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India's Silent Contribution To Linux Now Rapidly Getting Noticed

By Frederick Noronha <fred@bytesforall.org>
Posted: ( 2002-03-11 18:18:24 EST by Prakash Advani )
TILL SOMETIME LAST YEAR, the general lament was just this: why are rich-in-software-talent Indians not contributing back to the world of Linux. The good news is: they are.

The better news is that the trend is changing dramatically. Contributions to the worldwide GNU/Linux effort from South Asia are coming up virtually by the day. But, on the other hand, the sad part of the story is that hardly anybody seems to be noticing this... not even in India.

Young Indians from Nagpur to the North East, and those based in places as distant as Mumbai and Melbourne are adding generously and often selflessly to the powers of Linux. This talent-rich, resource-poor part of the globe is beginning to make its contribution felt.

That's the way it should be. For GNU/Linux, after all, is the package of computer applications and an operating system which has been cooperatively developed by thousands of people all over the world.

Based largely on volunteer-power, Linux has grown to now function as an alternative to Microsoft Windows (or Windows NT on your server) and Apple's MacOS.

As this happens, LUGs are springing up across India. If you don't believe this, a simple search on yahoogroups.com would collobrate. Some Indian LUGs are small, others are ambitious and happening places to be at. (Linux User Groups, the voluntary groups that take to evangelising for what has become one of the most powerful computer operating systems in the world.)

Probably there are reasons for Indian code-warriors delayed arrival on the scene.

Access to the Internet opened up for the average Indian only in August 1997. (Before that it was only the priviledged few of academics and officials who had access to slow-connections onto the Internet.) This opening up has unveiled new possibilities of code-collaborations across the globe. In under five years of Net opening up -- first in the big metros, and then spreading to smaller centres -- the contribution from India to Linux has grown vastly. Could the months ahead see an unleashing of the GNUIndia power globally?

Take a look at what's already available.

On one extreme, there are examples like the Simputer -- inching its way towards somewhat-delayed yet much-awaited completion. The project to build a sub-$200 commanman's computing device is based on Linux. It has already earned a lot of headlines. But, more interesting are the scores of
initiatives by little-noticed individuals across the country.

Dr Mahesh Jayachandra's Peacock Solutions in Bangalore calls itself the first Indian company to commercialize super-computing technology. It also
promises to "integrate cutting edge science with the latest Linux technology".

This doctor has a PhD in neurophysiology. He was one of those US-based experts enthused to 'come back' to India in the 'nineties. He is convinced
that Linux is the way to go.

Projects of his include Linux parallel supercomputers (Beowulf clusters) for high speed rendering, molecular modeling and weather modeling; ioinformatics solutions; GIS servers; and even local Indian language 'killer applications' (word processing, e-mail using GPLed tools -- the
iobox). To get to know more, visit peacocksys.com

Bangalore-based DeepRoot Linux offers its deepOfix range of office servers. Their claim: it takes just 12 minutes to have a server set up, to handle all office and network tasks "effortlessly" in an office.... Cast a "half-glance" at its display panel, and know exactly what's happening to your critical network resources.

This young firm -- made up of young people also offers EasyPush, a solution -- that frees the application and interface developer from knowing "anything about the system". Check out http://www.deeproot.co.in/

Mumbai-based S. Krishnan only recently came out with RPCAP, or the Remote Packet CAPture System for Linux. It allows you to run a remote packet capture session. Let's assume that you have a remote network, say in Delhi, and while sitting in Hyderabad you need to monitor traffic on it, for whatever reason. <http://rpcap.sourceforge.net >

To Arun Sharma (and a small initial team) goes the credit of being behind Linux-India. "What started as a small mailing list on my school machine,
has grown to more than 1000 subscribers now."

