News

Revision as of 17:32, 15 August 2005

This is an archive of all SwarmWiki news.

Swarm News

Known bugs and workarounds for Swarm 2.2

A bug in the getMin and getMax method of Swarm's Averager class was recently discovered. A description and fixes are on the stable release page.

SwarmFest 2005

• Pietro Terna announces that the official SwarmFest2005 page is on line. Look at the call for papers!

Objective C swarmapps updated for 2.2

Thanks to Paul Johnson there is a new package of applications for Swarm-2.2, particularly for Objective C. For more details see the applications page.

Swarm 2.2: Our new stable release

Swarm Development Group announces the release of Swarm 2.2 as the new stable release. The many development snapshots have been consolidated into a single set of code for all the available platforms. Thanks to Marcus Daniels for preparing the release, and all of you who have helped develop and test snapshots on various platforms.

• Source code, plus binaries for Windows, Fedora, and Mac OS X are available at the stable release page.
• See the documentation page for the Swarm 2.2 documentation set.
• Example applications are being updated and maintained by Paul Johnson. These currently include well-known models such as heatbugs, mousetrap, the Swarm tutorial, arborgames, schelling2, and Conway's game of life. These are currently on the CVS site at Swarm's development home at Savannah: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm/

Not all aspects of the release are completely settled down and we expect some minor changes in how it is distributed for specific platforms. Here is what you can do:

• If you identify problems, post them to the Swarm support email list, and (better yet) try to find solutions and post those, too.
• If you develop binary distributions for new platforms, etc., post them and an announcement on this wiki. (We encourage users to add things to this site! It's easy.)
• Buy an SDG membership so maintenance and development of Swarm can continue.

SDG membership

Development of Swarm 2.2 was largely a volunteer effort (by Marcus Daniels, Paul Johnson, Bill Northcott, and many others), but its packaging as a stable release was paid for by Swarm Development Group membership fees. Memberships are the primary resource we have for future maintenance and development.

• Include a group or institutional membership fee in your project budget. Your proposal will not be rejected because you include an SDG membership as software support or license; instead, it will make you look smart and sophisticated. (This is how the release of 2.2 was funded.)
• Low-cost memberships are available for individuals and low-budget projects.
• See the SDG contact page for information.

RPM packages for Fedora Core 3

• Paul Johnson offers RPMs of the Swarm for Fedora Core 2 & 3: http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm. Support for Redhat 5-8 has been terminated and those packages have been removed. We still have access to one RedHat 9 system, but unless we get some requests, we probably won't try to build RPMs for that platform because the version of gcc on that system is quite out of date.

Swarm Packages for MacOS X 10.3 Panther

• Bill Northcott announces that new binaries are available at [1] for running Swarm on MacOS X 10.3 Panther. These packages include everything other than standard Apple software needed to build and run Swarm models on Panther. There are several versions of the gcc compiler provided. One is a bleeding edge version built from the latest code in Apple's opensurce cvs. This compiler includes Fortran, libffi and the GNU Objective-C runtime library. (30 Nov 2004)

Swarm CD for Windows XP

• Pietro Terna announces that at http://eco83.econ.unito.it/swarm/materiale/cd/ you can find �all what you need� to install Swarm in a Windows XP machine. Look at the readme.txt file. This distribution contains also other useful things. We hope you�ll enjoy it. (June 29, 2004)

SwarmFest 2005

• Pietro Terna announces that the first SwarmFest2005 page is on line.

SwarmFest photos from 2001-2004

• Pietro Terna announces that the photos of the 2001, 2002, 2003 Fests are now also availabe at photo.terna.to.it, free of advertising.

• Also the photos of the 2004 SwarmFest are now on line, at photo.terna.to.it/fotoSwarmFest2004/SwarmFest2004.htm. I hope you'll enjoy them, Pietro Terna

SwarmFest 2004

• SwarmFest 2004: This year's SwarmFest was hosted by the UMich CSCS.