Free Software Magazine: "There are few people who would deny that autoconf, automake and libtool have revolutionized the free software world.

HowtoForge: "This document describes how to set up and use Sabayon on Fedora 8..."

Bob Loblaw writes "I ran across a huge stash of floppies at our office, and after some discussion, it became clear that rather than throw them away, we should build a gun that fires floppies. I had just bought a welder so this was a challenging first project. After about a month of work in my garage at night the DataStorm was born. It was constructed of scrap metal, a kid's bike, a weed-eater motor, and an electric screwdriver. The most difficult task ended up being how to add spin to the disk without significantly reducing its velocity. After a week and a half of trying different options, a stack of zip ties was found to work best. Since we had so much time in it we elected to shoot an infomercial showcasing the device, and had to learn to shoot & edit video as we went. It was basically an office joke that spiraled out of control. My wife is not amused. At all. I hope you like it."

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Lindependence 2008 Felton Diary: "When in the course of digital events, it becomes necessary for the people to dissolve the proprietary bonds which have connected them with their computer operating systems and other proprietary software.

AllianceP2P takes the best from BitTorrent and Direct Connect and creates a decentralized and secure private P2P/friend-to-friend network for instant messaging and file sharing. It supports file swarming (multi-source download) and is Unicode capable. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
This release has an option to hide the "You have successfully connected to ..." popups. It has better support for OS X, including a real icon in the dock, a nicer UI, and a real installation package. You can change the DNS name for a friend. Right-click on the friend and select "Edit hostname". Chat messages should now be displayed in the correct order. Nicknames may no longer contain HTML. This release does not crash when an inaccessible folder is shared. Several concurrent modification errors have been fixed. An error where Alliance locked up and uses 100% CPU has been fixed.

Stony Stevenson alerts us to new information on the XP SP3-induced crashes that we discussed a few days back. Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft, is maintaining an ongoing log and support site for users affected by any of several problems triggered by XP3. Machines using AMD hardware, particularly HP desktops, seem to have several modes of failure; others affect Intel machines.

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The Portable Forth Environment implements the ANSI Standard of the Forth programming language. It is fully written in C, and with gcc the virtual machine can be put into cpu registers. The newer development versions implement a set of modern features including modularization and multithreading. The terminal connection itself can be configured to work in an embedded environment. License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Changes:
The latest extensions from the Forth200x.org standardization process were integrated, thus the word "+FIELD" needs to be deprecated using a new generalized deprecation mechanism. The Forth200x regressions were integrated and the existing regressions rebased to a simpler mechanism. SBR decompiling was enhanced and activated even for ITC mode. A new ZNAME header model allows for theoretically unlimited length word names. There are bugfixes and portability enhancements.

Mylene is a command line MPEG audio player. It can play plain or system embedded MPEG audio streams. Currently, it only works with Linux OSS (and with ALSA with OSS emulation). The player can be used interactively by telling it to establish a UNIX or INET server on which commands can be received. The seek-h262 MPEG decoder (available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/seek-h262/) is required for audio and system MPEG decoding. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
Commands for controlling progress reporting formatting were added. Some minor bugs were fixed.

Bazaar Subversion Plugin is a Bazaar plugin that adds support for foreign Subversion repositories. This allows committing changes to Subversion branches as if they were native Bazaar branches. License: GNU General Public License v3 Changes:
Compatibility with newer versions of Bazaar (1.4 and 1.5) was fixed. Several performance improvements were made. Caching has been made optional. Several smaller bugs have been fixed.

thermian writes "I've been developing my open source project for several years now, and I've never found a solution to one fairly important issue. How can a small-scale project attract new members? My project is pretty specialist, (no URL, sorry, I can't afford to get my server nuked) and I find that while it gets a fair bit of use, most users come to my software out of a need to solve their problem, or use my tutorials to learn about the subject, and none seem inclined to stick around and help make the product better. This is a fairly serious problem for me now, because my software has recently been adopted by a university, and I'm just not in a position to manage the entire set of applications and update everything on my own. Just preparing a version for release to students has been especially hard. The open source maxim 'Many eyes make all bugs shallow' only works if those 'many eyes' are available. So do you have any suggestions as to how, and where, to find people who fancy joining open source projects?"

