Dear all,
I am writing a note on detailing Free/Open source projects that can speed up the adoption of Linux and would like to hear from the list members on this subject.
I would like to create a sharply defined list of say, ten specific problems which students from engineering colleges can be asked to solve. Ideally, these problems should be solvable by a group of people within 3-6 months so that these students can achieve a tangible goal.
Some of the suggestions I have received so far have been interesting. These include:
* Developing an open source tool like VM Ware that can run both Windows and Linux off the same CPU * Developing an open source VoIP product like Skype * Getting Internet Explorer working (natively?) on Linux (This will be of particular help in increasing the penetration of Linux in banks since many banking applications, though browser based, are optimized to work on Linux) * Reverse engineering Tally file formats and developing an open source financial accounting package (or getting Tally to work--natively--under Linux) * Developing translation mechanisms for converting Internet content from English to Indian languages and from one Indian language to another * Developing tools like Ximian Connector to connect to Micosoft Exchange server etc.
If anyone can add to this list, I shall be grateful.
Regards,
Venky
--- "Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan" venky@indlinux.org wrote:
* Developing an open source tool like VM Ware that can run both Windows and Linux off the same CPU
see http://plex86.sourceforge.net/ http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" your friends today! Download Messenger Now http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
On 9 Mar 2004, Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan wrote:
* Getting Internet Explorer working (natively?) on Linux (This will be of particular help in increasing the penetration of Linux in banks since many banking applications, though browser based, are optimized to work on Linux)
I think you really don't want this to happen. IE really messes up the standards. By making IE work on all machines, you'll just encourage people to make IE only sites. We should really be looking at porting these applications to work on standards compliant browsers.
Philip
--- Philip S Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
On 9 Mar 2004, Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan wrote:
* Getting Internet Explorer working (natively?) on Linux (This will be of particular help in increasing the penetration of Linux in banks since many banking applications, though browser based, are optimized to work on Linux)
I think you really don't want this to happen. IE really messes up the standards. By making IE work on all machines, you'll just encourage people to make IE only sites. We should really be looking at porting these applications to work on standards compliant browsers.
Philip
What ever IE do achievable in Mozilla. See pojects at http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm
1. Mozilla ActiveX Control Embed the Mozilla browser engine (Gecko) into any ActiveX application. This control implements the same APIs as the Internet Explorer control making porting of existing applications reasonably straightforward.
2. ActiveX Control For Plug-ins Embed plug-ins in any ActiveX application. This control can host most Netscape Plug-in API (LiveConnect) plug-ins, allowing them to use them in your existing ActiveX applications, including Internet Explorer.
3. Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application. This plug-in hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera.
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" your friends today! Download Messenger Now http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
Sometime on Mar 11, Biju G C assembled some asciibets to say:
What ever IE do achievable in Mozilla. See pojects at http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm
I don't think so. Things that IE can do that Mozilla cannot: - run viruses - allow remote users to gain access to your system (some versions) - crash windows
In any case, the problem really is that some sites have code like this:
if(navigator.appName != MSIE) alert("your browser won't work with this site");
(well, not exactly, but you get the picture)
We need to convert these sites to remove this code.
There's also a lot of JScript code that isn't JavaScript or DOM compliant, and this will run only on IE. That needs to be converted as well.
Philip
--- Philip S Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
I don't think so. Things that IE can do that Mozilla cannot:
- run viruses
- allow remote users to gain access to your system (some
versions)
- crash windows
In any case, the problem really is that some sites have code like this:
if(navigator.appName != MSIE) alert("your browser won't work with this site");
(well, not exactly, but you get the picture)
We need to convert these sites to remove this code.
Actually..any website development project starts off with a brief about which browsers they want to support. As of now, to save costs and time and to hide ignorance about standards and other browsers, most project leaders take the easy way out and "standardise' on IE. This way the developers dont need to work much, since only IE compatibility has to be tested, the client gets his site up faster, and everyone's happy..
regds, Kishor
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 10:59, kishor bhagwat wrote:
--- Philip S Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
I don't think so. Things that IE can do that Mozilla cannot:
- run viruses
- allow remote users to gain access to your system (some
versions)
- crash windows
May I suggest that if the subject has changed, we change the subject line also? That way, those browsing the archives would get to find info they are looking for faster. A more appropriate subject line would have been "IE versus Mozilla" instead of "Speeding up Linux adoption" that it had earlier.
