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Development
The Elastix PBX system
Elastix is a Linux-based telephone Private Branch eXchange (PBX) telephony system that is built on the CentOS Linux distribution. Elastix uses the Asterisk PBX software as its base and adds a number of extensions. Elastix is being developed by PaloSanto Solutions.
From the Elastix User Manual [pdf]:
Some of the Elastix features include:
- A web-based user interface.
- A built-in help interface.
- Modular design for easy management of features.
- Support for multiple virtualized systems on one platform.
- Can present a variety of system status reports.
- A built-in voicemail system.
- Support for VoIP telephony.
- Support for faxes with fax to email conversion.
- Support for instant messaging.
- a built-in mail server.
- Support for video phones.
- A billing interface.
- Support for automatic outgoing telemarketing calls.
- Multi-language support.
Stable version 1.1 of Elastix was recently announced:
![[Elastix]](/images/ns/Elastixlogo.png)
An Elastix 1.1 CD image was downloaded and burned onto a CDROM. The CD was installed onto an old 1.4 Ghz Athlon system with a 15GB hard drive. To actually use the system, an Asterisk-compatible telephone interface card should be installed on the host machine. The system installed with no problems, booted up and the login screen came up with a message to access the system via the web on the DHCP-supplied LAN address.
The Elastix web interface was accessed from another local machine. At this point, the documentation (still at version 0.9) fell short due to a lack of information on the required username/password. A little searching on Google revealed the answer (admin/palosanto) from the online Elastix PBX Installation instructions.
Once logged into the web interface, clicking through the many different pages showed that the system appeared to be functioning normally. An incredible array of capabilities exist in the system and it looks to be fairly easy to master. It was not possible to test any real telecom uses due to the lack of a telephone interface card, however adding and configuring a card can be done after the system has been installed.
If you have a need for a low cost PBX, or simply want an easy way to play with Asterisk, Elastix is a good way to proceed.
System Applications
Database Software
PostgreSQL Weekly News
The June 22, 2008 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Web Site Development
Midgard 1.9.0 alpha1 released
Version 1.9.0 alpha1 of the Midgard web content management system has been announced. "Midgard 1.9 has been designed as a version easing the transition from Midgard 1.x to Midgard 2. To aid developers, the release includes both the classic Midgard APIs that are now deprecated, and the new schema-based Midgard 2 APIs. This means that the release can be used to run both Midgard 1 applications like the version 2.8 of the MidCOM component framework, and Midgard 2 applications like MidCOM 3. Some new and experimental features of Midgard 2 series like D-Bus signaling on I/O events is also available on Midgard 1.9."
Midgard 2.0.0 alpha2 released
Version 2.0.0 alpha2 of the Midgard web content management system has been announced. "The second alpha of the Midgard 2.0 branch is targeted at web framework and desktop developers. This release does not consist of the CMS components, but instead targets at providing the development tools for building a modern web framework. Framework based not only on one tool, but which can connect multiple technologies and languages. This is also the first Midgard release which doesn't provide Apache module. The version 3 of MidCOM web content management components for PHP5 are currently in the process of being ported to the Midgard 2.0 platform."
nginx 0.7.5 released
Version 0.7.3 of the nginx web server has been announced, it adds some new functionality and a bug fix. See the CHANGES file for details.
Desktop Applications
BitTorrent Applications
aria2: 0.14.0 released (SourceForge)
Version 0.14.0 of aria2 has been announced. "aria2 is a utility for downloading files. The supported protocols are HTTP(S),FTP, BitTorrent, Metalink. It can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and utilizing your download bandwidth to the maximum. This release adds epoll support for linux and the ability to limiting the number of files to be opened to support more than 1024 files in multi file torrent."
Desktop Environments
GARNOME 2.23.4 released
Version 2.23.4 of GARNOME, the bleeding edge GNOME distribution, has been announced. "This is the third development release on our trip to GNOME 2.24, which will be out in September. This release is for anyone who wants to get his hands dirty on the development branch, or who'd like to get a peek at future features. If you want to help spot issues in GARNOME, this release is for you as well."
GNOME Software Announcements
The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:- Evince 2.23.4 (new features, bug fixes and translation work)
- gtkmm-utils 0.3.2 (new features and bug fixes)
- nemiver 0.5.4 (bug fixes and translation work)
- PaperBox 0.3.1 (bug fix)
- Tasque 0.1.6 (new features and bug fixes)
KDE 4.1 Beta 2 ready for testing (KDE.News)
KDE.News notes the availability of the second beta of KDE 4.1. "Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines."
