[Lintouch-announce] Lintouch 1.6 released

[Martin Man]

Lintouch 1.6 Release Announcement

Lintouch Team

<lintouch-dev at lintouch.org>

July 1st, 2005

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What's New In Lintouch 1.6

    2.1. Global Changes
    2.2. Lintouch Runtime Changes
    2.3. Lintouch Editor Changes

3. Obtaining and Installing Lintouch

    3.1. Ready Made Binaries
    3.2. Sources

4. What is Lintouch

1. Introduction

After three months of development we (the Lintouch Team) are proud to announce
the availability of the new stable release of the Lintouch Server, Lintouch
Runtime, and Lintouch Editor.

This version includes bug fixes plus several new important features. You are
welcome to download, install, test, and use this version.

Please see Section 4, “What is Lintouch” for more information about Lintouch.

2. What's New In Lintouch 1.6

2.1. Global Changes

Lintouch Server reimplemented in C

    The original Python based implementation of the Lintouch Server was
    deprecated due to various reasons (speed, size, and ease of installation
    being among them) in favor of plain C based implementation.

    The new server (excluding any server plugins) consumes less then 200kb of
    the disk space. You have to add another ~ 500kb for Apache Portable
    Runtime plus its dependencies and a space for your Linux system. The small
    size makes the Lintouch Server ideal for specialized low-cost and
    low-speed embedded devices.

    All existing server plugins have been ported to the new C language based
    API to maintain backwards compatibility.

New Visualization Objects

    Display Templates

        The SVGImage template is able to render not-so-complex SVG images (due
        to SVG rendering limitations posed by Qt library). It will help you
        make your projects more portable across various screen resolutions,
        because SVG is essentially a vector based image format (unlike bitmap
        based JPG or PNG formats).

    Qt Technical Widgets template library

        New template library ltl-qwt contains all widgets from Qwt
        (http://qwt.sf.net) library available as Lintouch Templates. The
        library includes control & visualization primitives such as Knob,
        Dial, Wheel, Plot, and others.

New Connectivity Options

    Modbus/TCP

        New pure-C based implementation of Modbus/TCP connectivity for
        Lintouch provides ModbusTCPMaster and ModbusTCPSlave plugins that have
        been successfully tested with PLCs from Modicon and Beckhoff.

    SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

        Lintouch SNMP Server Plugin allows the Lintouch Server to periodically
        poll specified SNMP OIDs (Object IDs) using SNMP v1/SNMP v2c protocol.

        SNMP protocol is usually used to manage/configure/monitor networking
        equipment such as routers, switches, and servers.

    Exec

        Lintouch Exec Server Plugin allows the Lintouch Server to periodically
        execute configured commands and grab their return value and/or output.

        This way an arbitrary commands can be executed at the server machine
        to provide a bridge to monitor the data that can not be accessed via
        other server plugins.

        Similar approach is used by the Nagios (http://www.nagios.org), an
        open source host, service and network monitoring program.

2.2. Lintouch Runtime Changes

Uses only the Loopback interface when in Local Mode

    Lintouch Runtime does not bind anymore to all network interfaces when used
    without Lintouch Server in so called Local Mode. This protects the
    Lintouch Server embedded within the Lintouch Runtime from being accessed
    via network from the other computers.

2.3. Lintouch Editor Changes

Import/Export/Reimport Connection

    Existing connections can be exported from Lintouch projects to a custom
    CSV (comma separated values) format understood by all major spreadsheet
    applications.

    New connections described in CSV can be imported and later on updated into
    the existing Lintouch Projects making it easier and more comfortable to
    edit connections with a lot of variables.

Import/Export/Reimport Resource

    Working with resources (images, text files, or arbitrary data files) is
    now easier. It is possible to export existing resources from the projects
    and reimport (update) new versions of the existing resources to the
    projects.

Other UI Changes

    Template Properties Dialog has been reorganized and contains the ability
    to manually move/resize template to the precisely specified coordinates.
    New keyboard shortcuts have been added to speed up access to the Variables
    Dialog (Ctrl-K), Resources Dialog (Ctrl-R), and Preview Dialog (Ctrl-P).

    Selection/Move/Resize handles are now painted always above all other
    templates and outside of the template occupied area. This makes it easier
    to move/resize objects that are partially occupied by another objects. It
    is also possible to resize templates to a very small size (think in
    pixels).

3. Obtaining and Installing Lintouch

3.1. Ready Made Binaries

Lintouch can be downloaded and installed directly on the Windows and Linux
based platforms. The detailed instructions are available at our website
(http://lintouch.org/static/download.html).

The list of supported platforms includes Microsoft Windows 2000/XP, SuSE Linux
9.x, Debian/GNU Linux 3.1 (sarge), and LSB based distributions. Source RPM
archives are provided in order to support other RPM based Linux distributions.

3.2. Sources

The source code of Lintouch Runtime and Lintouch Server is distributed under
the GNU General Public License 2. It can be downloaded and compiled by hand.
The detailed instructions are available at our website
(http://lintouch.org/static/download.html).

4. What is Lintouch

Lintouch is a real-time data monitoring/controlling system used in automation
industry and developed by S.W.A.C. GmbH Germany (http://www.swac.de) and
S.W.A.C. Bohemia s.r.o. (http://www.swac.cz).

Lintouch is an effort to build fully software-based open source control panel
software suite. Control panels are usually called HMI - Human Machine
Interface, or MMI - Man Machine Interface in the automation industry.

Lintouch supports variety of hardware/software platforms (Win32+Intel,
Linux+Intel, Linux+PPC).

Lintouch has been designed with extensibility in mind. New Server Plugins can
be developed to bring in new connectivity (ModBus/TCP, and Hilscher already
available). New Templates (GUI Objects) can be implemented to define new
control and visualization primitives (Buttons, Lamps, and other Technical
Objects already available).

To get more information about Lintouch please visit our website
(http://lintouch.org).

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