May be interesting here too.. Shridhar
-------- Original Message -------- Dear BSD friends: I'd be grateful if you could help me on this... FN ******************************************************************** Hi all! My search for the Indian / South Asian contribution to GNU/Linux has been progressing nicely. Thanks to all of you! This seems to be an exciting subject. Since so many of you on this list have shared information so generously with me, I would like to pass it back to all on this list. Below is a very preliminary summary of some initial findings. If I have left out anyone you know, please do inform me. It would be great if we could conduct this in an 'open/free research' kind of format. The aim is not only to document the Indian and South Asian contribution to GNU/Linux, but also to map what is possible, what can be done, and hopefully inspire other talented programmers to go the free software/open source way. This work is supported by Sarai <www.sarai.net> of New Delhi. Use this information freely; only credit those who offered the initial inputs. Your feedback / brickbats are awaited. FN *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Frederick Noronha | Freelance Journalist | 784 Saligao 403511 Goa India Ph [0091] 832.409490 or 832.409783 Cell 9822 12.24.36 [EMAIL PROTECTED] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Some of the work being done on the GNU/Linux front by Indians/South Asians or people of South Asian origin worldwide includes: * anjuta-0.1.6 stable has been released by Naba Kumar http://news.gnome.org/997515902/index_html#997549720 * Free Software Foundation (India) work on programs to be undertaken Localisation of Free Softwares Contact Arun <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Free Software in Education Making a special CD of Debian GNU/Linux for College Education, Making a similar CD (ofcourse with a different set of applications) for School Going Kids. Development of E-Learning tools. Prof Nagarjuna is already working on this. Free Software Education. Training programs on Free Software tools. * Hurd: Rajkumar S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes that they are beginning to work on a small lab for Hurd set up at the FD India office. * Indianisation of Linux vivek achary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> points to the website http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/ and says "These guys are_already_offering Indian language support from_the kernel_up, not as an add-on that is stuck on top of the OS. IndLinux offers console fonts, text (emacs, vim, pine,...) even gcc (u can write c programs in Indian languages) More details below... * M.P.Anand Babu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is offering students interested ideas for projects in Free Software. He writes: "I have lot of projects in (my) TODO list. If you find anybody looking for projects, please forward them to me, I will guide them and get it completed." * GNU Messenger: by ab, Bala, Mridul Jain, Parag Mehta, Jeffrin GNU Messenger for Yahoo services with a console based geeky readline and guile interface. It started a fun project, but today its production ready. Main motivation behind the project is to spread the power of GUILE and READLINE librady. * Cool Hurd Translators: Translator itself is cool concept in GNU/Hurd. Here are some translators written by college students in this list: * bzip2 translator: Ankur, Shikka and Venkat wrote this translator. This when mapped on a file, you can do bzip compressed I/O. * reverse translator: Written by Ramesh. When mapped to a file, what ever you write to it, you can read the reverse of them. * Tar file system translator: Again by Ramesh. Ramesh got the name "Tarzen" because of this TAR project. You can mount a tar file as file system using this translator. This project is still in initial stages. * Quote translator: You can map this as ur .signature, /etc/issues, /etc/motd and so on and get random quotes on the fly. Every time when you read from this file, you get random quotes from its database. * Visual Emacs Calculator: by Pradhap This is written in Emacs Lisp. He is currently busy with MP3 player for GNU Emacs. * MiG -> CORBA: By Mridul Jain and ab MiG is obsolete interface and Mach Specific. This project replaces MiG with CORBA standards to make GNU/Hurd language independent and distributed. This is extremely big project. * Linux Device Drivers Emulation in Hurd Space: By ab, Bala and Mridul Emulating Linux Device Drivers in user space. GNU Mach is only a micro kernel. Santhanu Goel emulated Linux SCSI and Network drivers inside GNU Mach. But GNU Mach bloats up in size and loses the Mirco Kernel stature. But by bringing the drivers to user space we have lots of advantages like system stability, modularization ease of development/maintainability. * Porting Netfilter to Hurd By ab Netfilter is NAT/Firewall framework in Linux 2.4.x kernel. This should be ported to GNU Hurd/Pfinet. Hurd's TCP/IP stack is derived from Linux kernel and because of that porting Netfilter to Hurd shouldn't be difficult. * GNU/Hurd Distribution: By gnu-india.org team. We have stopped this project, because Philip Charles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is doing it better. But still we continue the 3rd CD of this project. This CD is named "4-hackers" contains valuable documentation for GNU OS Hacking. * GNU Geek: by Visu and Nagappan GNU Geek is GNU [G]eek [E]nabled [E]ntry [K]it Geek is a highly extensible framework for building console based data entry tools. is powered by GUILE and READLINE. Info from M.P.Anand Babu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for all the above projects. * Mukund Deshmukh of Beta Computronics <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes in to say: "Please look at my IVRS module at http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=ivrs This is module is very popular among the people who want to build up low cost IVRS using external modem. I usually get 20-25 mails from all part of world per month. A rough estimate is around 1000 IVRS installations are using this module. I