Would anyone have useful links of examples of Free Software deployed
in Indian schools? Am just working on writing something on this topic.
FN
--
Frederick Noronha Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org
In Hyderabad. Ph 040-23132176 SMS: 9822122436
http://anivar.movingrepublic.org/2007/smc-sfd07-wide-news-coverage-in-malay…
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) got widespread support from
malayalam mainstream print media for the 2 day (14th & 15th september)
software freedom day celebration & the release of 7 software packages
developed during last year. It is the time to look at our history.
SMC is reactivated from a dead state, as a result of personal
discussions with praveen, hiran & vimaljoseph in the sidelines of
GPLv3 Conference in bangalore. The new team is setup at last year SFD
celebrations in Thrissur. Suresh, Baiju(the founder of SMC), Hussain
KH (rachana), Anwar, Students in GEC etc also joined in the team at
that time. Now we have more than 30 developers+localizers. The
astounding progress within the short span of time is described below
* December 2006: Debian Installer is Fully Translated into
Malayalam ( The Work of Debian malayalam, a sub team of Swathanthra
malayalam computing)
* January 2007: Santhosh Thottingal of SMC done a complete
architectural rewrite of Dhvani, the Indian language text to speech
system by Ramesh hariharan & added Malayalam support to It.
* March 2007 : participated & Conducted workshops in FOSS
Meet@NITC, Kozhikkode
* March 2007: Swathanthra Malayalam Computing selected as a
participating Organisation ( and only Indian Organisation) in Google
Summer of Code Project. 5 projects were allotted.
* April 2007: GNU aspell supported Malayalam (major issues are resolved)
* May 2007: Swanalekha: a Phonetic Input scheme for malayalam using SCIM
* June 2007: Lalitha, Bolnagiri based xkb keyboard for malayalam by Jinesh
* July 2007: Added pango support to Tuxtype by Mobin M as part of
GSoC work. Now Tuxtype is usable for all Indian languages
* July 2007:Debian package (Debconf )Translations. Malayalam is
the Most translated indian language with 27% translation of
configuration strings
* August 2007: Malayalam Matrix screen saver Release, & First
Public Release of Aspell- malayalam spellchecker with More than 137000
words list (It is the largest Indian Language Aspell wordlist. Second
is hindi with 25000 words).
* September 2007: Gnome Officially supports malayalam in Gnome
2.20 with More than 80% translations
* September 2007: Sarika : The first Free Indian language speech
recognition engine is developed by Shyam K (as a part of GsoC). It
Currently identifies more than 50 malayalam words
* September 2007: Tuxtype malayalam is Released by Mobin.M &
friends (Vimal, Shreyas, Sreeranj, Prince)
* Meera , a Malayalam Traditional opentype font with more than 900
glyphs is released under GNU GPL by Hussain K.H and Suresh P . It is
developed for Suruma renderering scheme (not compatible with Uniscribe
scheme for windows) . Authors are working on a Uniscribe compatible
(windows) version now
Pramode Sir wrote:
A society and a culture is identified by its language - once the
language is dead, the society starts losing its identity. A good way
to keep a language alive is to take it to the digital world - the
world of the PC/Communication devices and the Internet. This is one
context in which developing regional language computing environments
and popularising them has great significance.
The theme for the 2 day event was "Swathantra Software and Malayalam
computing" . Free software is touching the lives of common man now !!
Digg It: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Wide_spread_coverage_for_Software_Freedom_Day_in…
FSDaily: http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Wide_spread_coverage_for_Software_Freedom_…
http://swatantryam.blogspot.com/2007/08/story-of-free-software-in-kerala-in…
Free Software in Kerala
V. Sasi Kumar
A friend, who had worked in Brazil for a couple of years, once told
me, "Kerala is known in Latin America for Free Software." This
indicates the extent to which Kerala has dominated the Free Software
scenario in India. It is not by chance that the headquarters of the
Free Software Foundation of India happened to be situated at
Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. The state is now poised to become the
first in the country to introduce exclusively Free Software for IT
education in high schools. We shall examine here how all this came
about....
The story apparently began with the introduction of TeX, the
typesetting program that was designed in the 1970s by Donald Knuth,
the author of The Art of Computer Programming, a four volume classic.
TeX was introduced into Kerala by Prof. K.S.S. Namburipad of the
Department of Mathematics in the University of Kerala. TeX could
typeset mathematical equations very neatly, which no other software
could do, especially in the 1980s when Prof. Namburipad brought TeX in
fourteen floppy disks from the United States. He could bring the
program and use it on a number of computers without any legal problem
because it had no licences-it was in the public domain. It was, in a
sense, the Grandmother of Free Software, as some people call it.
Prof. Namburipad encouraged his students to learn and use TeX,
especially for preparing their theses. One of his students was E.
Krishnan, now with the Mathematics Department of the University
College, Thiruvananthapuram, a leading exponent of TeX and one of the
auA thors of the very popular LaTeX primer2 published as an electronic
book by the Indian TeX User Group. Dr. Krishnan also played an
important role in establishing the Free Software Foundation of India.