Venky
Sometime on Mar 13, Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan assembled some asciibets to say:
line also? That way, those browsing the archives would get to find info they are looking for faster. A more appropriate subject line
I've found that on this list, no one really cares about people who would browse the archives. It is far easier to unsubscribe than it is to make such suggestions on a repeated basis.
On 11/03/04 21:09 +0000, Biju G C wrote: <snip>
- Mozilla ActiveX Control Embed the Mozilla browser engine (Gecko) into any ActiveX application.
This control implements the same APIs as the Internet Explorer control making porting of existing applications reasonably straightforward.
Uh oh. So instead of getting a sane manual page, we will get Mozilla popping up, or worse, a current page being hijacked by another application. And Mozilla is not the only browser around.
- ActiveX Control For Plug-ins Embed plug-ins in any ActiveX application. This control can host
most Netscape Plug-in API (LiveConnect) plug-ins, allowing them to use them in your existing ActiveX applications, including Internet Explorer.
Why exactly should I want to use ActiveX, given that this is essentially allowing an untrusted third party access to files on my filesystem?
- Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application. This plug-in
hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera.
In which case, I will just uninstall those browsers. How about requiring that not everything run via the web? How about running applications via actual executables? Its not a hard thing to do.
Devdas Bhagat
- Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application.
This plug-in
hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera.
In which case, I will just uninstall those browsers. How about requiring that not everything run via the web? How about running applications via actual executables? Its not a hard thing to do.
But what will happen to our brilliant Java programmers? :)
On 12/03/04 18:41 +0530, Sthitaprajna wrote:
- Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application.
This plug-in
hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera.
In which case, I will just uninstall those browsers. How about requiring that not everything run via the web? How about running applications via actual executables? Its not a hard thing to do.
But what will happen to our brilliant Java programmers? :)
They can learn better tools? Or perhaps learn to actually code for performance on non Turing systems?
Devdas Bhagat
--- Devdas Bhagat devdas@dvb.homelinux.org wrote:
On 11/03/04 21:09 +0000, Biju G C wrote:
<snip> > 1. Mozilla ActiveX Control > Embed the Mozilla browser engine (Gecko) into any > ActiveX application. This control implements the same > APIs as the Internet Explorer control making porting of > existing applications reasonably straightforward. Uh oh. So instead of getting a sane manual page, we will get Mozilla popping up, or worse, a current page being hijacked by another application. And Mozilla is not the only browser around.
you miss understood pl. read http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm
No monster will popup
[quote] Standalone Mozilla ActiveX Control installers. Note these contain just the control and the parts of Mozilla Gecko it needs to function. It does not contain the full Mozilla browser. [/quote]
(sorry, this is going off-topic for the list) right now in MS-Win world if an application programmer want to show an Image on his screen it is possible. what if he wants to add window/box with content as image and text together like a web page in his application earlier Mozilla/Netscape only allowed to open it as an external program. But IE provided it as a control.
So companies like AOL started to provide their on browser with reentering component as this IE control (with also came all the bad behaviors of IE) And Netscape lost the battle in that sector.
[quote]
Why?
Previous versions of Netscape Communicator/Navigator were arguably superior to IE as day to day browsers but they suffered through their immediate usability and modularity. Although the Netscape browser was great as a standalone application, it wasn't possible to utilize that functionality in third party applications. On the other hand, Internet Explorer shipped with an ActiveX control which allowed exactly that ability.
