Lab::Measurement 3.00 released

I'm happy to be able to announce a first real release of the Lab::Measurement Perl package, providing a platform for measurement control with Perl.

Lab::Measurement is based on the packages Lab::VISA, Lab::Instrument, and Lab::Tools started by Daniel Schröer in 2005. Many people have contributed in the meantime, amongst others in roughly historical order Daniela Taubert, David Kalok, Florian Olbrich, and Alois Dirnaichner. The efforts of the last year have focussed on a general modularization, originally driven by a certain frustration with National Instruments NI-VISA support on Linux. Now, the hardware driver backend can be exchanged transparently, making measurements both with NI-VISA and with e.g. LinuxGPIB or the operating system serial port drivers on Linux and Windows possible.
Since VISA does not form a central part or even requirement anymore, the original use of Lab::VISA as name for the entire package became impractical, and we've decided to switch to Lab::Measurement instead. As version numbers of all components should still increase monotonously, our first release of the code rewrite then actually ended up as Lab::Measurement 3.00.

For downloads and documentation, including installation instructions for Linux and Windows and examples, visit the homepage of the package, http://www.labmeasurement.de/. Of course, if you're using Gentoo, the package is readily available in the main portage tree as dev-perl/Lab-Measurement.

Not all device drivers have been ported to the new internal architecture so far, but work is progressing swiftly. In the Regensburg nanophysics groups, we're using the new code already all the time in measurements at three different cryogenic setups. More drivers, bugfixes, and improvements are present in Git master. If you're willing to hack, I can only recommend that you give it a try. Contributors are always welcome; feel free to clone our git repository on Gitorious.

Top position in condensed matter physics

While everyone in the German research landscape was following the selection of the "Elite Universities" during the last days, we've had some remarkable news here ourselves: the DFG, which awards all the federal research funding in Germany, published the statistics of the last years. The full "Förderatlas" can be found on the website of the DFG, here's the interesting bit (self-made translation):



In the comparison of all German universities, Regensburg managed to get to rank 4 in physics in total, and to a clear number one position in the field of condensed matter physics! Actually we've gotten more funding in CM than TU München and LMU München together! Now if that's not something to celebrate...
Summarizing, now you know where to go for top-notch physics research. :)

cups-1.6 will be loads of fun

I've spent a bit of time recently looking at the current state of what will become cups-1.6, and preparing a live ebuild for subversion head (net-print/cups-9999). My only conclusion is, the transition from 1.5 to 1.6 will give us all loads of fun time... Here are some of the highlights:

• The serial and parallel port backends have been removed. Need USB or LAN now to talk to your printer.
• The PHP and Perl scripting modules have been removed.
• Remote printer discovery via CUPS, LDAP, or SLP is not supported anymore (what was known so-far as "browsing"). Instead you will need to use Zeroconf/Bonjour or Avahi.
• The filter code that allowed to directly print images is gone. (Maybe just moved to a separate package.)

Nice, isn't it? Anyway...  if any of you feels like joining the printing team give me a shout!

edit, 21/May: most of the removed code just made its way into cups-filters, as several people pointed out in comments below... so no need to panic...

CMake is getting verbose

Public announcement: we've just changed the default settings in cmake-utils.eclass, and as a result now cmake-based builds will display a verbose build log instead of the terse "one line per file" version. In the same way as with autotools, the entire compiler / linker / whatever command line is printed, which should simplify bug hunting a lot...

Calligra 2.4.0 is out!

Let's all congratulate the Calligra team for releasing Calligra 2.4.0, the first version of their integrated application suite for KDE. It has really gone a long way from the old KOffice codebase. Of course, Gentoo already has ebuilds as app-office/calligra. Give it a try! Cheers!

A neat trick for testing patches in Gentoo (source-based distros are great!)

Imagine you are running... say... Kubuntu, OpenSuSE, or Fedora, or any other of these famous and fantastic binary Linux distributions. You find a bug, report it to the authors of the package, and they come up with a possible solution. "Hey, here's a small patch to the source, could you please try if applying that helps?" Well... Either now you compile manually, which may or may not give the same packages as your distribution. Or you start setting up the full build system of your distro, which will take a while...
With Gentoo as a source-based distribution, however, this is very easy. Let's assume you want to apply a patch for more debug output to some kde plasma applets. The patch file is called debug.patch, the package name for the plasma applets is kde-base/plasma-apps. All you have to do is

mkdir -p /etc/portage/patches/kde-base/plasma-apps
cp debug.patch /etc/portage/patches/kde-base/plasma-apps/
emerge -a1 kde-base/plasma-apps

Finished. The patch is automatically applied during the emerge command:

 >>> Preparing source in /var/tmp/portage/kde-base/plasma-apps-4.8.2/work/plasma-apps-4.8.2 ...
 * Applying user patches from /etc/portage/patches//kde-base/plasma-apps ...
 *   debug.patch ...                      [ ok ]
 * Done with patching
>>> Source prepared.

Isn't that a nice trick? :)
Just one small warning... this does not work for all ebuilds in the portage tree yet, in case of doubt better check the build log if your patch was really applied. It does work for all ebuilds using base.eclass, which effectively includes all of KDE and all KDE applications.

Please test cups-1.5

CUPS 1.5 has now been in the tree for quite some time, so we should think about getting it stable. As I'm actually not really a person who prints a lot or uses a lot of different printer drivers, it would however be great to get some more widespread testing... So please: If you are still running stable CUPS (i.e. net-print/cups-1.4.8-r1), please give the newest ~arch ebuild a try, and if you are encountering problems, please file bug reports on Gentoo bugzilla! Thanks a lot in advance!!!