Another person inspired by Prof. Namburipad was one C.V. Radhakrishnan
who used to run a small centre that prepared theses for the research
students of the Kariavattom campus of the University of Kerala.
--
Frederick Noronha Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org
In Hyderabad. Ph 040-23132176 SMS: 9822122436
IT practical tests on 'open' platform
Anand Parthasarathy
IT@School project of Kerala has developed an operating system based on the
Linux
Akshaya had raised popular expectations
Kerala, first State to use Edusat satellite channel
— Photo: Special Arrangement
IT WORKS: Students of the Government Girls High School, Ernakulam,
doing self-paced computer 'practicals.'
BANGALORE: In the largest such simultaneous deployment of
'free-and-open' software in India, over 15 lakh Kerala schoolchildren
on Friday start taking their quarterly practical tests in Information
Technology on personal computers using a special Linux version.
The IT@School project of the State Education Department has developed
an operating system based on the Linux version Ubuntu. Called
IT@School GNU Linux Version 3.0, it was distributed to 2,832 high
schools — over a thousand of them government schools, the rest aided
and unaided ones.
Between September 7 and 22, children of Classes 8, 9 and 10 will use
some 30,000 PCs to do their quarterly practical examinations in IT.
Test skills
In Class VIII, for example, the examination will test skills in the
use of the mouse; the 'Tux' paint software for drawing; word
processing and spreadsheets. A trained cadre of over 70,000 teachers
will help them.
The project has created a whole ecosystem of computer-aided tools for
self-paced learning, online testing, instant evaluation, marks
generation and so on. All this is done using royalty-free Open Source
software.
For example, the Open Source picture editing tool Gimp, rather than a
pricey proprietary option like Photoshop, is in use.
The State's path-breaking e-learning initiative Akshaya had raised
popular expectations, but the cost of proprietary software licences in
bulk was unaffordable. This led to the State emerging as a pioneer in
the use of Open Source resources in a host of education and
e-governance projects.
In July 2005, Kerala was the first State to use the Edusat satellite
channel to connect schools in all its 14 districts under the Virtual
Class Technology on Edusat for Rural Schools, or VICTERS, programme.
IT@School executive director K. Anvar Sadath, a veteran of the Akshaya
programme, said on Thursday that the Central Government had
underwritten almost the entire cost of the school computerisation
programme to the tune of Rs. 6.2 crores, while the State had spent Rs.
75 lakh this fiscal year.
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http://www.hindu.com/2007/09/07/stories/2007090755131600.htm
--
Frederick Noronha Journalist http://fn.goa-india.org
In Hyderabad. Ph 040-23132176 SMS: 9822122436
It gives me pleasure to say that the Fedora Project's application [1]
to host a Project Day at FOSS.in 2007 [2] has been accepted by the
organizers.
However we now have to carry the burden of ensuring that we produce
many Indian contributors to Fedora in particular and FOSS in general.
This means that our sessions have to be structured in such a way that
it is easy for people to get in at the ground floor and the take the
elevator up. Or in other words we should have enough low hanging
fruits to encourage newer contributors.
We are looking for capable community members who are willing to step
up and help us achieve our objective.
A possible agenda [3] and a probable list of workshops [4] is now
being chalked out.
If you desire to participate -- give talks or hold workshops --
irrespective of whether they are present in [3] [4] or not, we would
encourage you to let us know what you have in mind. We want the agenda
and workshops to reflect the preferences of the community.
Please remember that our focus is on encouraging new contributors from
India, and not on addressing the end-users. However that will not
prohibit foreign nationals from giving talks or holding workshops as
long they help us in bootstrapping members of the audience into
contributors.
So lets get the dice rolling...
Happy hacking,
Debarshi
(Fedora Project Day co-proposer)
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FOSSin
[2] http://foss.in/2007
[3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FOSSin#head-60e6645a6a578d58f1e146a95147a061c…
[4] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FOSSin#head-a7640f2cdbfe84e210e71e8166a0296f1…
--
GPG key ID: 63D4A5A7
Key server: pgp.mit.edu
Hi,
Lets start early this time about our plans for the upcoming Software
Freedom Day 07. We can meet up at our regular place, Cubbon Park this
Sunday evening say 3pm.
Come with ideas. I would like to reach out to maximum students this time.
For more and volunteers see http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SFD/Bangalore/07
Cheers
Praveen
--
പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില്
Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now!
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign
Hello,
We shall be meeting tomorrow evening (7th September, 2007 @4pm) at St.
Joseph's College, Shantinagar(near Langford road) to finalise our activities
and responsibilities for Software Freedom Day 07
http://softwarefreedomday.org/
Expecting the whole-hearted participation of the FOSS community.
Please do contact me for any details.
Thank you,
--
Vikram Vincent
+919448810822
Project Engineer,
NRCFOSS http://nrcfoss.org.in/
AU-KBC Research Centre http://www.au-kbc.org/