Take a look at some of the applications that already use the IE control:
* AOL - For displaying a web pages in the AOL client * Encyclopaedia Britannica (CD) * Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia & World Atlas (Globe) * Microsoft Outlook - For HTML mail * Microsoft Studio - For online help * Qualcomm Eudora - For HTML mail * Neoplanet - Another skin, this time commercial * Custom Browser - Made to measure browsers * Active Worlds -VR conferencing that allows browsing in a pane * Intuit Quicken - For reports and statements * TopStyle A spiffy style sheet editor * Allaire Coldfusion - Web site authoring and server side scripting package.
There are hundreds of others apps, some commercial and probably many more running in intranets all over the world.
So what would it take for developers to use the Mozilla control as opposed to the IE control?
* An API close as possible to Internet Explorer's for ease of porting * Freely available source code to allow for bug fixing, customization, etc. * A very small distributable - 3-4Mb (for a download containing just the Gecko embedding engine and not the full Mozilla) compared to the 10Mb+ required for IE * State of the art rendering - exploit the speed and standards compliance of the Gecko rendering engine * No more nasty IE license - have you read it?
[/quote]
Another use of this control is to run a XUL-application inside IE or any other Win32-Application.
If you have a MS-windows PC you can try this Install http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/MozillaControl16.exe and open http://quicktools.mozdev.org/test/test1.html
This will encourage developers to make xul application even for the use of IE users. This in turn helps GNU/Linux users because they already can view XUL apps in Mozilla Hence this is the part I am more interested !!!
- ActiveX Control For Plug-ins Embed plug-ins in any ActiveX application. This
control can host most Netscape Plug-in API (LiveConnect) plug-ins, allowing them to use them in your existing ActiveX applications, including Internet Explorer.
Why exactly should I want to use ActiveX, given that this is essentially allowing an untrusted third party access to files on my filesystem?
What is bad if a MS App developer use Mozilla plugin. Again this is not for GNU/Linux
- Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application. This plug-in
hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera.
In which case, I will just uninstall those browsers. How about requiring that not everything run via the web? How about running applications via actual executables? Its not a hard thing to do.
This I dont like. But majority of world want it, if they should to switch back to mozilla
And people switching back to Mozilla is good for GNU/Linux
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" your friends today! Download Messenger Now http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
On 12/03/04 15:04 +0000, Biju G C wrote: <snip>
(sorry, this is going off-topic for the list) right now in MS-Win world if an application programmer want to show an Image on his screen it is possible.
It is possible even today in the Unix world if you like to the appropriate libraries.
what if he wants to add window/box with content as image and text together like a web page in his application earlier Mozilla/Netscape only allowed to open it as an external program. But IE provided it as a control.
This is one of the biggest reasons why we recommend using Mozilla on Windows over IE. Windows executes the image file, or whatever has to be displayed locally. This is a major cause of bugs/exploits in Windows.
<snip>
This will encourage developers to make xul application even for the use of IE users. This in turn helps GNU/Linux users because they already can view XUL apps in Mozilla Hence this is the part I am more interested !!!
Eh? So what stops people from installing Mozilla to view XUL pages? What is wrong with the idea of cross browser applications, *if* they MUST be web based? <rant> I use lynx, links and Mozilla about equally Do I care about graphics? Not necessarily. Do I care about usability? Yes. Do I care about standards compliance? Yes Do I care about IE or Konqueror or Dillo or ....? No. Are my pages usable in those browsers? Yes. </rant>
Easy enough questions to answer.
- ActiveX Control For Plug-ins Embed plug-ins in any ActiveX application. This
control can host most Netscape Plug-in API (LiveConnect) plug-ins, allowing them to use them in your existing ActiveX applications, including Internet Explorer.
Why exactly should I want to use ActiveX, given that this is essentially allowing an untrusted third party access to files on my filesystem?
What is bad if a MS App developer use Mozilla plugin. Again this is not for GNU/Linux
Because those Windows boxes on the network affect the usability of *my* network. Because all those viruses which spread through bugs in ActiveX affect *my* mail server, through sheer volume. They affect my network by filling it with useless traffic. All those viruses which offer SMTP services to spammers run on Windows systems. Quite a few of them walk in via ActiveX bugs.
