- Fsf-friends - lists.fsci.in

a must read
by Mahesh T. Pai 26 Mar '04

26 Mar '04

Just published. `Free Culture' - a book by Larry Lessig. Available for free under a free of cost license from http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/ or for a price from Penguin. He admits that his ideas were propounded by RMS a few decades back. Fours hours after publications, I am at page 30 of the pdf. -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

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Wonder if we could start recirculating such a note... to CMs and MPs...
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

Sir, The Free Software Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation involved in promoting freedom in software. We write this to request you to consider using Free Software for IT programmes being implemented by your government, thus saving money and building a strong indigenous resource base. The main advantages of using Free software, compared to proprietary software are: * Free software allows the user to modify and customise it. Thus, the * programs can be modified by the user, if he has the know-how, or by a * programmer hired by the user. * The software can be installed on any number of machines, and separate * licences are not required. * The 'source codes' (ie. the original programs written in human language) * are available, which can be used as very good examples to teach students. * This is a tremendous help for budding programmers who get to see programs * that have been written and refined by some of the world's best * programmers. * The GNU/Linux operating system, which is the leading Free operating system * today, is very stable and the natural choice for most network servers. * The GNU/Linux operating system and applications running on it are as * user-friendly as any other. It would be possible for anyone familiar with * computers to start using applications in GNU/Linux with a few days' * practice. A detailed write-up is enclosed, which explains in detail the advantages of Free Software over proprietary software. Hoping for a favourable response, Yours sincerely, for Free Software Foundation

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[AsiaOSS-RT:00211] Awareness slides on AsiaOSS - open content for your own use. (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Dear AsiaOSS RT members, I made a couple of presentations open to the public here in Malaysia last week, on the subjects of 1) Background Information on the AsiaOSS3 Symposium - organisers, aims, projects, future plans etc. 2) Open Source Trends in Asia (based on the economies' slides presented in Hanoi). Includes some discussion of business models. I hope that these may be of use to other RT members to promote participation in the Symposium in your own economy. They are all in an open content license, so you can easily modify them for your own purpose (OpenOffice format). The slides are downloadable from http://opensource.mimos.my/?main=tech_wshop/slides_2004/slides_2004 Regards, Imran -- Imran William Smith, Open Source R&D, MIMOS Berhad, Malaysia http://opensource.mimos.my - http://www.asiaosc.org Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

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GPL open source projects from INDIA
by Mujibur Rahman Shaik 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

Hello All, Where can i find the information about the projects and people who are working on GPL Open Source Projects in INDIA. Is there any means of collaboration between these teams to help each other in bringing up of the projects. Regards Rahman --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time.

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Re: [India-egov] Microsoft to conduct five e-Gov seminars in India, 10 March 2004(fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

Hi Atul, I certainly think this should be done. You have my full support. Copying this to FSF-FRIENDS. We can locate the MPs' names (even if the Lok Sabha has been dissolved) from the parliament.nic.in site. At least in the Rajya Sabha for now. In addition, we could also get friendly MPs to raise parliamentary questions. I know a couple, and FLOSS issues have already been raised in the Indian parliament, thanks to them. FN On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Atul Asthana @ home wrote: > Dear Frederick, > > Was planning to start a campaign to write to MLAs/MPs, Ministers, > Bureaucrats stating advantages of OSS over Microsoft. > Do you think that this campaign can be initiated thru any of the > mailing lists (you and I are on, or otherwise)? That is we encourage > people on the mailing lists to write to their representatives, > bueaucrats known to them etc? > Its not a difficult task to find names and addresses of > MLAs/MPs/Bureaucrats. > > > Regards. > Atul Asthana > atulasthana(a)gmx.net > 2004-03-15 09:51:53 > > First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. > --Mahatma Gandhi > > ======= At 2004-03-10, 13:54:00 Frederick Noronha (FN) fred(a)sancharnet.in wrote: ======= > > >---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > > > > >10 March, 2004 [ www.i4donline.net ] > > > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > >Microsoft to conduct five e-Gov seminars in India > >Microsoft Corporation India today announced a series of five > >e-Governance seminars targeted at bureaucrats and Government > >officials. The first seminar in the series will be held at Bhopal. > >Targeted at bureaucrats and government officials, the seminars > >will be conduced across of Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, > >Orissa and West Bengal. > >http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/03/10/stories/2004031002281700.htm > > > ><*> To visit your group on the web, go to: > > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/India-egov/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- March 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 | ---------------------------------------- 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Writing with a difference 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | ... on what makes *the* difference 28 29 30 31 | http://www.bytesforall.org ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHECK OUT USENET http://www.algebra.com/~scig/approved/threads.html -------------------------------------------------------------------

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RE: [Fsf-friends] YaST to be set free
by Senthil_OR＠Dell.com 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

>>SUSE YaST to be released under the GNU GPL by Novell. >>http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5175682.html Novell is coming up with quite a good things for Free Software/Open Source Programmers. Did you come across http://forge.novell.com ? /. Is bearing lotta news abt it. Seems they are working on integrating Gnome and Kde.

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Hacker Survey
by Senthil_OR＠Dell.com 24 Mar '04

24 Mar '04

Like various Corporates have surveys and analyses,Boston Consulting in collab with OSDN has come with a Hacker Survey. It is available here: http://www.osdn.com/bcg/ ( Under GNU FDL) The thing I observed was, the prominient reasons for people involving with Free Software/Open Source is " It is Intellectually Simulating and and it improves Skills". Other noticeable points were: - 98% are males ( :( if in college & :) if in school ) - India has a very small proportion as compared to US and Germany. Feel Free to Comment. -- Senthil

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Language Info Needed for GNU Aspell
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 24 Mar '04

