Fwd: xoscope 2.1 released

[Brent W. Baccala]

Hello -

Is Bhavani Shankar still maintaining xoscope?

If not, could somebody take a look at integrating xoscope 2.1 into Ubuntu?

    agape
    brent

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Hi everybody!

Well, it's been five years, but I've finally gotten a new release of
xoscope out on sourceforge.

The major enhancement in version 2.1 is support for ALSA, contributed
by Gerhard Schiller.  We wouldn't have a new release right now except
for Gerhard's work, so thank you, Gerhard, for pushing me to get 2.1
out.

I also re-introduced the Perl functions that were dropped in version
2.0.  i didn't like the previous design that used a separate Perl
script, because the feature would not work if the script was not
installed properly.  The script is now embedded into the xoscope
executable.  So long as Perl is available on the system, arbitrary
single line Perl functions can be displayed simply by typing them into
a dialog box.

Bitscope support has been dropped.  Recent Bitscope designs have
become more and more proprietary, and the older API is no longer
supported on their newest hardware.  Instead, you have to use a
proprietary library, and that's not acceptable for a free software
project.

The forked gtkdatbox library has been moved from the xoscope
distribution to its own forked git repository on sourceforge.  The
standard version works, but the forked version still looks better on
the screen.

An uncountable number of bugs have been fixed (actually, no, not that
many), but many more remain for a future release.  Bruce Caslow has
kindly provided me a Raspberry Pi with a BrickPi attached, and since
this Linux-based platform seems to be popular for robotics work, it's
likely to become a supported input device in the next release.

I continue to enjoy a mild winter here in Anchorage.  We've got so
little snow on the ground that the Iditarod start has been moved to
Fairbanks for only the second time in history.

A minor release of a niche software project isn't much, but it's
something.  Let us pray that God guide his servants to the fullest
fulfilment of our potential.

    agape
    brent