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Interview with Debian Devleoper from IITM Varun Hiremath
by Praveen A 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

Which project do you currently contribute to? I am a Debian Developer and I am currently maintaining about 135 packages in Debian. This is my Debian QA page where you will find the list of packages I am currently maintaining in Debian: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=Varun+Hiremath Apart from Debian I have been contributing to many open source projects: 1) I am author of open source project python-gastables: python modules for compressible gas flow calculations: Homepage: code.google.com/p/python-gastables 2) I am also author of Krickscore - KDE applet for cricket scores. http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Environment/KDE/krickscore-25612.sht… Homepage: http://varun.travisbsd.org/krickscore.php 3) I have been contributing to Jajuk - Advanced Juke box project, where I am working as a Developer and Debian package maintainer. Homepage: http://jajuk.info/index.php/Main_Page 4) I am also currently maintaing pidgin-festival ( formerly knows as festival-gaim). I rewrote festival-gaim to make it work with the new pidgin API. Homepage: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-festival/ How does it feels to have two DDs from neighbouring rooms? (Kumar Appaiah stays next to my room) It is a big advantage having him next door because we get to learn a lot from each other. Usually there is a lot of activity going on in Debian, and it becomes very difficult to keep track of things; having another DD next door really helps a lot to catch up with action. Read More about Varun at http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Varun_Hiremath Cheers Praveen -- പ്രവീണ്‍ അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില്‍ <GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call! <DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak? (as seen on /.) Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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Propagating Digital Democracy
by Rony 22 Apr '08

22 Apr '08

Hello All, This Olympic season has witnessed a lot of supporters of freedom and the media too is going out of its way to provide news reports on how activists all over the world are protesting against dictators and autocratic regimes. Even on normal days the people as well as the media have become pro-active in exposing those who abuse their power and position, whether it is the powerful Nations, politicians or Government officials. All this is happening because there is full awareness about Freedom and Democracy. There are now aware of their rights, so they protest whenever anyone abuses power. However in the digital world there is a near complete lack of awareness of Digital Democracy and Freedom. The main reason I believe for this is that we look at the digital world as simply a collection of electronic gadgets that help us do our daily work. We forget that the Digital World is nothing but an extension of the real world. Computers are no longer the simple devices that did specific jobs for us. They are a complete Digital Ecosystem that is fully integrated into our personal and professional space. Therefore anything that affects our Digital Freedom affects our individual freedom too. A software manufacturer for our digital environment is no different from a regular manufacturer who produces materials or finished products for our homes and offices. When we setup a home or an office, a lot of people are involved like carpenter, mason, plumber, painter, electrician etc. They provide us with the finished infrastructure we need to run our homes and offices. After their job is done and we start using the finished rooms, do we hand over an extra set of keys to each one of them so that they can walk into our rooms as and when they feel so and rummage through our things? We zealously guard our living space. What about our digital space? Why should a software manufacturer have to constantly access our Digital space under the pretext of providing security and upgrades when he should have provided a secure Digital product through its manufacture itself. How many of us realize that when a giant software manufacturer of one country has this access to our Digital space in most of the world's computers, including those used by Governments of all Nations, it has direct access to sensitive data and records of all those Nations. In our living world, we buy and use products that can be re-filled, re-cycled and can be serviced by more than one vendor as this makes our life easy and we are not dependent on one entity who may demand whatever price it wants to. We also look for continuity of use for those products over the years instead of simply paying high amounts every time and using them for short periods. Do we have the same awareness in the Digital World? Why are we content with paying large amounts of money for software to run our digital products and keep shelling out more and more every year for upgrades? Are we aware that digital products like computers can be run on software that is not expensive, restrictive and has a very long life span? That is Freedom software or Libre software. This is software that anyone can analyze, modify and use on their digital products with full freedom without the constant fear of it getting obsolete or our data becoming un-readable. In the real world if we guard our freedom to buy and use any product anyway we want without any monopolistic control or restrictions from the manufacturer then in the Digital world, why are we ignorant of our right to software Freedom and Digital Democracy? In the real world, if anyone powerfull and influential tries to flex his muscles and mow others down, there is an immediate public and media outcry against it. However in the Digital world why are we simply ignorant of our Digital Freedom and Democratic rights and let the Software super-powers simply bulldoze any initiative for Software Freedom? Knowledge creates awareness and awareness brings Freedom. Just as Democracy and Freedom are most important to mankind in the real world, so is Digital Democracy and Freedom, especially in this Digital era where knowledge is now digitized and should be freely accessible to everyone. -- Regards, Rony. GNU/Linux ! No Viruses No Spyware Only Freedom.