24 Mar '04

[Please distribute this document as widely as possible.] GNU Aspell 0.60 should be able to support most of the Word Languages. This includes languages languages written in Arabic and other scripts not well supported by an existing 8-bit character set. Eventually Aspell should be able to support any current language not based on the Chinese writing system. GNU Aspell is a spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. Its main feature is that it does a much better job of coming up with possible suggestions than just about any other spell checker out there for the English language, including Ispell and Microsoft Word. However, starting with Aspell 0.60 is should also be the only Free (as in Freedom) that can support most languages not written in the Latin or Cyrillic scripts. However I, the author of Aspell, know very little about foreign languages (ie non-English) and what it takes to correctly spell check them. Thus, I need other people to educate me. If you speak a foreign language I would appreciate if you would take the time too look over the following material and email me with any additional information you may have. The first part gives a thorough analysis of the languages which Aspell can and cannot support. If you find any of this information is incorrect please inform me at kevina(a)gnu.org. When Aspell 0.60 is released I would like to have dictionaries available for as many languages as possible. Therefore, if you know of a Free word list available for a language that is not currently listed as having a dictionary available I would appreciate hearing form you. I am especially interested in working with someone to add support for languages written in the Arabic script. The encoding of the Arabic is quite complicated and I want to be sure that Aspell can correctly handle it. I would also appreciate some help converting Ispell dictionaries to Aspell. So, if you would like to help convert some of the dictionaries listed as being available for Ispell please contact me. The second part lists languages related issues involved in correctly spell checking a document. If you can offer any additional insight on any of the issues discussed, or know of any additional complications when spell checking a given language, I would appreciate hearing from you. The last part discusses why Aspell uses 8-bit characters internally for your reading pleasure. All of this material is also included in the Aspell 0.60 manual which you can find at http://aspell.net/devel-doc/man. Languages Which Aspell can Support ********************************** Even though Aspell will remain 8-bit internally it should still be be able to support any written languages not based on a logographic script. The only logographic writing system in current use are those based on hànzi which includes Chinese, Japanese, and sometimes Korean. Supported ========= Aspell 0.60 should be able to support the following languages as, to the best of my knowledge, they all contain 220 or fewer symbols and can thus, fit within an 8-bit character set. If an existing character set does not exists than a new one can be invented. This is true even if the script is not yet supported by Unicode as the private use area can be used. Code Language Name Script Dictionary Gettext Available Translation aa Afar Latin - - ab Abkhazian Cyrillic - - ae Avestan Avestan - - af Afrikaans Latin Yes - ak Akan Latin - - an Aragonese Latin - - ar Arabic Arabic - - as Assamese Bengali - - av Avar Cyrillic - - ay Aymara Latin - - az Azerbaijani Cyrillic - - az Latin - - ba Bashkir Cyrillic - - be Belarusian Cyrillic Planned Yes bg Bulgarian Cyrillic Yes - bh Bihari Devanagari - - bi Bislama Latin - - bm Bambara Latin - - bn Bengali Bengali Planned - bo Tibetan Tibetan - - br Breton Latin Yes - bs Bosnian Latin - - ca Catalan/Valencian Latin Yes - ce Chechen Cyrillic - - ch Chamorro Latin - - co Corsican Latin - - cr Cree Latin - - cs Czech Latin Yes Yes cu Old Slavonic Cyrillic - - cv Chuvash Cyrillic - - cy Welsh Latin Yes - da Danish Latin Yes - de German Latin Yes Yes dv Divehi Thaana - - dz Dzongkha Tibetan - - ee Ewe Latin - - el Greek Greek Yes - en English Latin Yes Yes eo Esperanto Latin Yes - es Spanish Latin Yes Incomplete et Estonian Latin Planned - eu Basque Latin - - fa Persian Arabic - - ff Fulah Latin - - fi Finnish Latin Planned - fj Fijian Latin - - fo Faroese Latin Yes - fr French Latin Yes Yes fy Frisian Latin - - ga Irish Latin Yes Yes gd Scottish Gaelic Latin Planned - gl Gallegan Latin Yes - gn Guarani Latin - - gu Gujarati Gujarati - - gv Manx Latin Planned - ha Hausa Latin - - he Hebrew Hebrew Planned - hi Hindi Devanagari - - ho Hiri Motu Latin - - hr Croatian Latin Yes - ht Haitian Creole Latin - - hu Hungarian Latin Planned - hy Armenian Armenian - - hz Herero Latin - - ia Interlingua (IALA) Latin Yes - id Indonesian Latin Yes - ie Interlingue Latin - - ig Igbo Latin - - ik Inupiaq Latin - - io Ido Latin - - is Icelandic Latin Yes - it Italian Latin Yes - iu Inuktitut Latin - - jv Javanese Javanese - - jv Latin - - ka Georgian Georgian - - kg Kongo Latin - - ki Kikuyu/Gikuyu Latin - - kj Kwanyama Latin - - kk Kazakh Cyrillic - - kl Kalaallisut/Greenlandic Latin - - kn Kannada Kannada - - ko Korean Hangeul - - kr Kanuri Latin - - ks Kashmiri Arabic - - ks Devanagari - - ku Kurdish Arabic - - ku Cyrillic - - ku Latin - - kv Komi Cyrillic - - kw Cornish Latin - - ky Kirghiz Cyrillic - - ky Latin - - la Latin Latin - - lb Luxembourgish Latin Planned - lg Ganda Latin - - li Limburgan Latin - - ln Lingala Latin - - lo Lao Lao - - lt Lithuanian Latin Planned - lu Luba-Katanga Latin - - lv Latvian Latin - - mg Malagasy Latin - - mh Marshallese Latin - - mi Maori Latin Yes - mk Makasar Lontara/Makasar - - ml Malayalam Latin - - ml Malayalam - - mn Mongolian Cyrillic - - mn Mongolian - - mo Moldavian Cyrillic - - mr Marathi Devanagari - - ms Malay Latin Yes - mt Maltese Latin Planned - my Burmese Myanmar - - na Nauruan Latin - - nb Norwegian Bokmal Latin Yes - nd North Ndebele Latin - - ne Nepali Devanagari - - ng Ndonga Latin - - nl Dutch Latin Yes Yes nn Norwegian Nynorsk Latin Yes - nr South Ndebele Latin - - nv Navajo Latin - - ny Nyanja Latin - - oc Occitan/Provencal Latin - - or Oriya Oriya - - os Ossetic Cyrillic - - pa Punjabi Gurmukhi - - pi Pali Devanagari - - pi Sinhala - - pl Polish Latin Yes - ps Pushto Arabic - - pt Portuguese Latin Yes Yes qu Quechua Latin - - rm Raeto-Romance Latin - - rn Rundi Latin - - ro Romanian Latin Yes Yes ru Russian Cyrillic Yes Yes rw Kinyarwanda Latin - - sa Sanskrit Devanagari - - sc Sardinian Latin - - sd Sindhi Arabic - - se Northern Sami Latin - - sg Sango Latin - - si Sinhalese Sinhala - - sk Slovak Latin Yes - sl Slovenian Latin Yes - sm Samoan Latin - - sn Shona Latin - - so Somali Latin - - sq Albanian Latin Planned - sr Serbian Cyrillic - Yes sr Latin - - ss Swati Latin - - st Southern Sotho Latin - - su Sundanese Latin - - sv Swedish Latin Yes - sw Swahili Latin Planned - ta Tamil Tamil Planned - te Telugu Telugu - - tg Tajik Latin - - tk Turkmen Latin - - tl Tagalog Latin - - tl Tagalog - - tn Tswana Latin - - to Tonga Latin - - tr Turkish Latin - - ts Tsonga Latin - - tt Tatar Cyrillic - - tw Twi Latin - - ty Tahitian Latin - - ug Uighur Arabic - - ug Cyrillic - - ug Latin - - uk Ukrainian Cyrillic Yes - ur Urdu Arabic - - uz Uzbek Cyrillic - - uz Latin - - ve Venda Latin - - vi Vietnamese Latin - - vo Volapuk Latin - - wa Walloon Latin Planned Incomplete wo Wolof Latin - - xh Xhosa Latin - - yi Yiddish Hebrew - - yo Yoruba Latin - - za Zhuang Latin - - zu Zulu Latin Planned - Notes on Latin Languages ------------------------ Any word that can be written using on of the Latin ISO-8859 character sets (ISO-8859-1,2,3,4,9,10,13,14,15,16) can be written, in decomposed form, using the ASCII characters, the 23 additional letters: U+00C6 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE U+00D0 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ETH U+00D8 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE U+00DE LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN U+00DE LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN U+00DF LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S U+00E6 LATIN SMALL LETTER AE U+00F0 LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH U+00F8 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE U+0110 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE U+0111 LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH STROKE U+0126 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH STROKE U+0127 LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH STROKE U+0131 LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I U+0138 LATIN SMALL LETTER KRA U+0141 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH STROKE U+0142 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG U+0152 LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE U+0153 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE U+0166 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH STROKE U+0167 LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH STROKE and the 14 modifiers: U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT U+0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT U+0302 COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT U+0303 COMBINING TILDE U+0304 COMBINING MACRON U+0306 COMBINING BREVE U+0307 COMBINING DOT ABOVE U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS U+030A COMBINING RING ABOVE U+030B COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT U+030C COMBINING CARON U+0326 COMBINING COMMA BELOW U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA U+0328 COMBINING OGONEK Which is a total of 37 additional Unicode code points. All ISO-8859 character leaves the characters 0x00 - 0x19 and 0x80 - 0x99 unmapped as they are generally used as control characters. Of those, 0x02 - 0x19 and 0x80 - 0x99 may be mapped to anything in Aspell. This is a total of 62 characters which can be remapped in any ISO-8859 character set. Thus, by remapping 37 of the 62 characters to the previously specifed Unicode code-points, any modified ISO-8859 character set can be used for any Latin languages covered by ISO-8859. Of course decomposing every single accented character wastes a lot of space, so only characters that can be not be represented in the precomposed form should be broken up. By using this trick it is possible to store foreign words in the correctly accented form in the dictionary even if the precomposed character is not in the current character set. Any letter in the Unicode range U+0000 - U+0249, U+1E00..U+1EFF (Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional) can be represented using around 175 basic letters, and 25 modifiers which is less than 220 and can thus fit in an Aspell 8-bit character set. Since this unicode range covers any possible Latin language this special character set can be used to reperesnt any word written using the Latin script if so desired. Hangeul ------- Koren in generally written in hangeul or a mixture of hanja and hangeul. Aspell should be able to spell check the hangeul part of the writing. In Hangeul letters individual letters, known as jamo, are grouped together in syllable blocks. Unicode provided code points for both jamo and the combined syllable block. The syllable blocks will need to be decomposed into jamo in order for Aspell to spell check it. Syllabic ======== Syllabic languages use a separate symbol for each syllable of the language. Since most of them have more than 240 distinct characters Aspell can not support them as is. However, all hope is not lost as Aspell will most likely be able to support them in the future. Code Language Name Script am Amharic Ethiopic cr Cree Canadian Syllabics ii Sichuan Yi Yi iu Inuktitut Canadian Syllabics oj Ojibwa Ojibwe om Oromo Ethiopic ti Tigrinya Ethiopic The Ethiopic Syllabary ---------------------- Even though the Ethiopic script has more than 220 distinct characters with a little work Aspell can still handle it. The idea is to split each character into two parts based on the matrix representation. The first 3 bits will be the first part and could be mapped to `10000???'. The next 6 bits will be the second part and could be mapped to `11??????'. The combined character will then be mapped with the upper bits coming first. Thus each Ethiopic syllabary will have the form `11?????? 10000???'. By mapping the first and second parts to separate 8-bit characters it is easy to tell which part represents the consonant and which part represents the vowel of the syllabary. This encoding of the syllabary is far more useful to Aspell than if they were stored in UTF-8 or UTF-16. In fact, the exiting suggestion strategy of Aspell will work well with this encoding with out any additional modifications. However, additional improvements may be possible by taking advantage of the consonant-vowel structure of this encoding. In fact, the split consonant-vowel representation may prove to be so useful that it may be beneficial to encode other syllabary in this fashion, even if they are less than 220 of them. The code to break up a syllabary into the consonant-vowel parts does not exists as of Aspell 0.60. However, it will be fairly easy to add it as part of the Unicode normalization process once that is written. The Yi Syllabary ---------------- A very large syllabary with 819 distince symbols. However, like Ethiopic, it should be possible to support this script by breaking it up. The Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics ----------------------------------------- Another very large syllabary. The Ojibwe Syllabary -------------------- With only 120 distinct symbols, Aspell can actually support this one as is. However, as previously mentioned, it may be beneficial to break it up into the consonant-vowel representation anyway. Unsupported =========== These languages, when written in the given script, are currently unsupported by Aspell for one reason or another. Code Language Name Script ja Japanese Japanese km Khmer Khmer ko Korean Hanja + Hangeul pi Pali Thai th Thai Thai zh Chinese Hanja The Thai and Khmer Scripts -------------------------- The Thai and Khmer scripts presents a different problem for Aspell. The problem is not that there are more than 220 unique symbols, but that there are no spaces between words. This means that there is no easy way to split a sentence into individual words. However, it is still possible to spell check these scripts, it is just a lot more difficult. I will be happy to work within someone who is interested in adding Thai or Khmer support to Aspell, but it is not likely something I will do in the foreseeable future. Languages which use Hànzi Characters ------------------------------------ Hànzi Characters are used to write Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and were once used to write Vietnamese. Each hànzi character represents a syllable of a spoken word and also has a meaning. Since there are around 3,000 of them in common usage it is unlikely that Aspell will ever be able to support spell checking languages written using hànzi. However, I am not even sure if these languages need spell checking since hànzi characters are generally not entered in directly. Furthermore even if Aspell could spell check hànzi the exiting suggestion strategy will not work well at all, and thus a completely new strategy will need to be developed. Japanese -------- Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of "hiragana", "katakana", "kanji", and sometimes "romaji". "Hiragana" and "katakana" are both syllabaries unique to Japan, "kanji" is a modified form of hànzi, and "romaji" uses the Latin alphabet. With some work, Aspell should be able to check the non-kanji part of Japanese text. However, based on my limited understanding of Japanese hiragana is often used at the end of kanji. Thus if Aspell was to simply separate out the hiragana from kanji it would end up with a lot of word endings which are not proper words and will thus be flagged as misspellings. However, this can be fairly easily rectified as text is tokenized into words before it is converted into Aspell's internal encoding. In fact, some Japanese text is written in entirely in one script. For example books for children and foreigners are sometimes written entirely in hiragana. Thus, Aspell could prove at least somewhat useful for spell checking Japanese. Languages Written in Multiple Scripts ===================================== Aspell should be able to check text written in the same language, but in multiple scripts, with some work. If the number of unique symbols in both scripts is less than 220 than a special character set can be used to allow both scripts to be encoding in the same dictionary. However this may not be the most efficient solution. An alternate solution is to store each script in its own dictionary and allow Aspell to chose the correct dictionary based on which script the given word is written in. Aspell currently does not support this mode of spell checking however it is something that I hope to eventually support. Notes on Planned Dictionaries ============================= be Belarusian Ispell Dictionary available bn Bengali Unoffical Aspell Dictionary available `http://www.bengalinux.org/downloads/' et Estonian Ispell Dictionary available fi Finnish Ispell Dictionary available gd Scottish Ispell Dictionary available. Gaelic `http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/igaelic' gv Manx Ispell Dictionary available. `http://packages.debian.org/unstable/text/imanx' he Hebrew Ispell Dictionary available hu Hungarian MySpell dictionary expanded to over 500 MB. Will add once affix support is worked into the dictionary package system. lb Luxembourgish MySpell dictionary planned. lt Lithuanian MySpell dictionary expanded to over 500 MB. Will add once affix support is worked into the dictionary package system. mt Maltese Unofficial Aspell Dictionary available, but broken link to source. `http://linux.org.mt/article/spellcheck' sw Albanian Ispell Dictionary available sw Swahili Available at `http://sourceforge.net/projects/translate'. Offical version comming soon. ta Tamil Word list available at `http://www.developer.thamizha.com/spellchecker/index.html'. Working with them to create an Aspell dictionary. wa Walloon Ispell Dictionary available zu Zulu Available at `http://sourceforge.net/projects/translate'. Offical version comming soon. References ========== The information in this chapter was gathered from numerous sources, including: * ISO 639-2 Registration Authority, `http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/' * Languages and Scripts (Offical Unicode Site), `http://www.unicode.org/onlinedat/languages-scripts.html' * Omniglot - a guide to written language, `http://www.omniglot.com/' * Winkipedia - The Free Encyclopedia, `http://wikipedia.org/' * Ethnologue - Languages of the World, `http://www.ethnologue.com/' * World Languages - The Ultimate Language Store, `http://www.worldlanguage.com/' * South African Languages Web, `http://www.languages.web.za/' * The Languages and Writing Systems of Africa (Global Advisor Newsletter), `http://www.intersolinc.com/newsletters/africa.htm' Special thanks goes to Era Eriksson for helping me the information in this chapter. Language Related Issues *********************** Here are some language related issues that a good spell checker needs to handle. If you have any more information about any of these issues, or of a new issue not discussed here, please email me at <kevina(a)gnu.org>. German Sharp S ============== The German Sharp S or Eszett does not have an uppercase equivalent. Instead when `ß' is converted to `SS'. The conversion of `ß' to `SS' requires a special rule, and increases the length of a word, thus disallowing inplace case conversion. Furthermore, my general rule of converting all words to lowercase before looking them up in the dictionary won't work because the conversion of `SS' to lowercase is ambiguous; it can be `ss' or `ß'. I do plan on dealing with this eventually, however. Compound Words ============== In some languages, such as German, it is acceptable to string two words together, thus forming a compound word. However, there are rules to when this can be done. Furthermore, it is not always sufficient to simply concatenate the two words. For example, sometimes a letter is inserted between the two words. I tried implementing support for compound words in Aspell but it was too limiting and no one used it. Before I try implementing it again I want to know all the issues involved. Context Sensitive Spelling ========================== In some language, such as Luxembourgish, the spelling of a word depends on which words surround it. For example the the letter `n' at the end of a word will disappear if it is followed by another word starting with a certain letter such as an `s'. However, it can probably get more complicated than that. I would like to know how complicated before I attempt to implement support for context sensitive spelling. Unicode Normalization ===================== Because Unicode contains a large number of precomposed characters there are multiple ways a character can be represented. For example letter a* can either be represented as U+00E5 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE or U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A + U+030A COMBINING RING ABOVE By performing normalization first Aspell will only see one of these representations. The exact form of normalization depends on the language. Give the choice of 1. Precomposed character 2. Base letter + combining character(s) 3. Base letter only if the precomposed charter is in the target character set then (1), if both the base and combing character is present than (2), otherwise (3). Words With Spaces or other Symbols in Them ========================================== Many languages, including English, have words with non-letter symbols in them. For example the apostrophe. These symbols generally appear in the middle of a word, but they can also appear at the end, such as in an abbreviation. If a symbol can _only_ appear as part of a word than Aspell can treat it as if it were a letter. However, the problem is most of these symbols have other uses. For example, the apostrophe is often used as a single quote and the abbreviations marker is also used as a period. Thus, Aspell can not blindly treat them as if they were letters. Aspell currently handles the case where the symbol can only appear in the middle of the word fairly well. It simply assumes that if there is a letter both before and after the symbol than it is part of the word. This works most of the time but it is not fool proof. For example, suppose the user forgot to leave a space after the period: ... and the dog went up the tree.Then the cat ... Aspell would think "tree.Then" is one word. A better solution might be to then try to check "tree" and "Then" separately. But what if one of them is not in the dictionary? Should Aspell assume "tree.Then" is one word? The case where the symbol can appear at the beginning or end of the word is more difficult to deal with. The symbol may or may not actually be part of the word. Aspell currently handles this case by first trying to spell check the word with the symbol and if that fails, try it without. The problem is, if the word is misspelled, should Aspell assume the symbol belongs with the word or not? Currently Aspell assumes it does, which is not always the correct thing to do. Numbers in words present a different challenge to Aspell. If Aspell treats numbers as letters than every possible number a user might write in a document must be specified in the dictionary. This could be easily be solved by having special code to assume all numbers are correctly spelled. But what about something like "4th". Since the "th" suffix can appear after any number we are left with the same problem. The solution would be to have a special symbol for "any number". Words with spaces in them, such as foreign phrases, are even more trouble to deal with. The basic problem is that when tokonizing a string there is no good way to keep phrases together. One solution is to use trial and error. If a word is not in the dictionary try grouping it with the previous or next word and see if the combined word is the dictionary. But what if the combined word is not, should the misspelled word be grouped when looking for suggestions? One solution is to also store each part of the phrase in the dictionary, but tag it as part of a phrase and not an independent word. To further complicate things, most applications that use spell checkers are accustom to parsing the document themselves and sending it to the spell checker a word at a time. In order to support word with spaces in them a more complicated interface will be required. Notes on 8-bit Characters ************************* There is a very good reason I use 8-bit characters in Aspell. Speed and simplicity. While many parts of my code can fairly be easily be converted to some sort of wide character as my code is clean. Other parts can not be. One of the reasons because is many, many places I use a direct lookup to find out various information about characters. With 8-bit characters this is very feasible because there is only 256 of them. With 16-bit wide characters this will waste a LOT of space. With 32-bit characters this is just plain impossible. Converting the lookup tables to some other form, while certainly possible, will degrade performance significantly. Furthermore, some of my algorithms relay on words consisting only on a small number of distinct characters (often around 30 when case and accents are not considered). When the possible character can consist of any Unicode character this number because several thousand, if that. In order for these algorithms to still be used some sort of limit will need to be placed on the possible characters the word can contain. If I impose that limit, I might as well use some sort of 8-bit characters set which will automatically place the limit on what the characters can be. There is also the issue of how I should store the word lists in memory? As a string of 32 bit wide characters. Now that is using up 4 times more memory than charters would and for languages that can fit within an 8-bit character that is, in my view, a gross waste of memory. So maybe I should store them is some variable width format such as UTF-8. Unfortunately, way, way to many of may algorithms will simply not work with variable width characters without significant modification which will very likely degrade performance. So the solution is to work with the characters as 32-bit wide characters and than convert it to a shorter representation when storing them in the lookup tables. Now than can lead to an inefficiency. I could also use 16 bit wide characters however that may not be good enough to hold all of future versions of Unicode and it has the same problems. As a response to the space waste used by storing word lists in some sort of wide format some one asked: Since hard drive are cheaper and cheaper, you could store dictionary in a usable (uncompressed) form and use it directly with memory mapping. Then the efficiency would directly depend on the disk caching method, and only the used part of the dictionaries would relay be loaded into memory. You would no more have to load plain dictionaries into main memory, you'll just want to compute some indexes (or something like that) after mapping. However, the fact of the matter is that most of the dictionary will be read into memory anyway if it is available. If it is not available than there would be a good deal of disk swaps. Making characters 32-bit wide will increase the change that there are more disk swap. So the bottom line is that it will be cheaper to convert the characters from something like UTF-8 into some sort of wide character. I could also use some sort of disk space lookup table such as the Berkeley Database. However this will *definitely* degrade performance. The bottom line is that keeping Aspell 8-bit internally is a very well though out decision that is not likely to change any time soon. Fell free to challenge me on it, but, don't expect me to change my mind unless you can bring up some point that I have not thought of before and quite possible a patch to solve cleanly convert Aspell to Unicode internally with out a serious performance lost OR serious memory usage increase. -- http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu(a)gnu.org> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

