India’s contribution grows as Linux movement gains ground
What has India contributed to the Linux development effort? Frederick Noronha investigates, and finds that Indian programmers have been working on quite a lot of stuff indeed. Linux users in India need no longer feel guilty that we have been taking more than we have been giving back to the open source software movement.
There has been a general perception in software circles over the years that India has been benefited far more from the Linux and open-source software movement than what it’s been able to put back into the kitty of this global, volunteer-driven powerful software movement. That perception can now be dispensed with forever. For, young Indians from Nagpur to the North-East, and those based in places as distant from each other as Mumbai and Melbourne, are adding generously and selflessly to the powers of Linux. Or, more accurately, to GNU/Linux, the package of computer applications and an operating system which has been co-operatively developed by thousands of people all over the world.
Linux has grown to function as a more affordable alternative to Microsoft Windows (or Windows NT on your server) and Apple’s MacOS. As this happens, Linux User Groups (LUGs) are springing up all over India, voluntarily evangelising Linux, which has evolved into one of the most powerful and robust computer operating systems in the world. Easy access to the Internet at most cities and towns in the country over the last couple of years has opened up new possibilities of code-collaboration across the globe. Could the months ahead see an unleashing of the GNUIndia power globally?
Based on the work that’s already been done, that looks like a very distinct possibility. On the one hand, there are examples like the Simputer inching its way towards completion that is based on Linux and has been much in the news. But, more interesting are the scores of initiatives by little-noticed individuals across the country.
Slew of initiatives
Dr Mahesh Jayachandra’s Peacock Solutions in Bangalore calls itself the first Indian company to commercialise super-computing technology. It also promises to “integrate cutting-edge science with the latest Linux technology.” With a Ph.D. in neurophysiology, Jayachandra was one of those US-based experts enthused enough to ‘come back’ to India in the nineties. He is convinced that Linux is the way to go. The projects initiated by him include Linux parallel supercomputers (Beowulf clusters) for high-speed rendering, molecular modelling and weather modelling; bioinformatics solutions; GIS servers; and even local Indian language “killer applications” (word processing, e-mail using GPLed tools. You can find out more at 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. They ask you to cast a “half-glance” at the server’s display panel to know exactly what’s happening with the office’s critical network resources. This young firm also offers EasyPush, a solution that frees the application and interface developer from knowing “anything about the system”. Check out www.deeproot.co.in.Mumbai-based S Krishnan has recently come out with RPCAP, 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. This solution would enable you to do just that.
Named after the Sanskrit term for a magician, Prabhu Ramachandran’s MayaVi (mayavi.sourceforge.net) is a scientific data visualiser. At the NCST, 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 has his software available both at Sourceforge and at the ncst.ernet.in pages.
Ashish Gulhati’s Perl modules at netropolis.org help one to do “various things”. Chirag Kantharia’s work includes Bugster (a P2P application for sharing MP3s and OGGs). He has also worked on Yamit, Sentry Linux, Waba Virtual Machine, Kollektive Linux (a graphics-rich, desktop-enhanced GNU/Linux distribution for newbies), and ANet (anonymous peer-to-peer networking protocol).
“Basically, I wrote Bugster because we didn’t have a machine back at IIT Bombay with a disk large enough to store all our MP3 files. So the distributed storage and Bugster came to life,” explains Kantharia. As of now Sentry Linux is not being developed, and Kantharia wishes there were someone to take over. If you would like to, check out symonds.net/~chyrag/
The IMV (Information Meta View) system by Vinod Kulkarni attempts to create a Web standard for information storage in a decentralised database. Information is stored as a graph-like structure spanning several service providers. On the other hand, Mget is a command-line download manager, by Debajyoti Bera. TransConnect, transconnect.sourceforge.net, by Ajay Kumar Dwivedi and Binand Raj S, allows you “almost complete” access to the Internet, through an HTTP proxy like squid. It enables one to connect to remote machines on any port, using http tunnelling.
Amit Kale’s kgdb, kgdb.sourceforge.net, is a kernel patch, which allows one to use gdb to debug Linux kernels. Using it, it’s possible to place breakpoints in kernel code, step through the code and observe 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 to the community its software packages. Some of these are Hinv (hardware inventory), Gmemusage (graphical memory usage viewer), PPP dial-up scripts (makes it easier to dial out to your ISP) and Simple SMTP (checks how fast a mail server is).
Projects everywhere
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 an initiative of Parag Mehta and his team to build a freely available GNUmessenger for Yahoo! Started by a few GNU hackers end-2000, it’s purely console-based with 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-whiz 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.
