Lintouch Development Weekly News

Monday, May 02 2005

Welcome to the twentieth issue of the LDWN.

It has been awhile since the last report from Lintouch Team. We believe it is the right time to inform you about the latest and greatest from the Lintouch Land.

Python not needed anymore, aka Lintouch Server written in C. It took some 7 man days to take existing Lintouch libraries _libltfsm_, _libltvariables_, _libltcp_, and very cool APR + APR Util[1] library to reimplement Lintouch Server while keeping the list of supported features untouched.

1. http://apr.apache.org

Lintouch Server now takes less than 100kb of the hard drive space (without libc + APR + Linux itself) which makes it suitable for low-storage-space devices. Lintouch Server Plugins have to be written in C from now on. We have already reimplemented demonstration _Loopback_ and _Generator_ plugins and the work on _ModbusTCPMaster_ and _ModbusTCPSlave_ plugins is going on right now.

Lintouch Editor received UI polishing related to move/resize selection handles used to manipulate templates. The handles are now drawn outside of the template area and allow templates to be resized to very small sizes. Moreover the handles are now always visible and can not be obscured with other templates. This was the case with Lintouch Editor 1.4 and it was one of the main drawbacks while handling complicated configurations of multiple overlying templates.

Lintouch _SNMP_ Server Plugin will allow the Lintouch to periodically poll SNMP manageable devices and obtain string/numerical/boolean typed OIDs and visualize them with templates. The pilot net-snmp[2] based implementation is already available in SVN[3].

2. http://www.net-snmp.org
3. https://lintouch.org/repos/lintouch/lsp-snmp

Lintouch _Exec_ Server Plugin[4] will allow the user to periodically execute configured commands at the server machine and grab their return value (and/or their output) much the same way Nagios[5] is doing its network checks.

4. https://lintouch.org/repos/lintouch/lsp-exec
5. http://www.nagios.org

Both of these plugins are scheduled to be available for Linux and Windows within Lintouch 1.6.

Lintouch Qwt Template Library is being worked on. It will make the widgets from Qwt Library[6] available as Lintouch Templates.

6. http://qwt.sourceforge.net

Lintouch 1.6 is scheduled to be available beginning of July 2005. We are stepping aside from our standard 6-months-per-stable-release plan and we would like to get 1.6 out as soon as possible.

Until then the adventurous and living-on-the-bleeding-edge-like people can try out our automatically generated nighly snapshots[7]. They are verified to compile under Linux and can be useful if you want to taste what will be in 1.6.

7. http://builder.lintouch.org/~mman/snapshots

That's all folks for this week, if you have any comments, corrections or ideas to be published, feel free to contact me directly[0].

0. mailto:mman@swac.cz.