e88~~\ 888b | 888 | / 888 888 ,e, d888 |Y88b | 888 | L 888 888-~88e e88~\888 " /~~~8e 8888 __ | Y88b | 888 | I 888 888 888 d888 888 888 88b 8888 | | Y88b | 888 | N 888 888 888 8888 888 888 e88~-888 Y888 | | Y88b| Y88 | U 888 888 888 Y888 888 888 C888 888 "88__/ | Y888 "8__/ X 888 888 888 "88_/888 888 "88_-888 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Formerly LinuxInIndia * Compiled by: Frederick Noronha * Dec 27,2002 --------------------------------------------------------------------

GNU/LINUX TO GET A BOOST VIA PUNE: This message is from students at Pune. We wish them all the best. Contact navhindhanuka at hotmail dot com: "We the students of 'Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research' (SICSR) want to contribute to the GNU project. With this aim in mind, we are organizing 'GNUnify', with the whole hearted support of the management of our institute." Set up in 1971, primarily to promote world understanding between Indian and foreign students through education, Symbiosis has a strength of over 16,000 students from over 32 countries. Says the institution: "We in Symbiosis believe that the 'World is one Family'."

The annual fest of SICSR 'Unify', is composed of various cultural, academic events & contests. This year the institution is adding on GNUnify, as their own way "of contributing and encouraging the Free Software movement".

See http://www.sicsr.ac.in (to be updated by early Jan 2003)

The aim of GNUnify is to unify and encourage efforts of GNU developers across the country, by "awarding the best and motivating the rest". Events will include:

1. Code-Presentations (open for all) 1.1 App Dev (Web Apps, Biz Apps, Edu Capsules) 1.2 Embedded Linux 1.3 Network Programming 1.4 Kernel Development / Device Drivers

2. Paper-Presentations (open only for students) 2.1 General (Socio-economic aspects of using GNU/Linux, Does GNU/Linux make sense for India?, and Will China get ahead of India using Free Software?) 2.2 Free Software B-Plan Contest: The major concern of most developers is that since GNU is free there is little / no money to be earned out it. To disprove this a free s/w or gnu based B-plan contest. People submit their B-plans built around free s/w. 2.3 Technical (how to use Apache, migrating from ASP to PHP, Wirel) 3. Techie-Talks (under planning... if you know of any powerful speakers from across the country, do suggest) 4. Hands-on Workshops [Under Planning] 5. Install-Fest of GNU/Linux [Debian, Redhat, Slackware, Mandrake, ...] 6. Screenings. [RMS's Public Lecture @ IIT-Mumbai & Linux-The Code Movie] Event Dates: 15 & 16 Feb 2003 E-Mail: gnunify@symbiosiscomputers.com

NEWS FROM KERALA: Arun M <arun at freedevelopers dot net> reports that he had a recent meet with the general secretary of the KSTA, the trade union of teachers in the southern Indian state of Kerala. They're planning a meet on IT education in schools, and want experts to talk about Free Software.

Meanwhile, Kerala's IT@School expert committee met and seems agreeable to the view that Free Software must be used for the project. Logistical issues of training, text books, and distribution CDs etc need to be taken up. Help is needed for rewriting the textbooks, in a way that these don't exclusively promote proprietorial software.

USERS EXPO 2003: 'Linux India - National Users eXpo 2003' is packing itself as *the* national conference on GNU/Linux in India. It is scheduled between February 7 to 9, at the Marian College Kuttikkanam in Kerala. Want to present a paper? Send in an abstract via email. Organisers are keen to get presentations on kernel programming, compiler design/porting, x-windows, Linux and the computer industry, Linux security, etc. Technical partners for this event are the IPSR group. Contact ipsr at satyam dot net dot in

LINUX ON AN EMBEDDED BOARD: Anand Babu <ab at gnu dot org dot in> and Mridul Jain worked extensively on porting a version of Linux kernel to SA1110-based embedded board from scratch. "We do have a complete embedded GNU/Linux system and we use it in our firewalls and system installers. I can give ...the whole system for free," says Babu. Contact him or Mridul Jain mridul.jain@californiadigital.com Phone in Bangalore (080) 5565570

ANJUTA 1.0.0., LATEST STABLE RELEASE: Heard of Anjuta? Its the integrated development environment initiatied by Naba Kumar and named after his girlfriend! Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee at tcscal dot co dot in> recently announced that Anjuta 1.0.0 "Diwali" has been released. This is the latest stable release of Anjuta, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the GNOME 1.x platform. This release includes numerous enhancements and bugfixes. Website: http://www.anjuta.org/ Project Page: http://sf.net/projects/anjuta/ Downloads: http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=14222&release_id=120396 About Diwali: http://www.bawarchi.com/festivals/diwali1.html

SITEWATCH : http://gpasokan.com/demo-schools/

The Demo@Schools Project: The demo@schools project aims at demoing Free Softwares to schools and make the schools adopt free softwares as a subject of education in their syllabus. They also actively involve ourselves in encouraging children to hack free softwares and learn more. "Schools are increasingly putting efforts to impart software education to their students. We are in an attempt to make schools teach free softwares before they become dependant on non-free softwares," say the Demo@Schools promoters.

