................................................................ FN's Eye on FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) 10NOV05 ................................................................ Please forward this to FLOSS groups you know... help it grow -FN [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] FREEBSD ... AND INDIA: When FreeBSD 6.0 got recently released, one thought of checking out its links with India. Dru <dlavigne6@xxxxxxxxxxxx> responded to a query to to say, "While I don't know about Indian involvement with the FreeBSD project, I know there is involvement with BSD Certification (http://www.bsdcertification.org). One of the members of the bsdcert mailing list will be at FOSS India -- http://foss.in -- handing out 1500 copies of our brochure. We also have two translators who are starting translations into Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Telegu. As the current chair of the BSD Certification Group, I am interested in spreading the word about BSD certification to India." See bsd-india@xxxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list. Their website http://bsd-india.org/ was established in 1999 and has 111 members. Joseph Koshy <joseph.koshy@xxxxxxxxx> says, "There are indian programmers who have been working on FreeBSD since 1998." Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> who's an old-time friend in another context (Goa's first Usenet newsgroup soc.culture.indian.goa) had this to say, I am a FreeBSD committer, and PIO (Person of Indian Origin), with roots in Goa. FreeBSD is an open-source project which produces a very high-quality, rock solid, operating system. FreeBSD traces its roots to some of the earliest Unix work done at AT&T and the University of California, Berkeley, and is built on solid and proven technology. You can see the history of BSD here: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree Many people from around the world and from different backgrounds contribute to the FreeBSD project, including Indians. * Joseph Koshy ( http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/ ), in Bangalore, contributed a Performance Measurement Framework -- http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/projects/perf-measurement/index.html -- to FreeBSD. Joseph has also contributed other things to FreeBSD. * Mohan Srinivasan <Mohan_Srinivasan@xxxxxxxxx> works at Yahoo, and has contributed many fixes to the FreeBSD networking code. FreeBSD is the primary platform that Yahoo operates its servers on, so high performance networking code in FreeBSD is very important to them. You should contact Joseph and Mohan directly, to get the most accurate information about their involvement in FreeBSD, since I might have made some mistakes. As for myself, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc@xxxxxxxxxxx>, I contribute to FreeBSD in different areas. For FreeBSD 6.0, I have contributed bugfixes to various areas of the FreeBSD code. For FreeBSD 7 (which has not been released), I am collaborating with Alexander Kabaev <kan@xxxxxxxxxxx> to port the high performance XFS filesystem to FreeBSD. Unfortunately, we were not able to finish our work for FreeBSD 6. XFS was originally written by SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) for their IRIX operating system, but they have ported their code to [GNU]Linux. Alexander and I are working to port this code to FreeBSD, and we have a project web page at: http://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/xfs/ [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] Marco Fioretti <marco.fioretti@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> who has worked on the RULE project [1] says he is rebuilding that site from scratch right now, but have also started in another FLOSS-related project. It's the OpenDocument fellowship, its mission and and its petition to add OpenDocument support in Microsoft Office http://opendocumentfellowship.org Says Marco: "Please let me know your opinion, and let the news circulate in India as much as possible if they already haven't. You're obviously encouraged to tell people to contact me, and to let me know anything OpenDocument related happening in India." Marco Fioretti OpenDocument Fellowship Committee Member http://opendocumentfellowship.org Everybody's Guide to OpenDocument: www.linuxjournal.com/article/8616 [1] What is the RULE Project about? The problem: Hardware is not cheap. There are plenty of single users, schools and non-profit organizations with null or very little money for computers. Furthermore, PCs pollute a lot, hence they should be used as long as possible. Not with older Free Software, however, which is useless and dangerous: null support, security holes, no IMAP, GPG, HTML4... Our solution: Hardware is only as old as the software it runs. RULE wants to make modern Free Software useable even on 5 or more years old machines, on which current Linux distributions won't install or run too slowly. Today we work on Fedora simply because the project started among users of Red Hat Linux. To this purpose, M. Fratoni wrote first Miniconda and later Slinky, two installers for those distributions working in as little as 12 MB of RAM. http://www.rule-project.org/ [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] PHOENIX ... USEFUL FOR PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS: Ajith Kumar <ajith@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: You may remember me, Ajith Kumar, did the GLUE CD earlier. Phoenix is a simple computer interface that can be used for doing Physics experiments, data acquisition and control implemented in the same box. The interesting part is the Phoenix Live CD http://www.nsc.res.in/~elab/ISO/index.html A variation of SLAX but packed with lot of software development tools and educational software. It can also be installed to a harddisk partition within three minutes (celeron 2.5 GHz). The downloadable ISO is there on our site. If your bandwidth is low send me your postal address. Our institue name has been changed to Inter-University Accelerator Centre (earlier Nuclear Science Centre). PHYSICS WITH HOMEMADE EQUIPMENT and Innovative Experiments: This project is a part of the program by Inter University Accelerator Centre to improve the laboratory facilities at the universities. Unlike the other equipments developed in for this purpose, phoenix is kept as an open ended project where teaching community can contribute. Objectives: * Improve the accuracy of existing experiments by redesigning them using the low cost interface. * Encourage students and teachers to design new experiments. * Learn science from the experimental data by constructing mathematical models governing various phenomena. * Create a synergy between engineering and physics students so that new physics experiments can be designed as the project works of the former. * Develop demonstrations that can be used in the