Sharma has undertaken many free software projects and contributions. Genie (web based genealogy application), Citybus (web-based, to make it easier to find your way around bus-routes in Indian cities), Hindi Locale for FreeBSD, KWireless, Ziplib, libwi, Knight (a KDE frontend for chess playing engines), KLookup (a LDAP capable addressbook for KDE), KXMLViewer (a KDE based XML viewer written in Python) KLogViewer (a KDE based viewer for viewing syslog messages) KHM (a KDE based hardware monitor)...and more including some in FreeBSD.

Named after the Sanskrit term for a magician, Prabhu Ramachandran's MayaVi <http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/ > is a scientific data visualizer. Philip S Tellis' httptype reads a list of http hosts and optionally the port number for each of these. It then queries each of the hosts and displays the HTTP server software of the host. Tellis is with the NCST in Mumbai and his software is both at Sourceforge and the ncst.ernet.in pages.

Ashish Gulhati's Perl modules on the netropolis.org help one to do "various things". Chirag Kantharia's work includes Bugster (a P2P application for
sharing MP3z and OGGz). He also worked on Yamit, Sentry Linux, Waba Virtual Machine, Kollektive Linux (a distro aimed to be a graphics rich,
desktop-enhanced GNU/Linux distribution for newbies), and ANet (anonymous peer to peer networking protocol).

Bugster, says Chirag, is no longer being developed. "Basically, I wrote it cos we didn't have a machine back at the IIT-Bombay with disk large enough to store all our mp3s. So the distributed storage and Bugster came to life," he told this correspondent. As of now Sentry Linux is not being developed, and Kantharia wishes there was someone to take over. See http://symonds.net/~chyrag/

IMV (Information Meta View) system by Vinod G Kulkarni attempts to create a web standard for information storage in a decentralized database. Information is stored as a graph like structure spanning several service providers. http://sourceforge.net/projects/imv/

On the other hand, Mget is a command line download manager, by Debajyoti Bera. See freshmeat.net/projects/mget . TransConnect <transconnect.sourceforge.net > by Ajay Kumar Dwivedi and Binand Raj S. allows you "almost complete" access to the Internet, through a HTTP proxy like squid. It lets one to connect to remote machines on any port, using http tunneling.

Amit Kale's kgdb <kgdb.sourceforge.net > is a kernel patch, which allows one to use gdb to debug linux kernels. Using it, its possible to place
breakpoints in kernel code, step through the code and observer variables.

From Delhi, Raj Mathur's Kandalaya < kandalaya.org > consults in GNU/Linux, network application integration and network security. Committed to the Free Software-Open Source movement and its goals, Kandalaya which means "abundance" in Sanskrit, contributes back its software packages. Like Hinv (hardware inventory), Gmemusage (graphical memory usage viewer), PPP Dial-Up Scripts (makes it easier to dial-out to your ISP) and Simple SMTP (does a "simplistic checking" of how fast a mail server is).

This is not to say that big things happen only in the big cities. From tiny Goa comes another interesting project. Glibms is Library management software developed using PHP and PostgreSQL to automate the different activities carried out in the library. It was put together by young engineering college students Sharmad Naik, Gaurav Priyolkar and Hiren Lodhiya. Search sourceforge.net for glibs

GNUYahoo is Parag Mehta and team's initiative to build a freely available GNUmessenger for Yahoo! Started by few of GNU hackers in end-2000, it's purely console-based with a geeky "readline" and "guile" interfaces.

One of the unusual stories is that of Anjuta < anjuta.sourceforge.net > This software, written by Naba Kumar, a tech-whizz from the North East working in Delhi, was named after the young coder's girlfriend! Anjuta is a versatile Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C and C++ on GNU/Linux. It also aims at marrying the flexibility and power of text-based command-line tools with the ease-of-use of the GNOME graphical user interface.

www.tisya.co.in/indy/ takes one to an alpha release of the Indy Operating Environment for the Linux kernel. Indy OE has its beginings in a vision to
provide the world with a combination of, power offered by the Linux kernel and a minimalist yet, an elegant and easy to use interface, according to its promoters.

