FROM SOUTH ASIA WITH LOVE: INDIA CONTRIBUTES TO GNU/LINUX
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By Frederick Noronha
fred@bytesforall.org MORE DETAILS FROM
http://linuxinindia.pitas.com Is India contributing to the global GNU/Linux initiative?
Check out what's happening in this part of South Asia. The
modest work-in-progress site
http://linuxinindia.pitas.com attempts to catalogue some of these efforts...
And, it appears that quite a few things are actually
happening...
Scientific data visualisers (its name is 'MayaVi', after the
term for a magician in the ancient sacred language of
Sanskrit), software that queries each host to display the
HTTP server software, and the like.
That's not all: Commercialized supercomputing technology,
Linux parallel supercomputers for high speed rendering,
molecular modeling and weather modelling, bioinformatics
solutions, GIS servers and even Indian language 'killer
applications' (word processing, e-mail using GPLed tools).
Check out Perl modules that help you do "various things". Or
an interactive voice-response system, that allows anyone to
select and fetch pre-recorded messages via a telephone... of
course, using Linux.
Other Indian GNU/Linux products include a GPL WAP-based POP3
mail client, and a RomanScript-to-Hindi transliterator from
the world of GPL again.
Down south, software initiatives are focussing on building
office suites "like MS-Word, Excel and Access" for Linux. Or
even a Pacman in Tamil!
Likewise, other teams are looking at giving Linux an Indian
face -- offering Indian language support from the kernel up,
not just as an add-on stuck on top of the Operating
System. Imagine Pine in the South Indian language of
Tamil. It's possible, says this team!
Check out Bugster, a P2P application for sharing MP3z and
OGGz.
Information Meta View (IMV) system attempts to create a web
standard for information storage in a decentralized
database. Information is stored as a graph like structure
spanning several service providers.
Mget is a command-line download manager mget is a command
line download manager. "It splits the file into a number of
segments and uses several separate threads to download each
segment. It can handle proxies." It's by Debajyoti Bera,
from India's prestigious technology incubators called the
Indian Institute of Technology.
Kandalaya (Sanskrit for "abundance", take Raj Mathur's word
for it) is an outfit that consults in GNU/Linux, Network
application integration and network security. Committed to
the Free Software (Open Source) movement and its goals,
Kandalaya contributes back its software packages. Like Hinv
(hardware inventory, Gmemusage (graphical memory usage
viewer), PPP Dial-Up Scripts (it isn't that tough to
dial-out to your ISP now) and Simple SMTP (does a
"simplistic checking" of how fast a mail server is).
Checks links to the free software campaign in India, and
efforts to make GNU/Linux relevant to the millions of
youngsters going through the educational system in this
country.
On
http://linuxinindia.pitas.com you'll find links to GNU Yahoo, a software named after the developer's girl-friend
(guess which...software), and links to the growing number of
Linux groups across India. There's even a site earlier run
out of the Indian commercial capital Mumbai (earlier Bombay)
that tells 'everything' about a few dozen of free Operating
Systems available worldwide.
Students in the tiny state of Goa -- better known as a
holiday destination -- are smoothing out rough edges of
their GNU Library Management System, called Glibms. It's now
up on sourceforge.net
Wondered what happened to the Simputer, the sub-$200
computing device that was slotted at being meant to take
computing to the commonman in India and the rest of the
Third World? Check out the link...
Also being announced is an operating environment for the
Linux kernel. With a name like Indy, take no guesses where
it's coming from....
In nearby Bangladesh, Mohammed A Muquit has a fascinating
page of free software. Bangla fonts with Linux groff, LDAP
authentication module for Apache web server, good ol'
MasterMind game for Linux, a simple PPP dialler for Linux
(mppp), mxconsole... and lots more. Thanks to Jeebesh Bagchi
for pointing me here.
Links to all this is available on this site, which is still
only in the making and has a long way to go before it can
claim to credibly catalogue even some of the many
initiatives coming up from this region.
Why has India taken its time to make its contribution to the
Linux world felt? Till recently, there were doubts expressed
whether Indians were at all giving back anything to
GNU/Linux domain. Now, these doubts are vanishing...
It needs to be remembered that most Indians couldn't access
the Net till sometime in August 1997. It was only on
Independence Day that year that Internet services were
thrown open to the general public. They too had to pay steep
prices for Net access initially, and in recent months the
costs of this has fall...Earlier, only a few priviledged
researchers and some government officials could access the
Net.
All this means that collaborative working and gaining access
to ideas and inspiration from near and far is becoming a
reality.
In the months ahead, we could well see the speedy growth of
an Indian (and South Asian too, since other countries like
Pakistan and Bangladesh have their own programming talent)
contribution to GNU/Linux.
If readers could help this journalist with pointers in this
direction, I'd be grateful. My work to map the contribution
of South Asians to GNU/Linux is supported by www.sarai.net
of New Delhi. -FN
--
Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa * India
832.409490 / 409783 BYTESFORALL www.bytesforall.org *
GNU-LINUX
http://linuxinindia.pitas.com Email fred@bytesforall.org * SMS 9822122436@attcell.net * Saligao Goa India Writing with a difference... on what makes *the*
difference
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