Open Recall: E17, Bio-Linux, Wayland, MINIX 3, WordPress

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. This edition looks at the latest E17 alpha, Bio-Linux 7, the first point update to Wayland 1.0, a MINIX 3 job opening, and WordPress's latest supported payment method.

• E17 Alpha 4 – Only four days after the third alpha arrived, the E17 developers have published a fourth alpha of Enlightenment E17. The latest development release of the desktop environment brings further improvements to the default theme and theme information menu, and supports file renaming on long press when using the default theme. It also improves Mac OS X compatibility and includes translation updates, and fixes for a bug affecting sub-menu positioning, problems related to modal dialog windows and other issues. The new alpha is available from the project's download page.

• Bio-Linux 7 – Developed by the NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre, Bio-Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution for bioinformatics aimed at scientists which handle and analyse biological data. The latest 7.0 release is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and includes more than 500 specialist applications as well as sample data for testing programs. Compared to its predecessor, it also adds the Galaxy analysis environment, and several packages to handle new generation sequence data types. Bio-Linux 7.0.3 is available to download as an ISO image from the project's site.

• Wayland 1.0.1 – The first point update to Wayland 1.0 has been released by project founder and chief developer Kristian Høgsberg to fix various issues in the compositing display manager protocol. Among these bugs, version 1.0.1 of Wayland fixes a problem related to out-of-order delete_id events that could have lead to a crash during EGLSurface destruction. Weston, its reference implementation, has also been updated to 1.0.1 to correct flaws in the previous version.

• MINIX 3 Job – The Department of Computer Science at the VU University Amsterdam is currently seeking to hire a programmer to work on the open source MINIX 3 operating system. Interested applicants should have extensive experience with the C programming language, systems programming, embedded systems and operating system internals. Further details can be found in the job posting.

• WordPress and BitCoin – Automattic, the company behind the open source WordPress publishing platform, has announced that it will now accept Bitcoins. In addition to debit and credit cards, or PayPal, users can purchase WordPress.com upgrades using the distributed online currency. Automattic engineer Andy Skelton says that the new payment option should make it easier for users in countries where PayPal is blocked or credit cards place restrictions to access paid upgrades that remove ads from their sites or enable support for custom designs.

(crve)