am based in Nagpur, India." Web site - http://betacomp.com * Kinglsey informs us of some projects: Anjuta from http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/ Simputer project http://simputer.org/ Raju Mathur's VishwaKarma (kandalaya.org) Dr Tarique's wap library in PHP (".. it wouldn't fall into the purely linux category but definitely indicates use of linux in india!) * Check out the LIFE (Linux in Education) mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mm.hbcse.tifr.res.in/mailman/listinfo/life * [EMAIL PROTECTED] (localisation) mailing list! To post to this list, send your email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] General information about the mailing list is at: http://gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-locale * Abhas Abhinav <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes in to say: "I've got some great news for you! Kernel.org.in (remember?) is up and running now - and so is our upgraded web site... We are currently mirroring kernel.org and gnu.org ftp areas - but a lot more sites are in the pipeline - this includes linux documentation project, ibiblio archives, samba and apache projects, vim, rpmfind and more. The smaller ones might be possible pretty early, but others will take time and investment. Please do visit http://www.kernel.org.in for more details. * IBM invited student to participate in the Linux Scholar Challenge contest, where they can solve real-world issues and learn how to improve today's open source environment. For this contest, students will select a Linux project; describe their objectives, methodology, research and results in a three-page paper; and submit it for evaluation. Students may register online at http://www.ibm.com/university/linuxchallenge The response from India was "very encouraging", according to IBM ASEAN/South Asia Linux Manager Mukul Mathur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> He said around 275 entries were received from India alone. Contact: Kavitha Shankar, Community Relations Manager, Developer Relations [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Pappu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> says: "There is a team of programmers lead by M P Anand Babu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> working on many important parts of the HURD, which is a replacement for the *nix kernel." <http://www.gnu-india.org> * Parag Mehta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> announced recently: "i hv just released the gnuyahoo-0.1 beta release on sf.net and hv announced it on freshmeat.net. let me know if anything else needs to be done." * Ramakrishnan M <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> suggestions that in the aftermath of September 11, it is very likely that US exporting laws will become more strict as regard to the cryptography publishing in the form of papers or books or software. "I would like to request *everyone* who have access to the internet to start downloading as much 'cryptography software source code' as possible and also announce them on this list. We will have to find a mirror in India to host this software...." To start with, please have a look at http://www.cryptography.org ... and http://munitions.vipul.net/ * Radhakrishnan CV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> announces that the GNU/Linux system can now support Malayalam. He writes: "Today a team of developers in FreeDevelopers.net (India) have successfully implemented Malayalam support in Pango and an input module for gtk which can support Hellingman's Malayalam Transliteration Schema. Jeroen Hellingman is the man who wrote a TeX package, input scheme and a free Malayalam font using Metafont language. However, the metafont sources can only create rastor fonts that are fit for usage in a TeX system, we need to write our own fonts for using in GNU/Linux. The software used are gtk+-1.3.5, pango-0.16. The sources will be released soon. A screen shot can be had at: http://www.tugindia.org.in/malayalam/malayalam.jpg Its is just in alpha stage and you can expect a few bugs. Comments are welcome. Congratulations to the young developers of FD (India)." * Hardware compatibility: Richard M Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> recently wrote in to say "My friend Ramakrishnan has volunteered to prepare a list of devices normally available with assembled PC makers for which Free drivers are available. Once prepared he is planning to send it to FSFI. I request FSFI to host this list in their web site & keep it upto date so that we don't fall into the trap of devices with non-free drivers. This is a very useful project to work on." * Naba Kumar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> explains his project thus: "Anjuta is a versatile Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C and C++ on GNU/Linux. It has been written for GTK/GNOME, and features a number of advanced programming facilities. These include project management, application wizards, an on board interactive debugger, and a powerful source editor with source browsing and syntax highlighting. Anjuta is an effort to marry the flexibility and power of text-based command-line tools with the ease-of-use of the GNOME graphical user interface. That is why it has been made as user-friendly as possible. At present, Anjuta is only a beta release and lots of work needs to be done to improve it. In the future, Anjuta is going to be much more capable and stable! Extensive debugging has not yet been performed, so at the moment it will, undoubtedly, have lots of bugs." * More from Naba Kumar: "As for the other indian based application, I can tell only one from the gnome community. I don't have any idea about other communities. Peacock is an text based HTML editor written by Archit Baweja <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. He is from delhi. You can contact him to get the details about the application. You will also find him hanging around irc.gimp.com #gnome sometimes. In fact, I came to know about him from there only. The website for peacock is http://peacock.sourceforge.net " * RMS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was asked by FN in an email interview: In the West, the emphasis on 'free' software stresses the 'free' as in freespeech. In the countries of the Third World, would the 'free beer' approach also be as important, since for many here the costs of software is a real insurmountable problem? His reply: The principal importance of free software is that it respects your freedom. This is important for computer users everywhere. Free software means you are free to run the program, free to study the program and change it to suit your needs, free to redistribute copies, and free to publish an improved version. In other words, you are free to participate in a user community where people treat each other with kindness and helpfulness. Free software provides a secondary benefit which is also important in countries such as India, where there are many people who can just barely afford a computer. Namely, users can save on license fees by lawfully redistributing copies of software to each other. But important as this is, it is not as important as freedom to live an upright life and help your neighbor." * Writes Chennai-based S.GuruPrasanna <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: "it all started when i wanted to write my own text based yahoo messenger. i found a library called libyahoo that helps to connect with the Yahoo server. i also found a text based yahoo messenger from sourceforge.net. when i tried to go through the source code of that messenger, it was very difficult for me to go through the source code (C code) of some 100 pages containing lot of functions. I thought that it would be useful if i have a tool that converts the entire source code as HTML files with all the calls to various functions as hyper links. this would lead me to the function's code by clicking that link where it is called. I could not find such a tool. So thought of developing it and it is now ezvu (easy view). ezvu reads all the 'C' source files in a directory and generates a HTML file for each source file. The resulting HTML file contains the userdefined function calls converted to hyper link that leads to the function definition. This helps the user/developer to browse through other's source very easily without having to take the hardcopies (it is my way, donno abt others) of the entire source and jumping between pages to keep track of the function calls." * Thanks to S.GuruPrasanna for some useful links to: T.Venkataramanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ Implemenatation For Linux). Sankara Narayanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Anand Babu [EMAIL PROTECTED] put me in touch with the persons below to dig out some information on localisation (Indianisation) of Linux. * Mahesh Jayachandra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * Radhakrishnan CV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * Ravi Rao <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> generously offered links to Ashish Gulhati. See http://netropolis.org/ See also http://www.metlin.f2s.com/ * Boston-based Avinash Chopde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> says of his project: "It is over 10 years old, and I don't work on it anymore, it is just a general Unix app, made freeware way before too many people were doing freeware software :-) " Check http://www.aczone.com/ to know more about his work. ISongs this is not software, but a collection of Indian Film Song Lyrics - that Chopde started years ago, it is still being added to, and all songs are sent in by Indians... "I don't know of Indians in this field, but here are some pointers: KDE - probably the best GUI and Desktop Management System out there, improving by bounds, has someone named Narendra Umanee doing some major work - he may be an Indian." * From Nagpur, Swati Sani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> reminds us: "Hello Frederick, I know that you are well aware of the contributions made by SANIsoft and its programmers. Just for the sake of completeness I would like to list our Open Source projects 1) WAPpop 2) RtoD 3) of_cal 4) Scorpio." * Binand Raj S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> says: "One programmer I know - Philip Tellis - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. He is the author of httptype, http://www.ncst.ernet.in/~philip/downloads/httptype. Used at http://www.biznix.org/surveys, for example." * Udhay Shankar N <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> offers links to Indian GNU/Linux geeks: Abhijeet Menon-Sen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Ashish Gulhati <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vipul Ved Prakash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Raj Mathur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * Prabhu Ramachandran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, an old friend, tells of his own pet project, as he calls it: "Its a scientific data visualizer called MayaVi. Look here: http://mayavi.sourceforge.net and here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mayavi for details. This project is something that I personally created. I know that it has users all over the world." "The other projects that I am involved with are listed below. These projects are not mine (as in I was/am not the person behind it) but I contribute to them when I can. Sometimes the contribution can be very small." Besides, Prabhu is a VTK developer (VTK is the Visualization toolkit that is an OSS, high level, extremely powerful, visualization library). More details here: http://public.kitware.com/VTK/ He is also involved in some of the visualization/gui aspects of the SciPy project. http://www.scipy.org This project tries to make the Python programming environment into a powerful scientific data processing environment (something like matlab). * Please check this: http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/ Indian Language Support for the Linux Operating System Almost all the widely available software today is written and documented in English, and uses English as the medium to interact with users. This