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Kumar Appaiah: 5th Debian Developer from India
by Praveen A 21 Apr '08

21 Apr '08

Kumar Appaiah (ILUGC Member and Final year Dual degree student, EEE Dept, IIT-Madras) is the 5th Debian Developer from India. Other 4 from India are Ganesan Rajagopal, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan in Bangalore. Kapil Hari Paranjape in Institute of Mathematical Sciences Taramani. Varun Hiremath, student of Aerospace Engg. at IIT Madras. Congratulations Kumar. It is a great boost for the Debian community in India. -- പ്രവീണ്‍ അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില്‍ <GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call! <DRM> What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak? (as seen on /.) Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] google groups without membership: was a list discussing the ICT policy for education
by Nagarjuna G. 21 Apr '08

21 Apr '08

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Raj Mathur <raju(a)linux-delhi.org> wrote: > On Saturday 19 Apr 2008, Nagarjuna G. wrote: > > Those of you who would like to take active role in shaping the ICT > > policy of India, please join this group and voice your opinions. > > This group has members from various organizations, and not > > necessarily from free software community. > > > > http://groups.google.com/group/ict-education-india > > Why Google? It won't let me join the group unless I have a Google > account, and it won't let non-Google-members view archives, etc. > > I presume increasing Google's market worth isn't one of the objectives > of this discussion forum. > I do not realize till this time that it is not possible to subscribe unless you have a google account. the owner of the group subscribed my gnowlede.org account, so i could not realize and never visited the site nor the archives. Can a person with google account invite a non-member? or does this also make the non-member a member if the invited accepts? Nagarjuna

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a list discussing the ICT policy for education
by Nagarjuna G. 21 Apr '08

21 Apr '08

Those of you who would like to take active role in shaping the ICT policy of India, please join this group and voice your opinions. This group has members from various organizations, and not necessarily from free software community. http://groups.google.com/group/ict-education-india -- Nagarjuna G.

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3gpwiz installation
by Nishit Dave 19 Apr '08

19 Apr '08

Hi all, I have installed 3gpwiz from the LFY April 2008 cd. This script requires that I install ffmpeg with support for all types of media codecs. The script for installing ffmpeg tries to download it from mplayerhq.hu through a CVS command. When I run the install-ffmpeg script, the output tells me that it cannot find mplayerhq.hu. Now, I usually connect to the internet through an open (no uid / pwd) proxy at the workplace, that apparently doesn't allow ftp access. As I have already configured the proxy in my environment settings, bash profile etc., connecting to the internet while on my Reliance datacard from the bash shell also does not work. The mplayerhq.hu site now hosts mplayer and ffmpeg sources on SVN, and the CVS repository is obsolete (up to 2006). I had downloaded the 2006 ffmpeg tarball and tried to install 3gpwiz against that (after modifying the script), but it did not work properly. Has anybody else installed 3gpwiz successfully? Can anybody tell me how to replace the CVS option in the script with an SVN command? If you want, I will post the script's contents (after rebooting to linux).

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Help needed
by Aniruddha Dasgupta 17 Apr '08

17 Apr '08

Hi people, We are at a fix here. our studio is expecting a new work in a couple of days and our windows systems are repeatedly infected by virus. and our copy of SUSE has become corrupt. If anyone has a copy of SUSE linux 10.1 with all the repositories and codecs etc. can they give us a copy ? would be very grateful. because we are novice with linux, we won't be able to get all the repos from the net and we don't even know how to do that properly. next, if someone can guide us, as to where we can get a copy of Maya for Linux. same problem. our copy is not getting installed. We would be greatly obliged if someone can come over as our guest and have a look, at ou place and the system. looking for all your replies. regards Aniruddha Dasgupta Director-Animation +91-9324696842

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.. Re: Sunday Meet I am Waiting For It!
by Anivar Aravind 16 Apr '08

16 Apr '08

> True. For now it's not even a standard, never mind any other criteria > by which one may choose to classify a standard. > Of course M$ will always have their spin on everything, so Open > Standard means just that - a non standard open to interpretation by > everyone and the mickysoft puppet. One of the Demands of the candle light vigil was the need of a Clearly defined national policy for Open standards. Such a policy document need to define Open standards first Now Knowledge commission recommends Open standards 11th 5-year plan talk about open standards National Egovernance plan (NeGP) recommends it. but in the absence of a national policy with a clear definition of open standards we need to spend a lot of time for every project to get corrected. As Nagarjuna points on Hindu report already posted here “Very big voices like NASSCOM and Infosys that have not participated in even one meeting have voted irresponsibly. We fear that if such lobbying continues, academics and individuals like us will be put on the defensive, unless there is a policy in place,” said Nagarjuna G., professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, who was part of the technical committee of BIS. Todays Programme was a big sucess here in bangalore. Nearly 70-80 people turned up. Anivar

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] .. Re: Sunday Meet I am Waiting For It!
by jtd 15 Apr '08

15 Apr '08

On Tuesday 15 April 2008 03:23 pm, Devranjan Das wrote: > > not yet. ISO has approved setting up a commitiee for reconciling > > the differences between the various factions and resolving > > technical issues. > > > > Dear List > > This wikipedia article says that "OOXML" is an open standard. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML > > Is that so? No. It's not a standard. It is a proposed standard which will have to be cleared by various regular ISO committies and the newly formed ones (read my previous mail), before becoming a standard. OTOH ODF is already an approved standard. -- Rgds JTD

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[OT] LFY April 2008
by Nishit Dave 15 Apr '08

15 Apr '08

Hey, have the subscribers among you started to receive this month's LFY issue, you know, the one with FreeBSD (!drool)? If only I have been left out, it would be because of their very helpful but slightly confused subscriptions dept. (Coming from me, would it perk up ears?)

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