classroom. * Student projects based on phoenix * Demos and science fare items for school students. There can be achieved only with active collaboration of large number of people at various levels. Contributions from physicists, engineers,teachers and students are equally important. The hardware for the basic interfacing circuit has been done and all the details are available to anyone who is interested. Those who are interested in manufacturing and selling it commercially, see the vendors section. Those who want to make it for educational purposes may contact us only if they need some help. We need to develop more accessories using various sensor elements to make the unit more effective. The software available at the moment are a device driver, libraries accessible from C, Python and Scilab and some application programs for some experiments. All of them are distributed under GNU GPL. Phoenix Mailing List To join the list send a mail to phoenix-project-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word subscribe in the subject line. To post a message send it to phoenix-project@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx List Archives at //www.freelists.org/archives/phoenix-project/ [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] ABOUT ASTRONOMY AND GNU/LINUX: Anurag Garg <friends_ang@xxxxxxxxxxx> says: "I'm a student of M.Sc. Physics in DU, Delhi (India). I've been using {GNU]Linux for the past five mounth in my projects and reserch work related to astronomy. A few days back i was serching for some useful softwares for astronomy that could be run on [GNULinux and came to know about this OS "Linux for Astronomy". I would be very thankful to u if anybody could suggest a place near Delhi from where i could buy this OS. [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] HELPING POSTGRESQL: Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams@xxxxxxxxxx> says that he has volunteered to help with the PostgreSQL regional contact (a sort of press liaison) for India. His work includes forwarding press releases to press people. If you can put Abhijit with presspersons who would be interested, please do. [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] FOSS.IN DELEGATES CAN REGISTER NOW: The Delegate Registration for Nov 29-Dec 2 FOSS.IN/2005 in Bangalore is now open. http://foss.in/2005/delegates/ Please remember - * you do not pay now - you register now * you pay at the venue * if you have registered online and have your delegate code with you you pay Rs.500, else you pay Rs.750. * read the instructions you will receive in email * read the delegate guidelines [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] INDLINUX, the network to promote FLOSS in Indic languages, is planning its presence at FOSS.In, the end-November mega-event at Bangalore. G Karunakar <karunakar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> says they'll be at the event for the fourth time in a row. IndLinux stall will yet again be the center point for all you want to know about Indic on FLOSS, localization etc. They are one of the oldest FOSS projects in India and have been in FLOSS localization area for last six years. Their stall will feature demos, hands on and answer queries on using Indic with FLOSS. Writes Karunakar, who recently visited Goa too: "We would probably have couple of demo machines and laptops (and obviously any other machine nearby will be encroached upon and Indicized forever!). Those with CD writers in your laptops, you are always welcome to the Stall & will be treated as guests of honour, since the stall will always be manned, you can leave those precious things and go attend talks and while we will be busy burning CDs on them!" Volunteers welcome. For more on Indic stuff at FOSS.IN keep tracking http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/Indic%40FOSS.IN and the IndLinux blog http://www.indlinux.org/blog [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] LINTUX NEWSLETTER, FROM MANGALORE IN WESTERN INDIA: Nithin Kamath <knithink@xxxxxxxxx> has this useful LinTux Newsletter "Spreading the Spirit of GNU/Linux". Issue #51 is just out. Check http://groups-beta.google.com/group/lintux [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] ONE DAY, ONE COMMAND... LEARN IT SLOW AND STEADY: Bharathi Subramanian <sbharathi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> puts out a very useful One Day One GNU/Linux Command series. It's available at ODOC LJ -- http://www.livejournal.com/community/ilugc/ Every day (or, almost), the commands are updated in the above link. Says Bharathi: "I am looking for contributors to ODOC. How you can contribute?? Just take one command and prepare a mail in our ODOC format. Don't include hi-tech stuffs and target the newbies. Mail it to me. That ODOC will be posted with your name." FN recommends this as a simple-yet-great tool to build awareness about GNU/Linux and Free/Libre and Open Source Software. You can request Bharathi and he'll post it to your user-group regularly. A great tool to build your FSUG, GLUG and LUG too! [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] FREE SOFTWARE, TEACHERS AND KERALA: Arun M <arun@xxxxxxxxxx> informs via the FSF-Friends mailing list that KSTA, the school teachers' union in Kerala is distributing custom Debian CDs and installation manuals around Kerala. "More and more schools moving towards free software," he writes. See the FSF-Friends mailing list at http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends MEANWHILE, FROM TAJIKISTAN, Asomiddin Atoev <asomiddin@xxxxxxx> reports what he calls some "very good news for Tj FOSS community": A new IT curriculum for secondary education was approved by the Ministry of Education last week. It is platform independent unlike the former one that was solely Microsoft-oriented. FOR THOSE INTERESTED in Free Software and education, check schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Schoolforge's mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for primary and secondary education. Schoolforge is intended to empower member organizations to make open educational resources more effective, efficient, and ubiquitous by enhancing communication, sharing resources, and increasing the transparency of development. Schoolforge members advocate the use of open source and free software, open texts and lessons, and open curricula for the advancement of education and the betterment of humankind. http://schoolforge.net/ [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] Copyleft verbatim copying, with credits is both allowed and encouraged. We invite you to ILUG-Goa, the friendly GNU/Linux user group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa/join [</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>]o[</>] ** To subscribe to this list, please visit the URL below... //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=linuxinindia * *