- Plug-in For ActiveX controls Embed ActiveX controls in any NP API application. This plug-in
hosts ActiveX controls allowing them to be used in browser such as Netscape 4.x/6.x, Mozilla and Opera.
In which case, I will just uninstall those browsers. How about requiring that not everything run via the web? How about running applications via actual executables? Its not a hard thing to do.
This I dont like. But majority of world want it, if they should to switch back to mozilla
So you want to follow Microsoft and play catch up? No one ever won that way.
And people switching back to Mozilla is good for GNU/Linux
Not really, not if it means that Linux has to behave like Windows. The four Linux applications/suites I have the biggest beefs with? Mozilla, OpenOffice, KDE and GNOME. I will leave it to you to understand why (hint: whats the difference between Unix tools and Windows tools?).
Devdas Bhagat
Eh? So what stops people from installing Mozilla to view XUL pages?
Ignorance
What is wrong with the idea of cross browser applications, *if* they MUST be web based?
HTML is not a lanaguage for applications it is for documents
java is fine. But XUL is open source.
<rant> I use lynx, links and Mozilla about equally Do I care about graphics? Not necessarily. Do I care about usability? Yes. Do I care about standards compliance? Yes Do I care about IE or Konqueror or Dillo or ....? No. Are my pages usable in those browsers? Yes. </rant>
I completely agree with you
Because those Windows boxes on the network affect the usability of *my* network. Because all those viruses which spread through bugs in ActiveX affect *my* mail server, through sheer volume. They affect my network by filling it with useless traffic. All those viruses which offer SMTP services to spammers run on Windows systems. Quite a few of them walk in via ActiveX bugs.
I accept with your reason, but want you to take action. Pl. sue who gave chance for Spam
Alternative is we need a migration path.
Because there is big river we need to cross Some youngsters are strong enough to swim and cross it But I have family with old and young members Some are even ill.
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" your friends today! Download Messenger Now http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
Hello Everybody,
We are a team of undergraduates from CSE Department IIT Bombay,working on an Indian Language Text to Speech Synthesizer. Our project homepage is at
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vani/
It runs only on Linux now :).Might be of interest and help to some. Its in development stage rightnow.
Thanks, harsh
Why don't you put it up on Sourceforge? That way others can also contribute to the development of Vani.
Venky
On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 05:07, Harsh Jain wrote:
Hello Everybody,
We are a team of undergraduates from CSE Department IIT Bombay,working on an Indian Language Text to Speech Synthesizer. Our project homepage is at
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vani/
It runs only on Linux now :).Might be of interest and help to some. Its in development stage rightnow.
Thanks, harsh
On 14 Mar 2004, Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan wrote:
~ Why don't you put it up on Sourceforge? That way others can also ~ contribute to the development of Vani.
More importantly, what is the license that they are going to use? I would say make it LGPL, it will really do a lot in promoting our national language. That way we can expect to see terminals popping all over places, commercial ones, reading stuff to general population, that will benefit a lot.
The fact that there is no NLP/AI involved, imples there are very real chances an excellent TTS systems for Indian languages can be written, therefore making sure that the benefit reaches to the maximum number of people is also very important.
~ ~ Venky ~ ~ ~ ~ On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 05:07, Harsh Jain wrote: ~ > Hello Everybody, ~ > ~ > We are a team of undergraduates from CSE Department IIT Bombay,working on ~ > an Indian Language Text to Speech Synthesizer. Our project homepage is at ~ > ~ > http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vani/ ~ > ~ > It runs only on Linux now :).Might be of interest and help to some. Its in ~ > development stage rightnow. ~ > ~ > Thanks, ~ > harsh ~ > ~ ~ ~
Will be doing that very soon. It will be very soon on sourceforge.net. And I assure nothing will be deleted till then :)
Regards, Harsh
On 14 Mar 2004, Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan wrote:
=>Why don't you put it up on Sourceforge? That way others can also =>contribute to the development of Vani. => =>Venky => => => =>On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 05:07, Harsh Jain wrote: =>> Hello Everybody, =>> =>> We are a team of undergraduates from CSE Department IIT Bombay,working on =>> an Indian Language Text to Speech Synthesizer. Our project homepage is at =>> =>> http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vani/ =>> =>> It runs only on Linux now :).Might be of interest and help to some. Its in =>> development stage rightnow. =>> =>> Thanks, =>> harsh =>> => => =>
On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 05:07, Harsh Jain wrote:
Hello Everybody,
We are a team of undergraduates from CSE Department IIT Bombay,working on an Indian Language Text to Speech Synthesizer. Our project homepage is at
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/vani/
It runs only on Linux now :).Might be of interest and help to some. Its in development stage rightnow.