1 0

YaST to be set free
by Ramanraj K 24 Mar '04

24 Mar '04

SUSE YaST to be released under the GNU GPL by Novell. http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5175682.html

1 0

House of Dancing Lights
by Rakesh Ambati 24 Mar '04

24 Mar '04

Hello list, This post has a small story,the story which I could never understand. Perhaps someone will help me understand it better. With that hope I remain -arky --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ah, my dear friends, Listen,I have a story of tell, the story of house of dancing lights. I never heard anyone mention of the house, the little house on the hill.Not until the overcast the day I sat beside the fire in this roadside inn. 'I have seen many learned men go the over hill' said anna. Anna,the inn keeper knew me from annual stopover at the inn. 'Go where,anna?' I asked. 'To the house of dancing lights, where the old white beard lives. Many learned men from lands far far away come here. On clear summer nights you can see the dancing lights,over there' anna said. 'Over that hill, I don't see any dancing lights,anna' 'No,those were good old days,the men never come.' with a sad face anna left the salon. I decided to stay back the next day and visit the house on the hill,perhaps I meet the old white beard,strange name those country folk have.I rose early next morning, the portly inn keeper the showed my the path that led up the hill. The path up the hill lay steep.Disused for the long time,grass grew all along the path.Sweating with excursion,I reached the house. As I passed the gate,looking at house build with strong oak and stone.It stood there bravely deifying the menacing winds of the hills. 'Come in and sit in the shade' A voice called from the courtyard. The white beard beckoned me. 'Its a hot day, drink this water from the spring for I have knowing more to offer.' I drank the cool water the from jug,his calm smiling face asked no introduction,and none was given. 'Is this the house of dancing lights' I asked coyly. 'That what's the folks used to call it ' he said. 'It was known by that name, when the learned men come here' I asked. 'Learned men, with strong hands build this house. They build it with ideas,not stone and oak' 'Alas,they come no more' 'In the dark nights they built log fires and talked the things of learning,the night sky lite with sparks of joy and learning.' Thus ending my meeting with old white beard.I left him there in the house of dancing light, now I knew why it called so. Day flew by, again the time had come to visit my old parents in the country, I once again stopped by the inn.Anna,received me with joy and told me 'the learned come again from the lands far far away, they all go to the house over the hill'. 'Aha, the house of dancing lights, anna' I asked. 'No, I don't see dancing lights anymore' anna said and went back wiping the mugs. I decided to visit the old white beard, walking up the steep path, I saw the path was now well used. Seeing liter lying around the path, I realized sadly how much things changed. The grand old white beard welcome me with open arm's and come sit with me. 'So the learned men come again' I said 'yet,the night sky isn't lit with dancing sparks'. White beard was strangely silent,his gaze so distant and disenchanted. As if coming out of reverie, the old white beard spoke. 'My son,the learned men of the yore came here to give light of learning in the dark-th of night, sharing the warmth of their idea's.They left this place a little better every time they left.' 'Men,who cometh now desire to take what can not be given,they cast only shadows' ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The house of dancing lights is still there,on the hill.I could never understand the words of old white beard.Pray, enlighten me -arky ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html

3 4

HOWTO Learn Linux
by swathantra software 18 Mar '04

18 Mar '04

CD with more than 500 HOWTOs just for 100 Rupees. (Learn complete LINUX with this CD.) Other popular distributions also available. RedHat 7.1(2 CDs),7.3,8,9 -set of 3 CDs Rs 120/ Redhat 7.3,8 single CD with Autoinstallation (GLUE CD) Rs.60/- Fedora core 1 - set of 3 CDs - Rs 120/ Mandrake 9.2 - set of 3 CDs - Rs 150 / OpenOffice 1.1 , Mozilla 1.5, Mozilla Firebird 0.7(Linux/WIndows)-Rs 80/ Shipping charges extra as applicable. ( Rs 20 by courier, Rs 10 by ordinary parcel) Send dd in favour of Swathanthra Software solutions and support payable at kannur or M O or Please contact by email or phone Sujeevan Swathantra Software Solutions & Support (S2S2) 33,brigade center,Gr floor,Opp Kendriya vidyalay,Fort rd, Kannur -670001 Kerala Phone: Off 0497-2708182 Resi : 0497 -2790811 cell :9447449107 email: s2s2(a)linux.net www.s2s2net.netfirms.com _____________________________________________________________ Linux.Net -->Open Source to everyone Powered by Linare Corporation http://www.linare.com/