KDE Software Announcements
The following new KDE software has been announced this week:- AerX 1.0 (initial release)
- FALF Player 1.2/1.3dev (new features and bug fixes)
- KAlarm 1.5.3 / 2.0.0 beta (bug fixes and translation work)
- KMLDonkey 0.11 for KDE3 (new features and bug fixes)
- KTrafficAnalyzer 0.4.0-1 (new features and bug fixes)
- ManDVD 2.5-0 (bug fixes)
- MPlayerThumbs 1.0 (new features and bug fixes, first stable release)
- NoteFinder 2.1 (usability improvements)
- QVideoConverter 0.2 (new features)
- simon 0.1-alpha-2 (new features and bug fixes)
- SMILE 0.1.3 (performance improvements and bug fixes)
- YouTube Downloader+ 1.7 (unspecified)
Xorg Software Announcements
The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:- pixman 0.11.6 (new feature and bug fix)
- xf86-input-diamondtouch 0.3.0 (new features, bug fixes and documentation work)
- xf86-input-evdev-2.0.1 (bug fixes)
- xf86-video-ati 6.8.192 (new features, bug fixes and documentation work)
Fonts and Images
Linux Libertine version 2.8.14 released
Version 2.8.14 of the Linux Libertine font set has been announced. "Recent changes are: - TTF-Hinting improvements because of better TTF-Instruction of FontForge - some small kerning improvements - glyphs U+02BE and U+02BF are no combining charakters > corrected - kerning problem with 9 in italic corrected - some small corrections as usual - slavonic church signs added - Added cartouches for numbers between 0 and 99 at uniE128 till uniE12A - Change punctuationspace to width of fullstop (.) It is now 450 of width and not 350. New is furthermore our XeTex tutorial"
Mail Clients
Sylpheed 2.5.0 released
Stable version 2.5.0 of the Sylpheed mail client has been announced. "2.5.0 includes several new features and feature improvements. Stability has been also improved."
Multimedia
Gnash 0.8.3 released
Version 0.8.3 of the Gnash flash player has been announced. "Improvements since 0.8.2 release are: * Native fullscreen support (from AS) implemented. * Long command-line options properly supported. * View detailed movie information from GTK gui. * Added an option in Preferences to initially display a movie as a blank ("Click here to start") screen. * Added "dump" GUI to dump a movie to disk. * Improved Cairo rendering performance. * Fix support for OpenOffice Impress SWF exporter (malformed..)"
Music Applications
libsmf 1.1 released
Version 1.1 of libsmf has been announced. "Libsmf is a library for loading and writing Standard MIDI Files, i.e. files with the ".mid" extension. The only dependancy is glib. It was tested under Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris."
Office Applications
Chandler Desktop 0.7.7 released
Version 0.7.7 of Chandler Desktop, a networked information management system, has been announced. "For more information on the 0.7.7 release of Chandler Desktop, including a link to the list of bugs fixed, see the following blog post".
Languages and Tools
Caml
Caml Weekly News
The June 24, 2008 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Haskell
Haskell Weekly News
The June 18, 2008 edition of the Haskell Weekly News is out with new Haskell language articles.
Perl
Parrot 0.6.3 released
Version 0.6.3 of Parrot has been announced, it includes several new capabilities, performance improvements and bug fixes. "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.3 "Beautiful Parrot." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages."
This Week on perl5-porters (use Perl)
The June 7-13, 2008 edition of This Week on perl5-porters is out with the latest Perl 5 news.
Python
Python 2.6b1 and 3.0b1 are available
Versions 2.6b1 and 3.0b1 of Python have been announced. "On behalf of the Python development team and the Python community, I am happy to announce the first beta releases of Python 2.6 and Python 3.0. Please note that these are beta releases, and as such are not suitable for production environments. We continue to strive for a high degree of quality, and these releases are intended to freeze the feature set for Python 2.6 and 3.0. From now until the planned final releases in September 2008, we will be fixing known problems and stabilizing these new Python versions. You can help by downloading and testing them, providing feedback and hopefully helping to fix bugs"
Realizing Jython 2.5 (Front Range Pythoneering)
Jim Baker discusses the latest Jython progress on his blog. Jython is an implementation of Python written in Java. "Jython 2.5 is really, finally, unbelievably coming together. This is the next release of Jython, after last summer's 2.2. In a nutshell, we have completed all new language features using an Antlr parser, except for absolute imports. All bytecode generation work, now using an ASM backend, is done. Of course, there are many outstanding bugs."
Sphinx 0.4 released
Version 0.4 of Sphinx has been announced, some new capabilities have been added. "Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful documentation for Python projects (or other documents consisting of multiple reStructuredText source files)."
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links
The June 24, 2008 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Tcl/Tk
Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links
The June 19, 2008 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
IDEs
Pydev and Pydev Extensions 1.3.18 released
Version 1.3.18 of Pydev and Pydev Extensions have been announced, some new features have been added. "PyDev is a plugin that enables users to use Eclipse for Python and Jython development -- making Eclipse a first class Python IDE -- It comes with many goodies such as code completion, syntax highlighting, syntax analysis, refactor, debug and many others."
Version Control
GIT 1.5.6 released
Version 1.5.6 of the GIT distributed version control system is out with a number of new capabilities and some bug fixes.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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