[Lintouch-announce] Lintouch Development Weekly News - May 7th, 2004

[Martin Man]

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Lintouch Development Weekly News
http://lintouch.org
May 7th, 2003
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Welcome to the tenth issue of the LDWN in the year 2004. Since we have been
pretty busy with the 1.0 release a short break was necessary for all team
members which resulted in no news being published for almost two months. I
will try to summarize everything that happened since then.

Lintouch CVS code base has been immediately after the release branched and
stable Lintouch 1.0.x sources are now separate from the HEAD sources. In
order to obtain the stable sources from CVS you have to follow the
instructions specified in announcement email[1]. The email contains as well
a proposal on how to handle 1.0.x and HEAD commits.

    1. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-dev/2004-March/000458.html

Lintouch 1.0.1 maintenance release has been silently released during the
April 15th[2]. New release includes several important bug fixes which are
described within a ChangeLog for each source entity. ChangeLogs can be
accessed directly from the web[3] without the need to download the sources.

    2. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-dev/2004-April/000484.html
    3. http://lintouch.org/blog/latest

Lintouch 1.0.1 release includes two important documents called _Lintouch
Runtime User's Guide_[4] and _Lintouch Server User's Guide_[5]. They are
distributed along with the sources, binaries and they are also available
directly on the web.

    4. http://lintouch.org/cvs/lintouch/runtime/help/runtime.html
    5. http://lintouch.org/cvs/lintouch/server/help/server.html

Website[6] has been reorganized so that its structure is prepared for
addition of new documents, demonstration projects, etc. Several new
documents (_Templates HOWTO_, _Server Plugins HOWTO_, _Projects HOWTO_) are
under preparation and even that they are not complete yet you can already
examine their structure and main points on the web[6] and provide comments.

    6. http://lintouch.org/blog/documentation

We have prepared a Morphix[7] based _Lintouch Demo CD_ containing latest
versions of Lintouch preinstalled and preconfigured so that it can be run
straight out by point-and-clicking. The Demo CD features three demo projects
showing Lintouch in various monitoring scenarios:

    - Weather monitoring project visualizes meteorological data obtained
      from Sea Buoys located at Californian coast.

    - Network Monitoring projects visualizes state of several hosts on the
      network by pinging them periodically in a similar way that for example
      famous Nagios[8] project does.

    - Production Line project visualizes state of a simplified factory car
      production line and allows the full control of the line as well as
      failure monitoring and recovery.

Screenshots of the projects described above should be available on the web
soon. The image of the Demo CD is around 400MB in size and has not yet been
made available for download. If you are interested in getting the CD don't
hesitate to contact lintouch-dev[9] mailinglist and we will arrange it
somehow.

    7. http://www.morphix.org
    8. http://www.nagios.org
    9. mailto:lintouch-dev at lintouch.org

Lintouch Porting to embedded platforms started. The long term goal is to
minimize server memory usage and allow runtime to be used on devices
supported by QT Embedded[10]. Patrik kindly provided patch[11] for CVS HEAD
which allows runtime to be compiled against QTE 3.1.2 which will be included
in upcoming Debian/GNU Linux Sarge release[12]. Runtime can be compiled
successfully but does not run yet. Investigation is in the progress.

    10. http://www.trolltech.com/products/embedded/index.html
    11. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-dev/2004-May/000506.html
    12. http://www.debian.org

Modbus/TCP Python library and Lintouch Server Plugin are doing well. Hynek
already implemented Modbus Slave and Modbus Master functionality and is
polishing the code so that we can make it officially available. He also got
his hands dirty with real Modbus/TCP based devices and had a chance to
communicate with them from his Python library. The testing results raised
some concerns[13] related to speed of the library.

    13. http://lintouch.org/pipermail/lintouch-dev/2004-May/000503.html

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 at swac.cz.

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