Thanks, harsh
Another extremely important advantage of putting it on Sourceforge is that the project has a life beyond being a mere BTech project. The code then has a chance to reach out to the community and benefit others. Other individuals, hopefully with more experience can enhance the work you do and teach you better ways of doing the same thing.
"Free/Open Source" within a "Closed User Group" is, in my opinion, a terrible idea. Once the students leave, the code lies forgotten on some random hard disk; someone else comes along and says, "Let's start writing an Indian language TTS" and the whole bloody chain starts all over again.
One of the saddest moments of my life was at one of the IITs. A friend of mine who is a professor there told me that they had developed an Indian language search engine. I said, "Great. Is the code available? Give it to me." I got the shock of my life when he said, "Oh! Our hard disk crashed and therefore we lost the code." He saw the look of disgust on my face and said, "Don't worry. We can redo it from scratch in another three months." It is such a crime to waste time reinventing the wheel, especially in a country like India where resources are so scarce. If that code was on sourceforge, such a criminal lapse would not have happened.
Harsh, I would strongly urge you to persuade your professors that the Vani project should be hosted on a community web site under GPL at the earliest possible instance.
Venky
Harsh, I would strongly urge you to persuade your professors that the Vani project should be hosted on a community web site under GPL at the earliest possible instance.
I am sure IIT-B has excellent mirror and backup solutions to do away with the disk-failure excuse.
Also, are you willing to give the students grades for code that has been contributed by people other than the group that was assigned the task by their evaluator? AFAIK, most student projects are just that - during the period of assignment and execution, they are hacked on by the students themselves. They might choose to release it under xGPL and put it up on sf.net after that.
Don't make the task of student evaluation any more complex!! Its fairly complicated as it is.
-- cheers
On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 10:54, Sthitaprajna wrote:
<snip>
Also, are you willing to give the students grades for code that has been contributed by people other than the group that was assigned the task by their evaluator? AFAIK, most student projects are just that - during the period of assignment and execution, they are hacked on by the students themselves. They might choose to release it under xGPL and put it up on sf.net after that.
I think that putting up the code after their assignment is over is a reasonable suggestion. I know that TTS projects are common in most of the IITs and if next year's batch builds on top of what this year's students have done, we can eventually hope to reach somewhere.
Venky
--- "Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan" venky@indlinux.org wrote:
I am writing a note on detailing Free/Open source projects that can speed up the adoption of Linux and would like to hear from the list members on this subject.
I think issue is different We have situation where there are less people to support on GNU/Linux platform We need to improve it.
Step 1: Ensure there is an active GNU/Linux cell in every Colleges (essentially Engg Colleges & colleges which teaches CS). And cell should at least do 1. class for programming languages and OS 2. discuss free software principles 3. Workshops on all available free applications 4. Communicate with others cells
Step 2: Above cells should help the their community (the community they are living in) by doing. 1. help and support for GNU/Linux 2. explain the draw backs of close source, and how open source can overcome that.
Step 3: 1. Ensure Indian language web site view able in GNU/Linux
___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping" your friends today! Download Messenger Now http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 21:25, Biju G C wrote:
Step 1: Ensure there is an active GNU/Linux cell in every Colleges (essentially Engg Colleges & colleges which teaches CS).
One thought I have for this list of "Top ten solutions that can speed up Linux adoption" is that these can be handed out as projects for engineering students. Some of the profs at IIT Bombay are interested in such a list.
Venky