SITEWATCH : http://www.ilug-cal.org

The Kolkata chapter of the Indian Linux Users's group (ILUG-CAL) is a volunteer driven organisation dedicated to the propagation and usage of GNU/Linux in Kolkata, and in West Bengal. It says: "The organistion tries to provide suppport to the Linux community in Kolkata, as well as to increase the usage of GNU/Linux among the general computer users community in the city. It also organises workshops, seminars, etc for the local student community." Highlights: Sayamindu (Bangla Tux) has started a new project on Free Bangla fonts. Check out the site at http://www.nongnu.org/freebangfont/

WINDOWS... IN WEST BENGAL SCHOOLS: The West Bengal government is considering using open-source operating systems (OS) like Linux as an alternative to Microsoft Corp's Windows OS in its school computer literacy programme, and has approached hardware maker International Business Machines (IBM) to provide the system support, reports ZDNetIndia. It says the computer literacy programme will cover 11,000 schools all over the state, and the government has already bought 3000 personal computers (PCs) pre-loaded with Windows OS. http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/national/stories/nsl,70367.html

GNU/LINUX IN PUNJABI? Gurupkar Waraich <waraich at linuxmail dot org> says he would like to start a new team for Punjabi localization. See punjabi-linux.sourceforge.net Says he: "Volunteers please get in touch so that we can start working."

LG... LINUX GOING TO THE DESKTOP: LG Electronics India recently announced its decision to launch branded GNU/Linux-based PCs in India. In a stagnant market, will LG's attempt to break into the branded PC market succeed? Srikanth R P reports in Express Computer on LG's move to extend Linux to the desktop. R Manikandan says the Linux OS is not only relatively stable and bug-free, but also offers stronger memory management to the end-customer http://www.express-computer.com/20021125/newsan1.shtml

********************************************************************* See http://linux-bangalore.org for slide presentations of speakers at LinuxBangalore/2002 and also photographs of the event. ************** *********************************************************************

STORY FROM INDIA'S NEIGHBOURHOOD: Video Whale Project grew out of the concept of Umer Anwar Sheikh and was developed by Zeeshan Ali Khattak (zak147(AT)yahoo.com)

The video-whale project is an implementation of video-wall which exploits the combined power of Gstreamer (www.gstreamer.net) & Xinerama. Says the team: "We plan on using these videowalls in Pakistani universties and schools to let them quickly set up videowalls for use in the classrooms when need be. Anyone interested in the videowalls on a commercial basis is also of course welcome to contact us."http://www.gstreamer.net/apps/vw/

PROPRIETORY SOFTWARE: Amol Hatwar <rollacosta at phreaker dot net> drew our attention to the story at http://rediff.com/money/2002/nov/13gates.htm This is about the Govt. of Karnataka and Microsoft signing an MoU for a portal called Bangalore One.

r_dobhal at mailandnews dot com came up with this idea: "Why not mark a "Free Software" Day? Inorder to express your views please visit www.software-freedom.org"

SPEECH SYNTHESIS: Rohit Kumar of the Speech Processing Lab, LTRC at IIIT Hyderabad points to a speech synthesis demo at http://196.12.44.11/~speech/index.htm Says he: "I look forward to your responses both about the speech quality and the ease of use and understandability of the web interface. PS: For all [GNU/]/Linux enthusiasts the speech synthesizer is currently built on Red Hat Linux 7.2 and we have tested it with RHL 8.0."

61 LUGs ACROSS INDIA: National network LinuxIndia points to the existence of nearly 61 LUGs across India (see below). If this is true, then=20 we have more LUGs in India than what the international press is reporting as being present in the whole of Asia! Does anyone know of any unlisted LUGs? Or have some on this list gone inactive? http://www.linux-india.org/chapters.html

Guntupalli Karunakar <karunakar at freedomink dot org> and Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home dot net> point out that Pramod R has created some screenshots of Gnome applications in Kannada. http://kannada.sourceforge.net/gnome-screens/screenshots.html

Raghavendra <yesgr at vsnl dot com> points out the need to draw the attention of others in the Kannada computing world. Says he: "You can also do a demo on setting up the locale, installing the font, show off the translations, setup gtranslator/poedit, etc." The Kannada mailing list is at http://www.sharma-home.net/mailman/listinfo/kannada Meanwhile the Indic-Computing project is at indic-computing.sf.net

Want a set of the latest Debian and Knoppix CDs? Contact ragu@vsnl.com Some of Raghavendra Bhat's other involvements are in the FSUG-Kochi http://symonds.net/~fsug-kochi/ *************************************** UPCOMING MEETS Mumbai * LUG Meet on 12 Jan. 2003 @ VJTI ***************************************

Sajith T S sajith@symonds.net announces a JFS translator for the Hurd, and calls it "the first industrial-strength journaling filesystem for the Hurd". It's a readonly translator, so no journaling for now. See http://www.symonds.net/~sajith/hurd/ More on JFS here: http://oss.software.ibm.com/jfs/

AN OPEN SOURCE BUSINESS MODEL: Dr Tarique Sani <tarique at sanisoft dot com> has published SANIsoft's Open Source Business Model on his site. See http://www.sanisoft.com/openmodel.php Says he: "Feedback from you will be very much appreciated."

