Over at the Fedora wiki, Jonathan Roberts interviews the developers of the RPM Fusion repository. “Hans de Goede: We want to be a one stop place for Fedora add-on packages which cannot be in Fedora proper due to various issues. Currently we are a merger of the dribble, freshrpms and livna repositories, and we invite other repositories to join us.”

Back in November we started sharing some of the exciting features planned for the GNOME 2.22 and 2.24 releases, and now that the first GNOME 2.22.0 Beta release is planned for later this week, we have taken another look at the packages set for inclusion and the changes that have actually been made. While nothing groundbreaking will be introduced in GNOME 2.22, this desktop environment does have some moderate changes worth noting. In this article are eight interesting packages that either have noticeable changes since GNOME 2.20 or are new to GNOME. This list isn’t all-inclusive or ordered in any particular fashion, but just eight changes that had caught our attention.

SpringSource Inc. , which focuses on open-source software for building and deploying mission-critical enterprise applications, said Tuesday it acquired Covalent Technologies Inc. via East Bay Business Times

Cluster Resources releases final beta of Escalante, their full HPC-stack deployment solution for Novell ‘s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and announces product name change to Moab Cluster Builder?

Libferris allows you to index and perform full text search on a number of file formats, including PDF, manual pages, and office documents. The recent availability of packages of libferris and its dependencies for Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE makes it simpler to use the library to provide a file server search interface for the Web. Libferris was initially created to provide a virtual filesystem interface, similar to GnomeVFS and KDE’s KIO. Over time libferris has gained sophisticated support for indexing and searching filesystems.

LinuxSecurity.com: Setting up a web server with Apache on a Linux distribution is a very quick process, however to make it a secure setup takes some work. This article will show you how to make your Apache web server more secure from an attack by effectively using Access control and authentication strategies.

I love planning but I hate planning software. It’s an interesting problem. When I am working on something alone I tend to outline the project, estimate each piece and be done with it. My estimates tend to be accurate and the project gets done.

Ziproxy is a high-performance forwarding
(non-caching) HTTP proxy that gzips text and HTML
files, and reduces the size of images by
converting them to lower quality JPEGs or JPEG
2000. It is intended to increase the speed for
low-speed Internet connections (mobile, dial-up,
other). It’s suitable for both home and
professional usage. Ziproxy is fully configurable
and also features transparent proxy mode,
HTML/JS/CSS optimization, operation in daemon
mode, a detailed access log with compression
statistics, basic authentication, and more.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
JPEG 2000 support was rewritten and much improved.
A mechanism to exempt broken URLs from processing
was added. Manpages were added. The Basic HTTP
authentication code was rewritten. Miscellaneous
changes were made.

Ctalk provides object oriented programming features, like classes, methods, operator overloading, and inheritance to otherwise standard C programs. You can use only a few objects and classes in a program, or you can write programs entirely in Ctalk. The package provides a translator from Ctalk source code into C for compilation and a library that provides run-time support for class objects. The preprocessor, ctpp, is also available separately, and the package includes sample programs and documentation.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release adds the class SignalHandler and
provides the methods and API additions for
installing Ctalk methods to handle operating
system signals. It also includes several bugfixes.

MeshLab is an open, portable, extensible system
for the user-assisted processing of unstructured
3D meshes. The system is aimed to help the
processing of 3D models arising in 3D scanning,
providing a set of tools for cleaning and healing
this kind of meshes. The system is heavily based
on the VCG library developed at the Visual
Computing Lab of ISTI – CNR, for all the core mesh
processing tasks.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This version introduces many important and
appealing new features. The most notable
improvements are the possibility of managing
multiple meshes on different layers and the new
features for the processing of raw 3D scanning
data. ICP alignment and Poisson based merging of
multiple range maps is now possible within
MeshLab. Another important development of MeshLab
1.1.0 is the added support for output in the
compressed U3D format. This format also allows the
creation of captivating PDF documents with
embedded interactive 3D objects using LaTeX.