1 0

Re Fsf-friends MIT and Open Course Ware
by doxa＠sancharnet.in 18 Mar '04

18 Mar '04

Fred, please refrain from such misleading subjects and even more misleading articles. Also please make sure you read what you forward. Fred, I suppose there needs to be a SWOT done on MIT's Open Course Ware, before declaring their 'fitness' for reproduction, at least here in India. A blank approval to such themes will definitely invite more criticisms and /or create 'tensions'. Rgds, CK Raju Thrissur

1 0

Re: [Fsf-friends] QT Designer
by Rajkumar S 17 Mar '04

17 Mar '04

> Guys who post such confusing > emails suggesting the use of `Open Source', > `Freeware', `Shareware' etc. should be put on our watch > list and repeat offenders' mail should be blocked. Yes, this should be done with utmost priority. And even after banning from our list, if they harp about all these heretic stuff in other lists, we should even think of hiring some pretty good muscile men to beat the hell out of them. That will make these suckers to not even think of OpenSouce even in their wildest dreams! raj

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[Fsf-friends] INDIA: Text books are on the Net in Kerala... for the asking
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 16 Mar '04

16 Mar '04

[Thanks to i4d for pointing to this link. FN] Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Monday, Mar 15, 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open courses and e-learning K.G. Kumar SOMETHING revolutionary is happening in Kerala's education sector. From the next academic year (2004-05) onwards, all textbooks for students of Class 10 will be available on the Internet. Textbooks for students studying in Kerala where Malayalam or English is the medium of instruction are already available online. Students and teachers can download the textbooks free of cost, provided they are used only for educational purposes. The textbooks can be downloaded from either www.keralaeducation.org or www. education.kerala.gov.in in Adobe's portable document format (PDF), which allows for printing. As more and more States and universities put up their resources on the public domain via the Internet, it is worthwhile paying tribute to one of the pioneers of the movement to make knowledge freely available to whoever desires to acquire it the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1999, MIT Provost Robert A. Brown asked the MIT Council on Education Technology to provide strategic guidance on how MIT should position itself in the distance/ e-learning environment. The resulting recommendation led to the idea of MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW), which made available on the Net materials from virtually all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses. MIT OCW's goals are to (a) provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students and self-learners around the world; and (b) create an efficient, standards-based model that other institutions may emulate to openly share and publish their own e-learning course materials. The latter objective has been partially echoed in Kerala as well, with the Technopark-based Indian Pick-up truck segment Institute of Information Technology and Management-Kerala (IITMK) putting its course materials on the Internet too. OCW is in line with MIT's stated mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the US and the world in the 21st century. It is also true to MIT's values of excellence, innovation and leadership. Since it opened to the public on September 30, 2002, users from more than 215 countries, territories, and city-States around the world have visited the MIT OCW Web site. They have around 500 courses to choose from, in disciplines ranging from Aeronautics and Astronautics to Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences to Women's Studies, to name just a few. The reactions from users have been more than enthusiastic. A New Zealander, usually anti-American in sensibi- lities, said: "I am a New Zealander and must confess I do not generally have a very high opinion of the influence of America in the rest of the world. At times it can make one quite angry... However, projects like this bring home the fact that there are some pretty fine people over there, and that it is easy to judge a nation (or entire group of people) on the failings of a few. Keep up the good work, and thanks for restoring some faith in the US of A." One crucial element to the success of MIT OCW was the wholehearted backing of the faculty. MIT says it could not have published these courses, and the OCW will not succeed long-term, without the support of MIT's world-class faculty. That is something Kerala's educators need to ponder. In a State where teachers are more keen on taking private tuitions than in honing up on their knowledge, the tendency is often to hoard notes and lectures, fearing that competition from other tuition providers will draw away potential paying students. The real competition today, ironically enough, is from the Internet. Who needs to shell out precious rupees and walk long distances to attend a class in a cramped room when you can get all the knowledge you need in the comfort of your own room? If e-learning comes of age in Kerala - developing from online textbooks only to entire courses and lectures freely available to anyone with access to the Internet - tuitions may well become a thing of the past. The writer can be contacted at kg(a)tug.org.in Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Hindu Group: Home | About Us | Copyright | Archives | Contacts | Subscription Group Sites: The Hindu | Business Line | The Sportstar | Frontline | The Hindu eBooks | Home | Copyright * 2004, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- March 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 | ---------------------------------------- 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Writing with a difference 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | ... on what makes *the* difference 28 29 30 31 | http://www.bytesforall.org ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHECK OUT USENET http://www.algebra.com/~scig/approved/threads.html -------------------------------------------------------------------

2 1

Farmaguddi (Goa) GNU/Linux event, March 20-21
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 15 Mar '04

15 Mar '04

Inauguration Schedule [Details from kvmadhav(a)gec.ac.in ] GNU/LINUX-Workshop-04 Chief Guest: Shri Nitin Kunkolienkar President, GCCI and MD ; Dlink Pvt.Ltd Guests of Honour : 1.Shri Anupam Saraph Computer Society of India - Goa Chapter, Chairman and Adviser IT, Govt of Goa: 2. Shri Atul Chitnis Director, Exocore Consulting. - Bangalore. Registration starts : 8. 30 am Inaguration starts at 9.00 am sharp. Invocation of the programme by students 9.00 amLighting of the lamp by students from various colleges 9.05 am Welcome of the guests- 9.07 amChief guest speech - 10 minutes max- 9.17 Guest of honour speech - 5 minutes max.- 9.25Principal of the institute speech - 5 minutes.-9.30 vote of thanks-9.32 Tea break - Upto 9.45 am Start of Worshop, 9.45 am note :All speakers are requested to abide by timings strictly and kindly arrive at the venue by 8.45 am. All speakers are requested to forward their presentations by 19th Friday4.00 pm All delegates and students need to arrive latest by 8.15 am.Since we expect a large audience and hence arrive early. Go with the mantra ; Wake up Early Start your dayEarly and arrive Early and safely. The Inaguration will proceed with or without the Chief Guests/ Guests of Honour atsharp 9.00 am. Organisers. Day 1 20th March 2004 note: Evening tea will be served between 3.15 pm to 4.15 pm. No break has been allotted. Timings Library ReferenceHall Seminar Hall Hall 1 Lab 1 8.30 am to 11.30 AM RegistrationOpens 9.00 amto 9.30 am Inauguration 9.30 to 9.45 Tea Break 9.45 to 10.45 Naba Kumar Anjuta Ide | Gopi Garge Networking | Arvind Yadav IP tables 10.45 to 11.45 Ashutosh Naik Network security | Sponsor 1IBM | Trevor Warren 11.45 to 12.45 Animesh Singh Clustering in Linux | Atul Chitnis | BB Saha Magical world ofLinux graphical desktops | Mahesh T Pai Legal issues inLinux 12.45to 1.45 Lunch Break 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm Dr Anil Seth Python | Sponsor 3 Novell | Kartik N/Mahendra Kernel programming 3.00 pm to 4.00 pm Gurunandan Bhat PHP Introduction | Atul Chitnis | Yunus Sheikh Embedded Systems | GautamVenkataraman Wireless networks 4.00 pmto 5.00 pm Bhaskar Ghose LAMP | Gopi Garge NetworkingContd... | Amit Shirodker Demo in Embeddedsystems 5.00 pmto 6.00 pm Day 2 21st March 2004 Timings Library Hall Seminar Hall Hall 1 Lab 1 9.00 to 9.30 Tea Break 9.30 to 10.30 GurunandanBhat | TrevorWarren | Mahesh T Pai 9.45 to 10.45 Dr Anil Seth Python | Sponsor 2 Red hat | Ashutosh Naik 10.45 to 11.45 Animesh Singh | Naba Kumar | Venkatesh Prabhu * Unix programming 11.45to 12.45 Kartik N | Mahendra M | Animesh Singh 12.45to 1.45 Lunch Break 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm Arvind Yadav | Bhaskar Ghose | Sandeep Verenkar | GCCI talk | FrederickNoronha 3.00 pmto 4.00 pm AshleyDelaney | George Easaw | ShivramKhandeparkar Open source projectManagement 4.00 pmto 5.00 pm Schedule is tentative and subject to change. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- March 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 | ---------------------------------------- 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Writing with a difference 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | ... on what makes *the* difference 28 29 30 31 | http://www.bytesforall.org ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHECK OUT USENET http://www.algebra.com/~scig/approved/threads.html -------------------------------------------------------------------

1 0

Open courses and e-learning, March 15, 2004 (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 15 Mar '04

15 Mar '04

See the first item. FN -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- March 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 | ---------------------------------------- 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Writing with a difference 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | ... on what makes *the* difference 28 29 30 31 | http://www.bytesforall.org ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHECK OUT USENET http://www.algebra.com/~scig/approved/threads.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- 15 March, 2004 [ www.i4donline.net ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Open courses and e-learning Something revolutionary is happening in Kerala's education sector. >From the next academic year (2004-05) onwards, all textbooks for students of Class 10 will be available on the Internet. Textbooks for students studying in Kerala where Malayalam or English is the medium of instruction are already available online. http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/03/15/stories/2004031500711300.htm Wasting water, wasting energy What if water and energy problems in urban India were linked? Water, when reaching your home, has travelled and contains quite a bit of energy, on which one can save. Techniques do not exist on their own, they are embedded into the governance of cities. http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=54778 Use ICT to bridge digital divide The agenda was to use information and communication technology (ICT) to bridge the digital divide and the goal was to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that the United Nations has mandated for a better world. And that's what OneWorld South Asia's two-day third regional meet in New Delhi was all about. http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=13427716 The Digital Revolution and Ghana�s journey towards e-economy Today, we are witnessing a new revolution that will shape the knowledge society of the 21st century �Digital Revolution� driven by the accelerating convergence between the Internet, broadcast media and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), this revolution indeed affects all aspects of our life- the way we learn, work and communicate with each other as well as the way governments interact with civil society. http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=5376 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Your comments and suggestions and request for subscribe/unsubscribe are welcome at info(a)i4donline.net www.i4donline.net [The first monthly magazine on ICT4D] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[Fsf-friends] [AsiaOSS-RT:00202] Photo gallery from Hanoi ; Task Forces. (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 15 Mar '04

15 Mar '04

Update of what's happening elsewhere in (East) Asia. FN -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- March 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 | ---------------------------------------- 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | Writing with a difference 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | ... on what makes *the* difference 28 29 30 31 | http://www.bytesforall.org ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHECK OUT USENET http://www.algebra.com/~scig/approved/threads.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Thanks again to our hosts, MOST, and Dr Do Van Loc, as well as to the organisers, CICC, for a very enjoyable Symposium in Hanoi. I have uploaded a gallery of pictures at http://community.asiaosc.org/~iwsmith/events/asiaoss3/ (of course, with an 'open content' license!) Perhaps we should discuss the various task forces? Should the various roundtable members offer which task forces they would like to join? Does the group think that each task force needs an email group (e.g., tf-repository(a)ml.asia-oss.org), if CICC is able to set this up? Or, do people prefer to discuss and join the taskforces using Wiki discussion? Regards Imran -- Imran William Smith, Open Source R&D, MIMOS Berhad, Malaysia http://opensource.mimos.my - http://www.asiaosc.org Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