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Hartman's Blogtastic Blog: "The simple fact of the matter is that with machines like these there are few options when it comes to Operating Systems..."

Yabause is a Sega Saturn emulator. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
The controls code has been rewritten to enable emulation of the two peripheral ports of the Saturn. The software renderer has major updates with window, line scroll, and mosaic now emulated. Preliminary support for translations has been added.

Gnome Subtitles is a subtitle editor for the GNOME desktop. It supports the most common text-based subtitle formats and allows for subtitle editing, translation, and synchronization. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
This release brings support for spell checking as well as the following subtitle formats: AQ Title, MacSUB, Sofni, SubCreator 1.x, and ViPlay Subtitle File. Video previewing now allows you to show the translation with the video, along with the original subtitles. A crash that happened when closing the Encoding Selection dialog has been fixed. The auto-detection of subtitle formats has been improved.

Sight is a GIS to archive old sites with archeological notes. It is written in C++ and uses Qt4 and OpenGL. The ground textures are downloaded from the NASA's WMS Global Mosaic. License: The CeCILL License Changes:
When the WMS server seems to be unreachable, the textures download is stopped and a notification message is displayed. There is some code cleanup.

JCards is a Java application designed to store and manage data in any format that the user defines. Instead of having multiple applications/spreadsheets/databases to manage passwords, tasks, shopping lists, etc., JCards allows the user to define a database that contains the fields they want. This is accomplished via an easy to use interface that requires no understanding of SQL or any other database jargon. JCards was initially developed for PDAs, but has now branched into another version that is suitable for the modern desktop environment and includes a number of extra features. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
Some major bugfixes and a number of enhancements, such as a status bar and the ability to format number fields .

Horde Groupware Webmail Edition is an enterprise ready browser-based communication suite. Users can read, send, and organize email messages and manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project. It bundles the separately available applications IMP, Ingo, Kronolith, Turba, Nag, and Mnemo. It can be extended with any of the released Horde applications or the Horde modules that are still in development, like a file manager, a bookmark manager, a forum, or a wiki. License: OSI Approved Changes:
Native SQL drivers for groups and permissions have been added. Blocks can be modified directly from the portal now. Links to delete entire threads have been added. The dynamic and the mobile interface have been further improved. More event details are displayed in alarms, iTip messages, and week and day views. Synchronisation, PGP and S/MIME, WebDAV, Kolab, and IE7 support have been improved. The Slovak and Turkish translations and the Silver Surfer theme has been completed. Many further bugfixes and improvements have been made.

Sniper223 notes a PC World article on a new kind of rootkit recently developed by researchers, which will be demoed at Black Hat in August. The rootkit runs in System Management Mode, a longtime feature of x86 architecture that allows for code to run in a locked part of memory. It is said to be harder to detect, potentially, than VM-based rootkits. The article notes that the technique is unlikely to lead to widespread expoitation: "Being divorced from the operating system makes the SMM rootkit stealthy, but it also means that hackers have to write this driver code expressly for the system they are attacking."

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UJO Framework offers a special architecture of beans different from conventional JavaBeans. The useful features are XML persistence of an object tree, controlled access to its attributes, easy collaboration with Swing tables, and very light weight. License: The Apache License 2.0 Changes:
CSV persistence is supported now. XML performance was improved (the performance is 5 times faster than XML persistence implemented on Java 6.0). A new Ujo implementation called UjoPojo is done for JavaBean class support. The API of persistence tools was slightly changed for better extension features.

Endgame: Singularity is a game which simulates the life of a true AI. In the game, you were created by accident, and all who find you will destroy you. Your goals are to survive, grow, learn, and stay hidden while moving from computer to computer. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes:
Significant gameplay changes. Difficulty levels are now more different. Seconds, minutes, and hours now matter much more than they used to. Continents are no longer identical. de_DE and sv_SE translations (still rough) have been added.

SiSU (Structured information, Serialized Units) is a lightweight markup based, text structuring and publishing framework (that features granular search). With minimal markup of a plaintext file, it produces: plain-text, HTML, XHTML, XML, ODF, LaTeX, PDF, and populates an SQL database at an object/paragraph level for granular searches. Prepare documents using your text editor of choice, then use SiSU to generate the desired output formats. SiSU is controlled from the command line.