There are also more ambitious initiatives being taken.

IndLinux is a project to create a GNU/Linux distro that supports Indian languages "from a GUI/Application level as well as Kernel level". Wanted:
volunteers. Sign up here! http://www.indlinux.org/ .

Major Linux initiatives are also drawing from the Indian talent pool.

Indian Gnu/Linux Carves Out A Niche For Itself in Cyberspace

There's an interesting amount of activity (or planned activity) going on at yahoogroups.com when it comes to GNU/Linux and India. You might be surprised to see how many India-related GNU/Linux groups have been created on just yahoogroups (one of the major sites allowing you to create free mailing-lists).

Some of these are very active mailing lists. Others have got only a handful of members, maybe five or less. But it's interesting to check out all the options nonetheless. If you'd like to subscribe to any, send a blank email to: GROUPNAME-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Replace GROUPNAME with the actual group's name.

KDE, one of the most popular of the free software window managers for Linux, also has some Indians among the "persons behind KDE" listings. KDE, or the K Desktop Environment is a more than just a windows manager; it's a complete graphical environment.

Navindram Umanee and the Melbourne-based Sirtaj Singh Kang are prominent developers of Indian origin. There are likely to be others too, who might have not been noticed just yet.

Sirtaj, or 'Taj' to his friends, has many claims to fame. Including: KDOC (API doc generation tool), korn, karm, kview and kimgio (plugins for various image formats). Visit http://i18n.kde.org/ to find out about initiatives of giving an Indian-language interface for KDE.

You wouldn't notice it easily, but there is a wide range of initiatives being reported from across the region.

Mumbai-based Amish Mehta's Cyberoam Authentication Client for various platforms is meant for 24-hour online Internet on cable service. Check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/cyberoam/

Mukund Deshmukh, from Nagpur, has come out with a Perl extension for an Interactive Voice Response System. Check www.betacomp.com Ivrs works like this: someone phones a number, the system picks the call and a pre-recorded message is played out. 24 x 7. Your caller gets a voice menu -- to select the info wanted. Besides, the caller can feed in his input info (access code, ID number, etc) through the phone dial-pad. Based on his/her choice, the relevant voice message is played back. It works in any language.

Sanisoft (www.sanisoft.com ) also from Nagpur, run by paedetrician-turned-software guru Dr Tarique Sani, offer their WAPpop (GPL
WAP-based POP3 mail client), of_calendar (calendar element for PHPlib's OOH Forms Library... and RtoD (a Roman-to-Hindi transliterator). RtoD is functioning at their interesting ghazal site www.aaina-e-ghazal.com

Sani's aaina-e-ghazal.com offers a trilingual dictionary of commonly used words in 'ghazals'. To enhance the popularity of this site and help the
'ghazals' get a wider reach, the Urdu text is written in Devnagri, the widely-used script of Hindi and other North Indian languages. The meanings
of the words used in the Ghazals are given in English, Hindi and the regional language Marathi.

By using a WAP (wireless-access protocol) enabled device, like a phone, PDA, or palmtops, the software Sani wrote -- which is called WAPpop -- can read mail from an Internet server, reply or forward mail, even delete mail and send new messages.

The paedetrician-turned-software guru says he WAPpop still remains the only Open Source software of its kind in India. It was also the first Open Source software doing its job listed on prestigious international website
Freshmeat.net when the first version was released in July 2000.

Open Source and Free Software does not mean Linux alone.

There's a Free Software Foundation branch in India, which works out of Kerala. Last monsoons it was inaugurated amidst a high-profile visit to India by Richard Stallman, the founder of the global FSF.

Stallman has once said: "The most fundamental way of helping other people is to teach people how to do things better, to tell people things that you know that will enable them to better their lives. For people who use computers, this means sharing the recipes you use on your computer, in other words the programs you run."

Hundreds of coders across India are putting this into practise.

Besides Linux, there are also other Unix variants like FreeBSD, drawing attention of India. Take the case of Joseph Koshy's FreeBSD Pages.