1 0

Re: QuiTing designs and a rant
by Mahesh T. Pai 14 Mar '04

14 Mar '04

Populating the list and its archives with erroneous and misleading messages is not a very good thing to allow. Repeated misleading posts are like urging the FSF-I to adopt a message contrary to what it is trying to spread. People are free to have their own opinions, but IMHO, when such opinions conflict with the explicitly stated goal of the FSF, a FSF-I forum is not the place to propagate them. Newbies do read the archives, and unrebutted wrong messages in the archives are not exactly conducive to work of the FSF-I. Flaming people who correct wrong messages too is not a very good practise either. > Imagine the "good" publicity we would have got in slashdot, <rant> Earlier soft-glove approaches to people deliberately making wrong statements and flaming people trying to correct them, have resulted in kind of messages quoted below, which you can find at http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2003-August/001145.html I have slightly modified the original to appear as if it a /. post. <quote from an imaginary /. article> FSF INDIA CORRECTS ITSELF THE FSF-I has finally agreed that imposition of the terms such as "GNU" and "Free Software" is not justifiable as these word contains only manufactured messages to convey. FSF-I has decided that it is not advisable to urge others to use a term whose message is a manufactured one. Advocates of these terms may have some emotional satisfication in using these terms and need not be the case with all who campaigns for the freedom. In a press note issued today, the FSF-I acknowledged that a movement or philosophy is called after its originator. However common sense requires that a product is referred by its shortest name for convenience. The note goes on to admit that though major portion of the Linux OS is developed by the GNU project, (a) linux sense is better than common sense (b) 3 is greater than 5, (c) there is no Linux OS other than GNU/Linux. The FSF-I therefore has consented to the usage of "Linux" is justified by ease of use. The note goes on to say ''... There are spatial variations in the meaning of certain words. The word "Free" for us is actually more linked with 'free of cost' than to "freedom". However it is understood that there is concerted effort by FSF team to use "Free" for freedom whenever it is linked with software. In other sectors, advocates of imperialist globalisation use the term "Free" for freedom where freedom is a psuedo-freedom. And FSF-I consider "Free" as propaganda term by advocates of imperialist globalisation in other fields. It is found that nowadays even members of FSF teams are using the acronym "FLOSS" to avoid these confusion created by the term "Free". <end imaginary /. post> </rant> -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

1 0

Re: [Fsf-friends] QT Designer
by gok gok 13 Mar '04

13 Mar '04

Hi Smith Raj, I have worked in Qt and Qt Designer for Redhat and Suse Linux. Yoo can download the Qt Library from http://www.trolltech.com Use the following links for downloading the 30 day trial version. http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qt-x11-eval-3.3.1.tar.gz for linux http://www.trolltech.com/developer/download/qt-win-eval-msvc-3.3.1.exe for windows msvc Regards R.Padmakumar --- "Smith S.Raj" <smithsraj(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > > hi everyone... > > my name is Smith and i'm doing my 2nd year MCA > inNoorul Islam College, thuckalay,Tamil Nadu...I was > doing many projects in VB../but now i decided to > turn to Linux...as common man can afford it...i > would like to design same type of application that i > used to develop in Vb in Linux...Pls advice.... > > heard there is QT designer Similar to VB designer... > > pls ADVICE. > > -luv > > -Smith > > > --------------------------------- > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster.> _______________________________________________ > Fsf-friends mailing list > Fsf-friends(a)mm.gnu.org.in > http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com

4 3

[Fsf-friends] More on level, Napster, US federal agencies, Gartner, driver support
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 10 Mar '04

10 Mar '04

WINDOWS/LINUX fight moves to the cash register Geek.com - USA Microsoft and Linux are competing on more and more levels these days. A report by IHL Consulting Group released this week shows ... <http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004Mar/gee20040310024217.htm> See all stories on this topic: <http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&client=google&num=3…> NAPSTER Calls on Linux PC World - USA ... The application uses eServer BladeCenter systems from IBM that run on Linux and allows digital music files from Napster to be stored in on-site servers rather ... <http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115137,00.asp> See all stories on this topic: <http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&client=google&num=3…> OPEN-SOURCE gets serious: A new window on Linux USA Today - USA Thanks to its streamlined and relatively secure core, the Linux operating system has gradually been winning a place on servers in federal agencies. ... <http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techreviews/2004-03-10-linux-review_x.htm> GARTNER CIO Update: Linux in the Enterprise Tekrati (press release) - Belmont,CA,United States Gartner finds that as Linux climbs the enterprise ladder, it is becoming more commercial and is moving away from the ideal of being cost- and risk-free. ... <http://www.tekrati.com/T2/Analyst_Research/ResearchAnnouncementsDetails.asp…> NATIONAL Instruments adds motion control Linux driver support Linux News - USA Virtual instrumentation specialist National Instruments has developed commercial Linux drivers for its motion controllers, and has added Linux support to its ... <http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3483787122.html> This daily-once News Alert is brought to you by Google News (BETA)... - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Create another News Alert: http://www.google.com/newsalerts?hl=en Try Google News: http://news.google.com/

1 0

Interview with RMS by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
by Dileep M. Kumar 08 Mar '04

08 Mar '04

GNUHeads, Two interviews with RMS. Interview with RMS by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: http://www.gnu.org.in/rms_interview.html A Q&A session with Richard M. Stallman by Samuel Abraham: http://www.gnu.org.in/rms-ques-ans.html Regards -- .''`. Dileep M. Kumar <dileep(a)kumarayil.net> : :' : http://www.kumarayil.net `. `'` Mobile: 98474-47437 `- Debian GNU/Linux - Choice of the Freedom Lovers

1 0

[Fsf-friends] Prix Ars Electronica 2004 - Digital Communities Category (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 07 Mar '04

07 Mar '04

It would be nice if some Indian FLOSS-ventures could consider taking part in this contest. FN ---------- Forwarded message ---------- We would like to invite you to participate in this year's Prix Ars Electronica, the foremost international prize for computer-based art. To mark Ars Electronica's twenty-fifth anniversary in 2004, the Prix Ars Electronica has expanded its international competition for cyberarts to include a new "Digital Communities" category singling out for recognition projects of great sociopolitical relevance. This new category encompasses the social consequences of the Internet as well as the latest developments in the domain of mobile communications and wireless networks. For a detailed description of the category and about Prix Ars Electronica in general, please see the attached PDF file or our website http://prixars.aec.at. Prizes Two Golden Nicas will be awarded with 10,000 Euro each and 4 Awards of Distinction with 5,000 Euro each and up to 14 Honorary Mentions. The closing deadline for the entries is March 26th 2004 . If you need any further information, please do not hesitate to contact us. Looking forward to your positive reply! Sincerely yours, Clara Picot Clara Picot AEC Ars Electronica Center Linz Museumsgesellschaft mbH Hauptstrasse 2 A-4040 Linz / Austria Tel: +43-732-7272-74 Fax: +43-732-7272-676 Email: communities(a)prixars.aec.at http://prixars.aec.at/ <<prix_folder_DC.pdf>> Prix Ars Electronica 2004 Prix Ars Electronica 2004 is the 18th editition of the foremost international competition for computer-based art. To mark Ars Electronica's 25th anniversary in 2004, it is being expanded to include a "Digital Communities" domain dedicated to social developments of great current relevance. Deadline for submissions is March 26th 2004 . Prix Ars Electronica 2004 will be awarded in the following categories: "Computer Animation / Visual Effects", "Digital Musics", "Interactive Art", "Net Vision" and "Digital Communities". Computer Animation / Visual Effects The "Computer Animation / Visual Effects" category has been part of the Prix Ars Electronica since its very inception. It recognizes excellence in independent work in the arts and sciences as well as in high-end commercial productions in the film, advertising and entertainment industries. In this category, artistic originality counts just as much as masterful technical achievement. Digital Musics Contemporary digital sound productions from the broad spectrum of "electronica" come in for consideration in the "Digital Musics" category, as do works combining sound and media, computer compositions ranging from electro-acoustic to experimental music, or sound installations. This category's programmatic agenda is to expand horizons beyond the confines of individual genres and artistic currents. Interactive Art The "Interactive Art" category is dedicated to interactive works in all forms and formats, from installations to performances. Here, particular consideration is given to the realization of apowerful artistic concept through the especially appropriate use of technologies, the innovativeness of the interaction design, and the work's inherent potential to expand the human radius of action. Net Vision The "Net Vision" category singles out for recognition artistic projects in the Internet that display brilliance in how they have been engineered, designed and- especially-conceived, works that are outstanding with respect to innovation, interface design and the originality of their content. The way in which a work of net-based art deals with the online medium is essential in this category. Digital Communities "Digital Communities" encompasses the wide-ranging social consequences of the Internet as well as the latest developments in the domain of mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" will spotlight bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the digital divide regarding gender as well as geography, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure. This new category will showcase the political potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed as a forum for a broad spectrum of projects, programs, initiatives and phenomenain which social innovation is taking place, as itwere, in real time. u19-freestyle computing Competition for young people under 19 in Austria Prix Ars Electronica u19-freestyle computing is an open category for all works that have been designed with or executed by the computer-from websites to software to robots. "freestyle computing" stands for freedom from the restrictions associated with the use of different tools and for a competition that pays just as much attention to innovation and creativity as it does to the age of the individual submitting it. [The next idea] Art and Technology Grant Discovering ideas for tomorrow in young minds today is the aim of this spin-off the highly successful u19 competition. Artists age 19-27 are invited to submit ideas and proposals for works not yet realized. The winner receives a stipend in the amount of 7,500 Euro and will be invited to spend a term as Artist in Residence at the Ars Electronica Futurelab-a great opportunity to bring project ideas to fruition and subsequently to present them to a large international audience at the Ars Electronica Festival.

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Re: [Fsf-friends] QT Designer
by Mahesh T. Pai 07 Mar '04

07 Mar '04

Smith S.Raj said on Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 08:57:59AM -0800,: > my name is Smith and i'm doing my 2nd year MCA inNoorul Islam > College, thuckalay,Tamil Nadu... Hi!!! > I was doing many projects in VB../but now i decided to turn to > Linux...as common man can afford it... Welcome to the world of freedom, and GNU/linux. > i would like to design same type of application that i used to develop in Vb in Linux...Pls advice.... What is the distro you are using?? Most distros come with default IDEs including IDES for QT and GNOME. For GNOME, we have Glade, which is developed by Naba Kumar, and Indian ... But `point and click' is a very very *bad* way of learning to write programmes ... better learn it the ha[nr]d way. -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

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Re: [Fsf-friends] QT Designer
by p.suresh＠hotpop.com 06 Mar '04

06 Mar '04

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 08:57:59AM -0800, Smith S.Raj wrote: > my name is Smith and i'm doing my 2nd year MCA inNoorul Islam College, thuckalay,Tamil Nadu...I was doing many projects in VB../but now i decided to turn to Linux...as common man can afford it...i would like to design same type of application that i used to develop in Vb in Linux...Pls advice.... > > heard there is QT designer Similar to VB designer... > Try Gambas from http://gambas.sourceforge.net This is an inplementation of BASIC interpreter and will replace weebee KDE3 and QT3 will be needed for compiling the source This is still in the evolving stage suresh p

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SCO vs IBM
by doxa＠sancharnet.in 06 Mar '04