has the advantage of a common language of communication between developers, maintainers and users from different countries. In a country like India, an overwhelming majority of the population does not know English. Given this fact, availability of affordable native language software will play a crucial role in the process of taking the benefits of the "information revolution" to the marginalized sections of society and to achieve appropriate social use of information technology. Indian language support for Linux operating system is done at two modes, namely the Console mode and the X-Windows mode, with mutual compatibility. The requirements on the RAM vary with the mode. In the console mode the RAM requirement is 4 MB while a minimal windows based system requires 6-8 MB. For the cheapest solution, with minimal configuration of resources, the console mode is preferred. But the comfort and ease of use on GUI based applications has prompted the X-Windows based solution, at the cost of slightly more resources. The native language effort of IndLinux group at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras focusses on providing both the console and X-Windows based local language interface for the Linux operating system. The design of the solution for X-Windows mode is based on the work [2] by REC Trichy in collaboration with IIT Kanpur. In either case, the primary goal is to enable applications to inherit the interface with no or minimal modification. Further, an application developed in the console-based environment must work without requiring any modification in the X environment. In addition, once support has been developed for a particular language, the effort to enable any other Indian language should require only changes to the configuration. To meet this requirement, ISCII [3] in consonance with the Inscript keyboard layout has been used. So that keyboard and sound mapping are uniform across all Indian languages. ISCII includes ASCII as a subset. Developing a native language interface at an operating system level is a better proposition compared to developing it at an application level as the former enables all the applications running on top of the operating system to inherit the interface. The choice of Linux as the operating system has been motivated by the fact that Linux is a robust and stable operatingsystem and free. [FROM THE WEBSITE] * SIRTAJ SINGH KANG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ... Virtual Developer's Gallery . . . E 1.x projects: HTML widget, KDEHelp, KDisplay, KColorDialog. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sirtaj Singh Kang 24 years old. Born in New Delhi, India. Living in Melbourne, Australia. Traveller, apprentice musician, software engineer, and appreciator of classical music and ear-splitting . . Tasks in the KDE-Project: karm, kview, korn, kdoc, image file filters, Developers' Centre and Holder of Much Opinion. * The Indian TeX Users Group (TUGIndia) was founded in 1997 to provide leadership for users of TeX, Donald Knuth's revolutionary typesetting system. It represents the interests of TeX users in India: if you use TeX in any of its forms, you may consider joining TUGIndia (see the Aims and Benefits). For additional information on products and services available through the Indian TeX Users Group, please send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED], phone +91-471-33 7501/7502, or FAX your request to +91-471-33 3186.You can also contact via snail mail at:Indian TeX Users Group 3rd Floor, SJP Buildings Cottons Hills, Trivandrum 695 014 * CK Raju <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> associate professor of IT at the Kerala Institute of Local Administration recently announced on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list that "recently the Minister for Local Administration in Kerala has gone public saying that deploying software developed on patent free open source platforms is his dream. This happened on 02 Nov 2001 at Thiruvananthapuram". Information Kerala Mission, started by the LDF ministry are well ahead in their plans with Microsoft products based solutions. They have already started installations at a couple of Grama Panchayats. "As a part of the exercise, I had enquired about availability of financial application packages developed for Linux boxes. GnuCash and Sql-ledger were some packages, but I would like to know whether someone had seen or developed applications on MySQL/PHP (on thin clients, to reduce h/w cost overheads and allow scope for thin devices). GnuCash doesn't use a backend and Sql-Ledger uses PostgreSQL.I would also like to know whether someone would contribute efforts towards this exercise if I go ahead with the initial design and develop a prototype. (I sure am against reinventing the wheel)," he says. The exercise would not be limited to financial package as it would need to step into areas of citizen services to be utilised by the local bodies. Initial design could be made available provided there are volunteers to build and develop the work. * incident.pl 1.9 by Viraj Alankar (http://freshmeat.net/users/valankos/) Sunday, November 11th 2001 11:51 Internet :: Log Analysis Security System :: Networking :: Monitoring About: incident.pl is a small script that, when given syslogs generated by snort or other tools, can generate an incident report for events that appear to be attempted security attacks, gather information on the remote host, and report the attack to the appropriate administrators. Changes: A segfault problem which occurred when WHOIS continually failed was fixed. A problem where the -a/-A options did not prompt for description was fixed. Another issue that prevented RWHOIS server problems from being detected properly was fixed. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) URL: http://freshmeat.net/projects/incident.pl/ _______________________________________________ bsd-india mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sharma-home.net/mailman/listinfo/bsd-india _______________________________________________ linux-india-help mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-india-help