SOME FEEDBACK TO GNU/LinuxINDIA NEWSLETTER:

From: Arun Sharma arun@sharma-home.net I understand that you can't fit an ASCII art logo mentioning "GNU/Linux India" in 80 columns, and hence had to abbreviate "Linux" part a little bit. But given all the controversy about the term "GNU/Linux", I find the above logo in bad taste -- it almost seems like you're posting about "GNU India", when in fact, the message is about what I'd normally call "Linux". I'm sure you could design a logo that displays "Linux" more prominently.-Arun

From amish_munshi@sify.com Fri Dec 27 17:07:26 2002 Can you change this artwork, it is not readable. I am very bad at art work, so I can not provide any artwork, sorry. Overall, it is the best newsletter I have ever got, very well made. Keep it up. How regularly will I be getting such rich content?

From paivakil@vsnl.net Fri Dec 27 17:08:37 2002 Wow!!!! What a beautiful logo!!! -- Mahesh T. Pai.

INDIAN-LANGUAGE SOLUTIONS FROM PIONEERS AT IIT-MADRAS:

Dr Hema A Murthy <hema at lantana dot tenet dot res dot in>, associate professor at the IIT Madras (Chennai) is one of the two coordinators of the IndLinux effort, along with Timothy A Gonsalves <tag at tenet dot res dot in>. You can also contact indlinux at tenet dot res dot in for information.

She recently wrote in to point to some of the shortcomings in an article written recently. Our apologies for an inadequate representation; we have no excuse other than the general difficulties in garnering information across a virtual sub-continent, largely depending on e-mail.

Says Dr Murthy: "Currently, the TeNeT group is involved in the wide scale deployment of Internet kiosks across the countryside. The kiosks require local language software so that they can be effectively used by the marginalised literate population of our country."

We are grateful for the explanation below to Dr Murthy:

Given the number of Indian languages and different encoding standards and fonts they use, it was felt that we need to develop Indian language support that is essentially independent of encoding and font. Further, we felt that this support must be provided at the kernel/X-Window system levels so that applications that run on top of the kernel/X-Window system inherit the interface.

To this end we provide two different solutions under linux: kernel based and X-Window based.

Kernel based solution: Indian languages have variable width characters. To support variable width at the kernel level, a multiglyph approach is proposed, i.e. a keystroke may correspond to one or more glyphs. Further, the number of keystrokes possible on the standard QWERTY keyboard is not sufficient to represent all characters and character clusters in any given language. This results in the problem that a sequences of keys may correspond to different glyphs (in that a key sequence ab might correspond to a glyph g1, while a key sequence abc might correspond to a different glyph g2). This requires that the system has a memory of the keystrokes that have been made. To address this problem a finite state machine and a set of associated rules was introduced in the kernel.

X-Window based solution: Two different solutions are supported at the X-Window level, namely, glyph based and encoding based. In the first approach, similar to that of the kernel, the parsing is done on the input side, while glyphs are produced on the output side (file/display). In this approach, clearly the system is tied to the font that is used. To overcome this problem, an encoding based solution has also been provided. The problem with this approach is in cursor positioning. The position of the cursor is maintained by the application which interacts with X to obtain the widths of characters. The cursor is positioned based on the keys typed (no memory/context sensitivity is assumed). We are yet to address this problem. We do feel that the only solution available to us is to provide a set of cursor APIs in X which can be used by any application.

In either solution, the language dependent information is provided in parse rule tables. This information is loaded at runtime. This ensures that changing the local language environment is simply a question of manipulating parse rule tables.

Applications: The solutions that we have provided enable a user to type in a local language in most applications (Open Office/ KOffice/gcc...). We have further customised some of the applications (menus/errors in local languages), namely, KOffice, Konqueror, gcc, pine, emacs. We are currently working on customising Open Office. We are also working on a convertor from fonts to encoding, fonts to fonts, encoding to font.

Current Support: Tamil (Glyph-based) - TamilNet99, Inscript Hindi (Glyph-based) - Inscript

Tamil (Encoding-based) - ISCII Hindi (Encoding-based) - ISCII

The above supports are complete. (This simply means that we have populated the appropriate language dependent parse rule files). We are currently working on Malayalam, Oriya, Marathi and Gujarathi.

Future Plans: This work is part of a major plan to develop a multimodal interface to the computer. By multimodal, we mean, handwriting, keyboard and speech interfaces. We have started work on both handwriting and speech. We have developed a handwriting interface for Tamil and have developed speech technology software for: speech synthesis in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam (Malayalam database was obtained from ISDL, Trivandrum); spoken language identification, syllable-based recognition of continuous speech, speaker identification. (ENDS) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOUR INPUTS to this newsletter are welcome. Volunteers more than welcome. Contact us at fred at bytesforall dot org --COPYLEFT 2002, GPL. May be freely circulated provided entire text is retained. FN --------------------------------------------------------------------------