06 Mar '04

The judgement goes like this ".... I. SCO Plaintiff/Counterclaim-Defendant is hereby ORDERED: 1. To fully comply within 45 days of the entry of this order with the corut's previous order dated December 12, 2003. This is to include those items that SCO had difficulty in obtaining prior to the Court's previously ordered deadline of January 12, 2004. 2. As previously ordered, SCO is to provide and identify all specific lines of code that IBM is alleged to have contributed to Linux from either AIX or Dynix. This is to include all lines of code that SCO can identify at this time. 3. SCO is to provide and identify all specific lines of code from Unix System V from which IBM's contributions from AIX and Dynix are alleged to be derived. 4. SCO is to provide and identify with specificity all lines of code in Linux that it claims rights to. 5. SCO is to provide and identify with specificity the lines of code that SCO distributed to other parties. This is to include where appplicable the conditions of release, to whom the code was released, the date and under what circumstances such code was released." More on the story at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040303195948664 CK Raju Thrissur

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halloween
by Mahesh T. Pai 04 Mar '04

04 Mar '04

Halloween #10 is up. See http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween10.html I have not gone through the contents yet. -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

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malayalam-0.8 latex
by suresh p 03 Mar '04

03 Mar '04

Alex, The malayalam latex is a welcome thing for typesetting in our malayalam language.The "rachana" fonts used for this is also very good as it is a nice font package and now "rachana" fonts are released under GPL.(I am not sure about the licensing terms of "keli" fonts).But I feel that some glyphs for 'koottaksharam's(conjunts) in the "rachana" fonts aren't used at all. But I am vary about the "mm" preprocessor( from Malayalam-tex 1.6 by Jeroen Hellingman) used by you. Its source is not permitted to distribute in the modified form without the consent from the author(see the "README" of Malayalam-tex 1.6).You could have used the "indica" preprocessor included with Sinhala_tex.2.1.1 which is licensed under GPL. I have also made some modifications to the metafont files of the Malayalam-tex to add some veriety to the fonts.But I am unable to distribute the same because of the abovementioned clause.Now I have started to create some metafonts which provides different shapes by changing some parameters. We should collectively make an attempt to make the Malayalam-tex released under GPL. suresh p

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OFF-TOPIC] Will IT take away our freedom?
by V. Sasi Kumar 29 Feb '04

29 Feb '04

Sorry for this off-topic mail. Just could not resist this. This is a delightful takeoff on how IT could spoil our lives. Not just funny, it talks of our freedom to ignore our health too! A 40 year old middle class man wants to buy pizza, this mail shows what he experienced.. Operator: "Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. May I have your..." Customer: "Hi, I'd like to order." Operator: "May I have your NIDN first, sir?" Customer: "My National ID Number, yeah, hold on, eh, it's 6102049998-45-54610." Operator: "Thank you, Mr. Sheehan. I see you live at 1742 Meadowland Drive, and the phone number's 494-2366. Your office number over at Lincoln Insurance is 745-2302 and your cell number's 266-2566. Which number are you calling from, sir?" Customer: "Huh? I'm at home. Where d'ya get all this information?" Operator: "We're wired into the system, sir." Customer: (Sighs) "Oh, well, I'd like to order a couple of your All-Meat Special pizzas..." Operator: "I don't think that's a good idea, sir." Customer: "Whaddya mean?" Operator: "Sir, your medical records indicate that you've got very high blood pressure and extremely high cholesterol. Your National Health Care provider won't allow such an unhealthy choice." Customer: "Dang . What do you recommend, then?" Operator: "You might try our low-fat Soybean Yogurt Pizza. I'm sure you'll like it." Customer: "What makes you think I'd like something like that?" Operator: "Well, you checked out 'Gourmet Soybean Recipes' from your local library last week, sir. That's why I made the suggestion." Customer: "All right, all right. Give me two family-sized ones, then.What's the damage?" Operator: "That should be plenty for you, your wife and your four kids, sir. The 'damage,' as you put it, heh, heh, comes to $49.99." Customer: "Lemme give you my credit card number." Operator: "I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid you'll have to pay in cash. Your credit card balance is over its limit." Customer: "I'll run over to the ATM and get some cash before your driver gets here." Operator: "That won't work either, sir. Your checking account's overdrawn." Customer: "Never mind. Just send the pizzas. I'll have the cash ready. How long will it take? Operator: "We're running a little behind, sir. It'll be about 45 minutes, sir. If you're in a hurry you might want to pick 'em up while you're out getting the cash, but carrying pizzas on a motorcycle can be a little awkward." Customer: "How the heck do you know I'm riding a bike?" Operator: "It says here you're in arrears on your car payments, so your car got repo'ed. But your Harley's paid up, so I just assumed that you'd be using it." Customer: "@#%/$@&?#!" Operator: "I'd advise watching your language, sir. You've already got a July 2006 conviction for cussing out a cop." Customer: (Speechless) Operator: "Will there be anything else, sir?" Customer: "No, nothing. Oh, yeah, don't forget the two free litres of Coke your ad says I get with the pizzas." Operator: "I'm sorry sir, but our ad's exclusionary clause prevents us from offering free soda to diabetics." --- Will information technology really improves our life, or will it take our freedom of life from us. is it a good idea to give IT tremendous influence on our lives.. Choice is yours and its your fundamental right, choose wisely. -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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CIA’s flawed software caused 1982-Siberia gas explosion
by V. Sasi Kumar 29 Feb '04

29 Feb '04

Here is an interesting bit of news about how a piece of software can be used to sabotage a country's economy. This is from http://jang.com.pk/thenews/feb2004-daily/28-02-2004/world/w17.htm. A Google search would give a number of pages on this issue, including an article by William Saffire (the guy who writes about the English language in Frontline) who gleefully narrates the background of the incident which "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Can we trust their software? ‘CIA’s flawed software caused 1982-Siberia gas explosion’ WASHINGTON: The CIA exploited the Soviet Union’s desire to pilfer western technology to send it flawed software that resulted in a huge explosion on a natural gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982, The Washington Post said on Friday. Nobody was killed in the blast, but it did significant damage to the Soviet economy, said the daily quoting the memoirs of Thomas Reed, a former Air Force secretary who served in the National Security Council. Approved by then US president Ronald Reagan, the plan was part of ‘cold-eyed economic warfare’ against the Soviet Union that the Central Intelligence Agency conducted under Director William Casey, said Reed, whose book, ‘At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War,’ will be published next month. Reed said the Soviets in 1970 had created a special KGB section to plumb Western research and development for badly needed technology. The secret programme was later disclosed by a Soviet engineer to French intelligence, who in turn alerted the Reagan administration in 1981. Shocked by the knowledge the Soviets were stealing abundant Western technology and aware the United States at the time was trying to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas, the CIA came up with the idea of slipping the Soviets technology that would work for a while, then fail. "In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes. The resulting explosion in the summer of 1982, said Reed, was observed from space by US satellites and caused concern for the US military who feared it was a missile liftoff. A CIA agent quickly told the military what had happened. "While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," Reed writes adding, "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end." -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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[Fsf-friends] [OFFTOPIC] Radio suffers as Colombo bosses call the shots
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 29 Feb '04

29 Feb '04

Please excuse the posting of a completely off-topic posting here. This is a campaign that is underway since the mid-nineties. FN ---------- Forwarded message ---------- DO YOU believe that radio has a role in enhancing communication among the common(wo)man in India? Join a network meant to campaign for the opening up of genuine community radio in India. Click on the link-below to sign-up on the 'Community Radio-India' mailing list. FN (Frederick Noronha) _______________________________________________ cr-india mailing list cr-india(a)sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/cr-india PFM2058 | 22/10/2003 | 970 words Radio Suffers As Colombo Bosses Call The Shots By Nalaka Gunawardene COLOMBO (PANOS FEATURES) -- Soon after conquering Mount Everest half a century ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay turned on their transistor radio -- and the first thing they heard was an overseas broadcast of Radio Ceylon, from more than 3,000 kilometres away. They joined millions of people across the Indian subcontinent who regularly tuned in to these broadcasts. A pioneer in broadcasting in Asia, Radio Ceylon for decades informed and entertained an overseas audience many times the population of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. How times have changed. The once influential, popular and monopolistic state-owned radio in Sri Lanka has been completely sidelined in the past decade. A cacophony of privately-owned channels now crowd the airwaves -- albeit only in the FM band -- competing with each other to inform, entertain and sell consumer goods to the island nation's 19 million people. The product of media and economic liberalisation, these channels are operated by half a dozen companies, each struggling to make money in a market that until recently was depressed by a protracted civil war. Loss of listenership and advertising revenue are not the only problems that plague Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), successor to Radio Ceylon. Over the years, successive governments have misused the station for political and state propaganda. Inconsequential and boring speeches of politicians were broadcast in full. Not that the private commercial channels have completely fulfilled their expectations: after the initial novelty had worn off, discerning listeners found that they could take only so much of the popular culture dished out by young announcers endlessly chattering in a mix of Sinhala or Tamil with English. Yet, on balance, many have come to the conclusion that even bad FM radio is better than SLBC. Private channels moved closer to their audiences by presenting news in colloquial and friendly Sinhala. Not so SLBC, which insists on using an imperious and archaic version of the language. *Our listeners immediately welcomed news in spoken Sinhala, and only a few pundits raised objections,* recalls Asoka Dias, news director at Sirasa FM which pioneered this innovation. *Now everybody does it -- at least in selected news formats.* It was Sirasa FM -- the first private channel started in 1992 -- that turned broadcasting in Sri Lanka upside down. Nimal Lakshapathiarachchi, its founder director, recognised the critical need for new formats to make radio more engaging and relevant in the multimedia age. Arguably some of these were in the *tabloid* mould, but Sirasa -- and other FM channels -- have lured back a whole new generation of listeners. Major gaps remain. Most FM signals can only be picked up in urban areas, and their profit-oriented owners are unlikely to invest further to achieve rural coverage. SLBC is the only station broadcasting on medium wave, short wave and FM bands -- and, in spite of considerable media freedom granted by the current government, it remains *His Master*s Voice* on all key political, social and economic matters. And in spite of having more choice than ever before, many Sri Lankans regularly listen to foreign broadcasts. By far the biggest gap concerns community radio. SLBC broadcasts from all corners of the country, including stations located in remote areas. The channel involves local people in programme production, and it maintains a strongly agrarian audience. But listeners have no say in running the stations -- these are managed by a tight bureaucracy in the capital Colombo, whose rigid guidelines control content: strictly no politics, and nothing remotely against the government in office. But, although touted as such, SLBC is not community radio, which is supposed to promote access, public participation in production and decision-making and listener-financing -- where each listener contributes a small amount towards the running of the radio station. In Sri Lanka, ironically, only armed rebels have challenged this state dominance by running clandestine channels. The Marxist People's Liberation Front ran Rana Handa (Sound of Victory) in the 1980s when it spearheaded a youth insurgency. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- the guerrilla group now talking peace with the government after two decades of war -- ran Voice of Tigers which made a mockery of Colombo's broadcast regulations. In November 2002, the government granted a license for LTTE to continue its broadcasts legally, a move that has since been contested in courts by other citizen groups. But that's the first -- and so far only time the state has accommodated such a request. Four successive governments since 1992 have refused to grant broadcast license to non-profit, non-governmental or cooperative groups. Organisations such as Sarvodaya -- the country's largest development NGO -- are keen to use the airwaves for public benefit, but their requests have been ignored. A major bottleneck is the discretionary broadcast licensing system that lacks transparency, accountability and consistency. As a result, the electro magnetic spectrum -- a public property -- has been plundered by officials and politicians who have granted licenses to relatives and business cronies. Some licenses have been traded for huge sums of money. The FM band is now saturated. Governments have never explained why community groups are not given broadcast licenses. Senior officials have sometimes cited fears of media misuse for 'anti-social' or political purposes. Strangely, such concerns don*t seem to extend to profit-making companies, some of whose channels are openly aligned with political parties. Meanwhile, the smokescreen of so-called 'community radio' has been used by bureaucrats hand-in-glove with commercial interests to block the evolution of broadcasting to the next stage * where community media are owned, managed and sustained by the people. 'Colombo Calling' was the station call in the early days of radio broadcasting in colonial Ceylon. Eight decades on, Colombo is still calling the shots. A few token rural transmissions of the state cannot redress this huge imbalance, no matter how they are dressed up. The first step towards truly community media is to demand the real liberation of the airwaves./PANOS FEATURES Nalaka Gunawardene is a media commentator and a director of Panos South Asia. This feature is published by Panos Features and can be reproduced free of charge. Please credit the author and Panos Features and send a copy to MAC, Panos Institute, 9 White Lion St, London N1 9PD, UK. Email: media(a)panoslondon.org.uk Photos (c) Panos Pictures except where otherwise credited. Panos London is a registered charity number 297366 Site development by viplondon. Design by John F McGill. CIRCULATED VIA: -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- February 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | ---------------------------------------- 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Writing with a difference 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | ... on what makes *the* difference 29 | http://www.bytesforall.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