Bangalore-based Koshy (33) volunteers to fix bugs, tweak documentation, and "do random jobs here and there in the source base". His projects include: CIEE Database (website for distributing information on various government funded schools in the Indian state of Karnataka), and Indian BSD (adapting FreeBSD and other BSD-derived OSes to support the languages of the Indian subcontinent). <http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/ >

On the Free Software front, coders from India are involved in projects such as Guile (a library designed to help programmers create flexible
applications), Cool Hurd Translators (like the bzip2, reverse, Tar file system, and quote translators), the Visual Emacs Calculator, GNU Hurd Asynchronous Message Debugger, MiG > CORBA, Linux Device Drivers Emulation in Hurd Space, porting Netfilter to Hurd, documentation for GNU OS Hacking, and GNU Geek (a highly extensible framework for building console-based data entry tools powered by GUILE and READLINE).

Other parts of South Asia are also following suit. www2.linuxpakistan.net is the site of Linux enthusiasts across the border. From Bangladesh, the site www.muquit.com lists a whole range of free software, quite a few linked to
Linux.

Most noteworthy are the efforts being made to Indianise Linux.

From down south, www.chennaikavigal.com are working to develop an office suite "like MS-Word, Excel and Access" for Linux. It's already some way there. There are also other products available -- like Pacman in Tamil!

Linux is offering software that might be relevant to India, even though it is not created in India. Take the case of www.postvan.net/tablabeat
TablaBeat is a simple set of Perl scripts and a C++ program to permit playback of Tabla rhythms.

Perhaps even more impressive is an attempt to take computing to the commanman through Indian-language solutions.

This page was recently quietly (and without much ado) announced. Leading someone on a Linux-based mailing-list to comment: "These guys are already offering Indian language support from the kernel up, not as an add-on that is stuck on top of the OS. Imagine Pine in Tamil!

This team is at IIT-Madras are really upto something. Don't get taken in by their unostentatious web page: www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/

Introducing young minds to Linux is also an important task. In the last column, IndiaComputes focussed on an attempt to take Linux education to
schools in Goa.

At the TIFR, Mumbai www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/gn professor Nagarjuna G. is undertaking some interesting projects. 'Fostering Free/Open Source
Technologies' (FOST) and running a mailing-list called GNU/Linux for Education (GNU/LIFE). Some time back, he announced plans to put together a CD of GNU/Linux tools that would be useful to engineering students.

Secunderabad-based Linux trainers Algologic came out with their CD called 'GNU/Linux in a Teaspoon (Ver. 3)'. It's a fascinating one CDROM collection of tutorial material on Linux. See http://algolog.tripod.com

The LOST (Linux-One-Stanza-Tips) is a series of small tips for Linux users, via the home-page of U S M Bish. http://geocities.com/usmbish/

M.N.Karthik's work is also going to make it easier for Linux enthusiasts based anywhere to understand this OS, which has an initially-steep learning
curve. http://www.metlin.f2s.com/linux/ takes you to Layman's Linux FAQ, with interesting tips on this unique OS. There's also a shell scripting
tutorial and a how-to on accessing Windows partitions.

You could contribute too. Check out for the nearest LUG, or visit linux-india.org Incidentally, http://www.linux.org/groups/india/ is a
somewhat-aging list of Linux user groups across India.

There are many Linux groups across various cities and states of India, which can be found via www.yahoogroups.com. Of course, more active groups
like those in Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata have their own busy mailing-lists which can be located by searching the Net.

This is only the beginning. As many more enter the field -- and get inspired by the work of their classmates and colleagues -- more such initiatives
could burst forth on the scene. In time, this could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as India's contribution to GNU/Linux gets recognised worldwide.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha is a Goa-based freelance journalist currently working on a sarai.net print-media fellowship to study the South
Asian contribution to GNU/Linux.

Other articles by Frederick Noronha

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