prostoalex writes "BusyBox, a stripped-down minimalistic toolkit for embedded Linux, is now shipping 1.0.0. ChangeLog is available on the project Web site."

Pan T. Hose writes "The long awaited release of Parrot 0.1.1 "Poicephalus" has been finally announced on perl.perl6.internals newsgroup and perl6-internals mailing list simultaneously by Leopold Toetsch followed by an announcement on use Perl by Will Coleda and now also on Slashdot." (Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links.)

theodp writes "Do you use drop-down menus, alphanumerical input boxes, check boxes, radio buttons or sliders to allow client side-processing of data? Utilize SQL, HTML, ActiveX, Java, Perl, JavaScript or JScript to do so? Employ arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, or decision trees to organize things? Well Bunky, you might be infringing on Microsoft's new patent for Dynamically adjusting data values and enforcing valid combinations of the data in response to remote user input, which the USPTO granted Tuesday after 6+ years and two rejections."

Michael Pyne writes "It's finally out, KDE 3.3.1 has been released with many bugfixes and translation improvements! Those who just want to start downloading can visit the KDE 3.3.1 Info page, which also includes packages for Red Hat, SuSE, Conectiva, and Yoper." wikinerd adds some details, writing that the new version "fixes a number of bugs in Konqueror, improves JuK and enables VPL in the Quanta webpage editor. The new Plastik theme is very fast and may become the default style in 3.4."

Golygydd Max writes "Dave Voorhis from the University of Derbyshire has developed a program incorporating Tutorial D, a language designed to overcome of the shortcomings of SQL, and developed some years ago by Hugh Darwen and Chris Date. Until now, no-one had done anything with it but Voorhis is hoping for wider adoption; although we think it would be like pushing water uphill though." Update: 10/13 12:43 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "It's being picky I know, but the university in question is in fact called The University Of Derby, not Derbyshire."

kourge writes "Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted. Today, Croquet Project released its initial developer release, codenamed 'Jasmine.' Although it isn't a finished product, it still is complete enough for developers to develop in Croquet. Croquet itself is written in Squeak, a branch of the Smalltalk language. Please remember to download Croquet via BitTorrent, which provides faster speeds and won't overload the server." The idea is ambitious: An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it. Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.

xiando writes "LinuxReviews has interviewed the BitlBee developer team: Wilmer van der Gaast, Maurits Dijkstra and Jelmer Vernooij, with a word from former developer Sjoerd Hemminga. Find out what new cool features will be available in v1.0, what features have been implemented so far and what visions these bright young men have for the future of BitlBee and the Open Source community." BitlBee is a daemon which does the necessary black magic to translate IRC messages to those of various instant message networks, letting a user use emacs (for instance) as an MSN messenger client.

Adrian Spinei writes "From a documentation point of view, Hibernate is one of the most notable exception in the world of LGPL'ed projects. Its website offers a plethora of information, from solid documentation (the reference has no less than 141 pages) and various FAQs to sample projects and third-party resources. The forum is quite active and you may get answers to tricky questions. Or a little bit of rough treatment in case you haven't RTFM - but that is understandable, given the number of questions that the authors have to answer every day. Under these circumstances, one might wonder what Gavin King (Hibernate founder) and Christian Bauer (documentation/website maintainer and Hibernate core developer) can add in order to be able to write a 400-pages book about Hibernate. I mean - sure - only by joining the reference documentation, different FAQs and guides, one can easily 'extract' a hefty 'manuscript' with more than 200 pages." Read on for Spinei's review of Hibernate in Action.

SexyFingers writes "Sun released Java 1.5. The non-API stuff that they've added made it finally "catch-up" with C# - since both languages are built to support OOP from the ground-up, their constructs become almost identical as additional OOP "features" are supported. So if you're doing C# and your foundations in OOP are rock-solid, there really isn't any difference whether you're coding C# or Java."

An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.

Xampper writes "Just BASIC beta candidate 2 has just been released, and can be found at the JB website. The programming language is based on the popular Liberty BASIC language, and is a slightly watered down, but free, version. Standalone executables can be made, and the language is easy to grasp, especially for beginners." (Note, this is a Windows-specific language.)

sally bitter writes "Linux 2.6 kernel Real-Time? It is going to happen soon. Montavista developers submitted patches today to LKML to begin testing all the low latency task preempt and interrupt stuffs they're introducing."

EqualSlash writes "The Windows installer for the upcoming MySQL 4.1 release will be built using Microsoft's first ever open source project - Windows Installer XML toolset(Wix). According to an InternetNews report, they are using Wix to convert the MSI file designed using InstallShield into XML to achieve greater control over the installer. Of course, they are simply using it because it's Open Source (CPL license) and in good faith. Earlier this year, when Microsoft surprised everybody by releasing the Wix project under an open source license, some were cautious about using it, as the specific XML schema it uses might be patented just like the Office xml schema. Whatever.. Rob Mensching, Wix's lead developer, is very happy about MySQL choosing to use Wix for their installer."

spirality asks: "I've been developing under *NIX since I started writing software about ten years ago, and my company has been developing its product under *NIX since its inception. Until recently that is. We just completed the first Windows version of our product. Under Unix we used CVS with a custom build environment that we developed in house, and it simply can not be ported to Windows. What are Slashdot users, who must develop under Windows, using for a development environment?"

BlueMoon writes "After almost 2 years of silence a new version of OpenXDK (the open source, free and legal development kit for the Microsoft Xbox) has been released. It has now a complete libc replacement, multimedia support (video, joysticks and event handling) using the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) and it migrated to a GCC-based toolchain. To demonstrate the capabilities of the framework, the SDL port of Doom is able to be compiled and executed."

An anonymous reader writes "ONLamp.com Security section has published an interesting interview with Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of hping. Among other things, it talks about nmap, idle-scan, and low level network analisys with simple Tcl scripts."

Andy Gimblett writes "Alan Cox recently gave a talk in which he discussed some current and emerging techniques for producing higher quality software. Some of these will be familiar to Slashdot readers, such as validation tools, type checking, etc, but others seem heavily influenced by his recent MBA. In particular, he has a lot to say about Quality Assurance in the software world, and the kinds of things we should be doing (and some people are doing) to make better software. Story and lots of quotes at Ping Wales, and video at IT Wales."

JohnA writes "I can't believe this hasn't received more attention than it has, but Caucho Software released their award-winning Java application server Resin under the GPL. This means that you are no longer bound to Tomcat and its less-than-stellar performance when deploying Java-based web apps."

Number Ten Ox writes "According to The Register the BBC wants help to develop their open source video codec Dirac. '[Lead developer Dr. Thomas] Davies said the codec could live on anything from mobile phones to high-definition TVs but not before a lot of further work is completed. For one thing, Dirac doesn't currently work in real-time. Davies also reckons that the compression offered by the technology could be further optimised. The BBC is working on integrating the technology with its other systems, but the corporation would welcome more help in developing Dirac.' Sounds like something worth helping with."

norburym writes "W. Jason Gilmore and Apress have put together an impressive volume, both in girth and content, in Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL, From Novice to Professional. At first glance, it appears that any technical manual that tries to approach such heady stuff such as PHP and MySQL for an audience ranging the span from beginner to the uber-geek is headed for failure. Happily, I can report that Gilmore and Apress have given the world one book that will replace many other PHP and MySQL volumes. This is one that the reader will consistently rely on and keep near to hand." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.