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GNU Libidn 0.4.0 alpha released (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 28 Feb '04

28 Feb '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- GNU Libidn is an implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications defined by the IETF Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) working group, used for internationalized domain names. The library contains a generic Stringprep implementation that does Unicode 3.2 NFKC normalization, mapping and prohibitation of characters, and bidirectional character handling. Profiles for Nameprep, iSCSI, SASL and XMPP are included. Punycode and ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) via IDNA are supported. A mechanism to define Top-Level Domain (TLD) specific validation tables, and to compare strings against those tables, is included. Default tables for some TLDs are also included. Here are the compressed sources: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz (1.6) http://josefsson.org/libidn/releases/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz (1.6MB) Here are GPG detached signatures: ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz.sig http://josefsson.org/libidn/releases/libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz.asc Here are the build reports for various platforms: http://josefsson.org/autobuild/libidn.html Here are the MD5 and SHA1 signatures: 71f3db9892848073c0c76b4d3326fd9a libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz 61c126e7a889ab571b62a547505ead02b0f5b84c libidn-0.4.0.tar.gz Noteworthy changes since version 0.3.5 (last version announced here): * Version 0.4.0 (released 2004-02-28) ** Support for TLD restrictions on IDN strings, contributed by Thomas Jacob. Many TLDs restrict the set of characters that can be used, from the full Unicode 3.2 range that is normally available. This contribution make it possible for you to test strings for TLD conformance locally. The code can be disabled by --disable-tld. If enabled (the default), the new API "tld.h" is installed which can be used to check a string for conformance to TLD specific rules. This add a new self test, and a new chapter in the manual. People responsible for maintaining TLD tables are hereby encouraged to contribute them (under reasonable licensing terms) for inclusion in future versions of Libidn. Be warned that the API for TLD checking may change throughout the 0.4.x series as we get feedback on it. ** Kerberos 5 stringprep profile macro is no longer documented. The macro itself will probably be removed in the future, if the specification is dropped from the Kerberos WG agenda. ** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version. stringprep_kerberos5: DEPRECATED. Tld_table_element: Tld_table: Tld_rc: ADD. New data types. tld_get_4: tld_get_4z: tld_get_z: ADD. New functions to extract TLD from string. tld_get_table: tld_default_table: ADD. New functions to get TLD table from TLD name. tld_check_4t: tld_check_4tz: ADD. New function to provide core TLD operations. tld_check_4: tld_check_4z: tld_check_8z: tld_check_lz: ADD. New functions that combine all TLD operations in one call. * Version 0.3.7 (released 2004-01-22) ** The command line parameter '--' idiom is documented. ** The iSCSI stringprep profile now recognized as "iSCSI". The earlier name "ISCSIprep" is still recognized, for backwards compatibility. ** DocBook manuals no longer included (the tools are too unstable). ** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version. * Version 0.3.6 (released 2004-01-06) ** The manual now contain a troubleshooting section for the command line tool. ** The PHP interface pass the string directly on the command line. ** The macro that create 'idn-int.h' has been updated to latest version. ** API and ABI is backwards compatible with the previous version. _______________________________________________ GNU Announcement mailing list <info-gnu(a)gnu.org> http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu

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Free Software Badges
by Rishi Gangoly 28 Feb '04

28 Feb '04

Hello Friends, When RMS was here last, he had a badge which said : "Free Software ... Want to know more" or something like that... With the 3 logos of BSD, GNU & Linux. I was thinking that we should make badges like those for us to use. I mean how many of us actively talk about Free Software in trains or buses? Hardly... right? I'm thinking maybe wearing these badges may help instigate others to ask what this is and that would start the ball rolling? Any comments? Regards Rishi

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what is free software movement about?
by Mahesh T. Pai 27 Feb '04

27 Feb '04

Eben Moglen speaks at Harvard. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733 Summary:- Free Software Movement is not about software alone. -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

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RMS speech at CESS
by Arun M 27 Feb '04

27 Feb '04

Hi All, Audio of RMS speech at Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala. Topic: Scientific Journals and freedom of knowledge. http://www.gnu.org.in/rms1.ogg regards, arun.

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A Q&A session with Richard M. Stallman
by Dileep M. Kumar 27 Feb '04

27 Feb '04

GNUHeads, RMS' answers to questions put forward by Samuel Abraham of `The Week'. These questions were mailed to RMS and he patiently answered them in great detail. He was asked these questions after his talk at the CUSAT campus in Kochi, January 23. http://puggy.symonds.net/~fsug-kochi/rms-interview.html Regards -- .''`. Dileep M. Kumar <dileep(a)kumarayil.net> : :' : http://www.kumarayil.net `. `'` Mobile: 98474-47437 `- Debian GNU/Linux - Choice of the Freedom Lovers

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[Fsf-friends] Audio recording of the video conference with Richard Stallman
by Vijay Kumar 26 Feb '04

26 Feb '04

The audio of recording of the video conference with Dr. Richard Stallman is avaialable from the following website http://www.nitt.edu/probe/lectures.shtml#freesoft The audio recording is available in both Ogg Vorbis and MP3 format. Some people sent me mails asking what software was used for the video conference. Actually, the video conference equipment we used were all hardware. I used a Debian GNU/Linux system to do the audio recording in WAV format at 16kHz sampling rate using snd-recorder. This was later compressed using oggenc to produce the ogg vorbis file. Vijay -- Free the Code. Free the User. ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP(http://www.nitt.edu)

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Re: Fsf-friends Digest, Vol 10, Issue 19 (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 25 Feb '04

25 Feb '04

Did this get across to the list? FN On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Richard Stallman wrote: > Translations are modified versions. People who want to publish translations > should write to web-trans(a)gnu.org, and arrange for them to be published > on our web site. > -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- February 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | ---------------------------------------- 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Writing with a difference 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | ... on what makes *the* difference 29 | http://www.bytesforall.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: req for help on shell design.
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 24 Feb '04

24 Feb '04

Could anyone help Arjun in Bangalore? FN On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Arjun Venkat wrote: > hi im a student of computer science at bangalore and am planning to > implement my own shell for linux. id be grateful for any pointers i could > get on the subject i.e. reference books, sites etc. if you could please put > this on the LUG in bangalore id be really grateful > thanks > Arjun Venkatraman > 6th sem B.E. > Computer Science Engg > Dayananda Sagar College of Engg > Bangalore-78 > ph 9886037416 > > _________________________________________________________________ > Masterpieces made affordable! Buy art prints. > http://go.msnserver.com/IN/42736.asp MSN Shopping. > -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- February 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | ---------------------------------------- 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Writing with a difference 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | ... on what makes *the* difference 29 | http://www.bytesforall.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

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Copyright for Translation
by Vijay Kumar 24 Feb '04

24 Feb '04

I would like to know, what one should do to distribute translations of the GNU Manifesto. The copyright notice in the Manifesto says modified versions may not be made. Do we have to get permission from RMS? Is the translation considered a modified version? Vijay -- Free the Code. Free the User. ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP(http://www.nitt.edu)

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Legal issues and FLOSS licences
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 22 Feb '04

22 Feb '04

Shun-ling Chen, the Project Manager of the Open Source Software Foundry (Law & Policy) at Taiwan's Institute of Information Science at the Academia Sinica writes in to inform of an English version of a booklet, which deals with Free/Libre and Open Source Software licenses. Download the PDF file from http://www.openfoundry.org/en/archives/000387.html Also, a comparison on the 10 most pervasively adopted open source licenses could be downloaded from http://www.openfoundry.org/en/archives/000388.html She says: "Your comments and corrections are most appreciated." -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- February 2004 | Frederick Noronha, Freelance Journalist Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa | Goa India 0091.832.2409490 or 2409783 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | ---------------------------------------- 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | Email fred at bytesforall.org 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Writing with a difference 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 | ... on what makes *the* difference 29 | http://www.bytesforall.org -------------------------------------------------------------------

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KalaKaumudi Article
by Manilal 20 Feb '04

20 Feb '04

Friends, An Obscene article appeared in the recent issue of KalaKaumudi(Malayalam fortnightly, issue no:1485, Feb 15-21). The author of the article Mr. Madhu Nair(Reporting from New York) criticise Stallman in a very bad manner. He is making fun of Malayalees and says that Stallman has no disciples at Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, TamilNadu and calls him a "Smallman". Actually the article is so obsolete that it's a waste to discuss about it. Still as it gives a bad impression about Swathanthra Software and personally criticise Stallman it should be noted. Regards Manilal

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Hi Friends
by fjsylvester 19 Feb '04

19 Feb '04

I have started to vend linux cds with prompt response pls visit http://fijusylvester.tripod.com/mypage.html

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[FSFE PR][EN] "Free Software Foundation defends the GNU GPL against SCO attacks" (fwd)
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Milano, February 18th, 2003 - for immediate release - "Free Software Foundation defends the GNU GPL against SCO attacks" The organization that defends Free Software in Europe, Free Software Foundation Europe, has no doubt that the litigation between SCO against IBM and Novell cannot affect the users of the operating system GNU/Linux. Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University, pro-bono general counsel of FSF North America, has published a paper that will help free software developers and end-users understand the legal issues and business risks involved in using the Linux kernel. The paper is avaible on the OSDL web site. http://www.osdl.org/docs/osdl_eben_moglen_third_statement.pdf "After selling licenses for rights in the original Unix code, the SCO Group is now suing Novell to please hand over those rights to SCO." Stefano Maffulli, Italian chancellor of FSF Europe explains. "The lawsuit shows SCO Group's uncertainty about their claims on the code in question. One could ask on what grounds they think they were suing others. In any case, their licensing campaign is obviously over," he continues. The license of the Linux kernel, the GNU General Public Licens, grants the recipients of the software the right to use, copy, modify and redistribute the software under the same terms. Many users got the Linux software from the SCO Group, even after they sued IBM in august 2003. "As both the SCO Group and Novell, through its recent acquisition SuSE, have been distributing copies of the GNU/Linux system -- including the Linux kernel -- under the GNU GPL, it means that regardless of the outcome of that process, no party will ever be able to ask for licensing fees." says Werner Koch, Head of Office of FSF Europe. "The whole issue has been very much overplayed and overrated by analysts who assumed that if there is smoke, there is fire. But in the modern business world, you will often discover nothing but a smoke machine," concludes Georg Greve, president of the FSF Europe. "In the end, this case is a typical example of a company trying to undo time and undoing itself in the process. Understanding, accepting and working with the freedoms of Free Software is becoming a key factor of success for modern companies in information technology." About the Free Software Foundation Europe The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable non-governmental organization dedicated to all aspects of Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition - allow equal participation in the information age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in 2001 as the European sister organization of the Free Software Foundation in the United States. http://fsfeurope.org Contact Europe: Georg C. F. Greve <greve(a)fsfeurope.org> phone: +49-40-23809080 fax: +49-40-23809081 Italy: Stefano Maffulli <maffulli(a)fsfeurope.org> phone: +39-02-34537127 fax: +39-02-34531282 Germany: Werner Koch <koch(a)fsfeurope.org> phone: +49-2104-173855 Further contact information available at http://fsfeurope.org/contact/ _______________________________________________ Press-release mailing list Press-release(a)fsfeurope.org https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release

