SIL LSDev Linux Development

The libcom COM Support Library version 0.4.0 has been released. This is the first release of libcom. libcom is licensed under the LGPL.

libcom implements a subset of Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) and supports both C++ and C# (via Mono) COM clients and servers on Linux. libcom is similar to ole32.dll in Windows.

libcom can be downloaded from http://linux.lsdev.sil.org/wiki/index.php/Downloads.

Update: libcom now has its own web page at http://linux.lsdev.sil.org/wiki/index.php/Libcom.

We use ssh a lot, especially for access to our source code repository (currently CVS). We use a public key system with ssh, and most of our server accounts don’t have a password at all; they can be accessed only with a key.

For security, we ask people to protect their key with a passphrase. However, it is very inconvenient to have to type in the passphrase on every single access to the repository. The solution to this is to use an ssh agent, but finding out the best way to do this isn’t all that clear from the documentation.

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I’ve had a number of requests to recommend some Python IDEs. Although I don’t use a Python IDE myself (just a good programmer’s editor) I have heard others speak highly of several.

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