ki-Young Choi, have joined the Brave GNU modules are usable out of the box, while others are World family. Thus, the column now appears in six included on an extensible or customizable basis.