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Re: summer school
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Could someone help Prof Gangavane? Prof, I wish the term used would be GNU/Linux (rather than just the kernel's lable of 'Linux', which lacks the strong emphasis on ethics and freedom. FN On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, vibhavari vasant pandit wrote: > To, Respected Sir/Madam Sub :- Demanding suggestion about summer school. We are going to conduct Summer School at panhale (Lanja) Ratnagiri. This summer School is held during the month of May. The Summer School will be a 1-Month condensed introduction of a Vocational Course that is meant to prepare the student to be a Productive Self Reliant Knowledgeable Computer Craftsman who has leaned the Art of Working with Free Software for Productive use in the Society, covering all important Areas of human life. These students would have tasted the Freedom and Honesty and Continuous Learning that is involved in working with Free software, and would have imbibed the work culture of independent and autonomous self-learning made possible by the free access to the wealth of software and documentation available on the internet. It also engenders in them the spirit of freely giving back to the society in kind. Syllabus of course is enclosed with this letter. Kindly send your suggestions on this id vgangavane(a)rediffmail.com or contacat on this telephone no.(02351) 230749 & (02351) 230824. One Month Course Contents 1. Computer Fundamentals - Computing with a Desktop PC 2. What is Free Software, Open Source , Linux ? 3. System features - Design and Philosophy of Linux. 4. Text processing and word processing. 5. Programming languages and utilities. 6. Graphical Desktop - X Window System. 7. Introduction to Networking and Communications. 8. World Wide Web. 9. Differences between Linux and other operating systems. 10. Hardware requirements. 11. Obtaining and Installing Linux 12. Generic installation - Partitioning. 13. Hardware Compatibility Issues 14. Features of Installed Linux System 15. Console commands, Indirection and Piping 16. Desktop Programs 17. Downloading, Copying and Installing Programs 18. Linux Distributions - Red Hat Linux. 19. The RPM package management system. 20. Problems with installation 21. Understanding Login accounts. 22. Shells and Executing programs. 23. Home directory and Working in Linux 24. The Linux File System 25. The root user and Permissions 26. Jobs and processes. 27. Background processes and Daemons. 28. Text documents Using the vi editor. 29. HTML documents with vi editor. 30. TeX dcuments with vi editor. 31. Shell environment and scripts. 32. Creating,Archiving and compressing files. 33. Upgrading and installing new software. 34. Application Binaries and System files. 35. Text processing using GUI Applications 36. Indian Language Fonts and Documents. 37. Images and Image Editing 38. Sound and Text to Speech 39. Linux Desktop Multimedia 40. Devices and Mounts in Linux 41. Serial, Parallel and USB devices 42. Printing, Scanning and Camera 43. Networking and Host names 44. Configuring TCP/IP on the system. 45. Dial-up Modems, PPP and Internet. 46. Linux Console and gui programs. 47. Tricks and Shortcuts. 48. The linux culture. Yours Faithfully Vasantrao Gangavane -- Frederick Noronha : http://fredericknoronha.blogware.com Freelance Journalist : Ph 0091.832.2409490 Cell 0 9822 122436

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Bangla LINUX in Compass 2004
by linux junkies 18 Feb '04

18 Feb '04

Yesterday was the last day of COMPASS 2004. After three disappointing days last two days has been encouraging to the Linux fanatics like me. ILUG-CAL presented linux to this COMPASS. I must appreciate Mr.Indranil Dasgupta and Mr Shankarshan Mukhopadhya, who answered the open house. Though participation was very disappointing. The range of question was very vivid. From one user asking the web address where he can download these free stuffs to the other user asking whether he can use his old ttf (true type font) Bengali fonts in this free OS platform. Most of the queries were whether users could run so-called popular proprietary s/w in GNU/LINUX. Both of them handled these queries efficiently. My heartiest thanks to them. Most interesting part was their presentation on Ankur Bangla Project. ( You can see details about it at www.bengalinux.org ). They presented Ankur Bangla Live CD 1.0. It is a fascinating idea to make a OS with Bangali messages. People will love to work with a s/w that they can instruct in his mother tongue (though it will still work in binary). The basic idea of popularizing GNU/Linux will get a booster dose, at least in Bengal through this project. L10n(localization) of the OS is very much needed to popularize Free s/w. Various bengali OTF(Open type Fonts) in UNICODE was also very much needed for easy portability. The editors are quite good. They have all powerful features that a modern text editor needs, even a interesting bengali dictionary to check spellings . Bangla Sahityer Sankalan (Collection of Bengali Literature) is also very unique. The Full Ankur Bangla Linux distribution is due in April 2004. They are also undertaking Oriya localization project. It is nice to hear that 15 community centers in USA is using this Live CD to train US born bengali children in their mother tongue. These children took birth in a country habituated with computer. So its a nice idea to teach them bengali through computers. This live CD might be first big step forward to popularize GNU/Linux in Bengal also. We can approach West Bengal Government to adapt this Bengali Linux instead of proprietary s/w in their basic computer education starting from school. May this live CD, not be a collectors item of proprietary s/w users. I expect this CD to pave a path of using free s/w and LINUX OS in West Bengal. One very good friend of mine made a good point here. We must make conscious effort to let people know that there exist a Free Live Bangla OS CD, otherwise there is no point in making such a good job. It will just be wasted. A grass root level workforce must be there to popularize GNU/Linux itself, otherwise all their valuable efforts will be in vain. I found a little boy in this COMPASS saying Their configuration lack enough memory to run P IV efficiently, after seeing a h/w vendors offer paper. This was fabulous. It shows how much we are coming of age. But this little boy must also be taught to use FREE GNU/Linux and s/w so that he will not use pirated proprietary s/w. He should be taught that here he can put his talent to modify the s/w itself according to his need. Most of the LUGs have been involved in projects that take the free s/w movement ahead. It is very much needed. But they lack the urge to popularize it in grass root level. But Believe me, this is important. There is no point in inventing space ships if common people are not made aware of their existence. Common people must be heard, they must be informed, due attention must be given to them to solve their basic problems in GNU/Linux. They must not thing Linux is very much geeks OS. They must feel easy while using LINUX daily in their PC. May the freedom, knowledge and the Ankur Bangla Live CD 1.0 be with you You can download this from http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/bengalinux/ankurbangla-ld_1.0.… regards avijit patra linuxjunkies foundation www.linuxjunkies.org/forum Yahoo! India Insurance Special: Be informed on the best policies, services, tools and more.

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Re: [Free-gis] Reinventing the wheel
by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay 17 Feb '04

17 Feb '04

----- Original Message ----- From: "V. Sasi Kumar" <vsasi(a)hotpop.com> > The Dept. of Science and Technology, Government of India, is planning to > invest in developing further their GIS called Gram that runs on Windows. > They are also planning to develop support for local level planning, > which included a decision support system. Much of what they are thinking > of is possibly available in the Free GIS GRASS. I think FSF should point > this out to the DST and garner support for further developing GRASS, if > required, for local level development purposes. An extract from DST's > report is given below: > This is perhaps the tragedy that has been afflicting the project(s) since inception. i feel that it'd be better if their particular needs are identified and then FSFI does provide a comprehensive case for GRASS. thanks for bringing this to the notice of the members. -sankarshan --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.580 / Virus Database: 367 - Release Date: 02/06/2004

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GNU/Linux @ Compass 2004
by linux junkies 16 Feb '04

16 Feb '04

COMPASS 2004, organised by Computer Association of Eastern India is One of the biggest IT show in India (from 13 th Feb to 17 Feb in Kolkata). We, the members of LINUXjunkies.org have found some interesting facts on GNU/Linux in this IT show. 1. There are only two participants have GNU/Linux installed on their PC.Everybody else are using Windows XP mostly. Whether they are PC vendors, or dealing with Monitors or Music systems, everybody are using Windows XP or Windows 98. Only "aamar PC", the bengal's own branded pc has all of their pcs redhat 9 pre-installed. And another vendor, i just can't remember name, has a Debian preinstalled on it's HCL Beanstalk machine. 2. When we enquired about the GNU/Linux compatible Printers, we have none. All the vendors said that printers have nothing to do with OS. but when we insisted, they said that why we were bothering about OS. Some of them offered us Windows for Free if we get printers from them. 3. Some vendors are offering refurbished pcs, with the price tag of Rs. 5000 to 9000, with Windows 98/XP pre-installed. When we asked them about the GNU/Linux, they said that we don't need to use GNU/Linux as they are giving us Windows for Free ( Pre-installed ).i.e why you use GNU/Linux if you could get Windows for Free ! 4.Chabria Infotech, one of the biggest s/w vendors of Kolkata, has a display board at their stall. The board says " Linux available here" with the logo of all major linux distros. But when we enquired, we came to know that they donot have any of linux distros right there at their stall. We have to order and it will take at least 5 to 7 days to get the CDs. One interesting thing was, when we asked for the price,they said the OEM (!) version of all distro will cost Rs 500 and Original (!) Full pack will cost around Rs 3500. 5. When we asked for any games on GNU/Linux, the game vendors said that they don't have anything for GNU/Linux. Well, this the overall picture of GNU/Linux at Compass 2004. Any comments??? regards aloke majumder LINUXjunkies Foundation www.linuxjunkies.org/forum ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Insurance Special: Be informed on the best policies, services, tools and more. Go to: http://in.insurance.yahoo.com/licspecial/index.html

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Leapfrogging the divide
by Ramanraj K 15 Feb '04

15 Feb '04

Today's ET has carried a report on the Akshaya computer literacy mission titled "Leapfrogging the divide" in the The Knowledge Society section. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/497224.cms But, the article did not mention about any use of free software in the project.

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Memorandum to CSIR
by Ramanraj K 13 Feb '04

13 Feb '04

Last month, it was decided to draft a memorandum to request CSIR to use Free Software and philosophy. I have posted a memorandum to the fsf-discuss list, which includes ideas and suggestions from V. Sasi Kumar, Mahesh T. Pai, and other members of this list. Please join the thread at fsf-discuss and share your views.

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UGC
by Mahesh T. Pai 13 Feb '04

13 Feb '04

Any body interested? http://www.ugc.ac.in/hisp.htm -- +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+

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