If you’re looking for the alpha release of the Indy Operating Environment for the Linux kernel you’ll find it at www.tisya.co.in/indy/. Indy OE has its beginnings in a vision to provide the world with a combination of the power of the Linux kernel along with an elegant and easy-to-use interface that’s also minimalist.
Major Linux initiatives abroad are also drawing from the Indian talent pool.
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.
Sirtaj, or ‘Taj’ to his friends, has many claims to fame. These include KDOC (API doc generation tool), korn, karm, kview and kimgio (plugins for various image formats). Visit i18n.kde.org to find out about initiatives to provide an Indian-language interface for KDE.
To Arun Sharma (and a small initial team) goes the credit of launching a vibrant discussion group and Linux initiative called Linux-India. “What started as a small mailing list on my school machine, has grown to more than 1,000 subscribers now,” states Sharma enthusiastically. 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 several more, including some in FreeBSD.
Mumbai-based Amish Mehta’s Cyberoam Authentica-tion 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 for a download. Ivrs works like this: someone phones a number, the system picks the call and a pre-recorded message is played out, 24 x 7. The 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 paediatrician-turned-software guru Dr Tarique Sani, offers WAPpop (GPL WAP-based POP3 mail client), and of_calendar (calendar element for PHPlib’s OOH Forms Library. 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. Sani says WAPpop still remains the only open source software program of its kind in India.
Going beyond Linux
Open Source and Free Software does not mean Linux alone. There’s a Free Software Foundation (FSF) branch in India, which works out of Kerala. Last monsoon it was inaugurated amidst a high-profile visit to India by Richard Stallman, the founder of the global FSF.
Stallman 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 practice.
Besides Linux, there are also other Unix variants like FreeBSD, drawing the 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 Karnataka), and Indian BSD (adapting FreeBSD and other BSD-derived OSes to support the languages of the Indian subcontinent). He’s up on the Web at 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.
The Indianisation of 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. The organisation is already halfway there. They also have 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 common man through Indian-language solutions. IndLinux is a project to create a GNU/Linux distribution that supports Indian languages “from a GUI/Application level as well as kernel level.” If you would like to volunteer to help, sign up at www.indlinux.org
This page was recently announced without much ado, leading someone on a Linux 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!”
Sanisoft, mentioned earlier, also has developed RtoD (a Roman-to-Hindi transliterator). RtoD is functioning at their interesting ghazal site www.aaina-e-ghazal.com. This site 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 Devnagari, 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 Marathi.
Education in Linux
Introducing young minds to Linux is also an important task. In the last column, India Computes! focussed on an attempt to take Linux education to schools in Goa. Meanwhile, at the TIFR in Mumbai, professor Nagarjuna G is undertaking some interesting projects like Fostering Free/Open Source Technologies (FOST). He also runs 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 have released a CD called GNU/Linux in a Teaspoon (Ver. 3). It’s a fascinating one CD-ROM collection of tutorial material on Linux. See algolog.tripod.com for more details. The LOST (Linux-One-Stanza-Tips) is a series of small tips for Linux users, available via the home-page of U S M Bish at 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. The website at www.metlin.f2s.com/linux/ takes you to the 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. 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 more enter the field and get inspired by the work of their classmates and colleagues many more similar 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. He can be contacted at fred@bytesforall.org
KDE versus GNOME
KDE and GNOME (pronounced “guh-nome”) are two ‘rival’ graphical desktop environments made for the Linux platform. While KDE stands for the K desktop Environment, GNOME expands to GNU (pronounced “guh-noo”) Network Object Model Environment. India’s small but fast-growing community of contributors to Linux are present on both sides.
At the Linux-Bangalore 2001 event, held last December, KDE supporter Sirtaj Singh Kang came in from Melbourne, Australia while Naba Kumar was there from Delhi, to take up cudgels on behalf of GNOME.
In one of the ‘birds of a feather’ (BOF) sessions, it was a blunt debate, with each side laughing at the weaknesses of the other (See photo). Both ended however with a friendly bear-hug, after the debate was done with.
Linux Grows
To so many Linux enthusiasts across India, he’s simply known as Thaths. But Sudhakar Chandrashekaran modestly calls himself a “slacker at large”. This is one of the guys who played a key role in promoting the Linux India network... even while seated many thousand miles away, in the offices of Netscape, in the US.
His is a story which is typical of many Indian software geeks of this generation home-grown experts whose parents simply didn’t have the money to buy a computer... and who (as in Thaths’ case) probably had to sneak in their first copy of Linux onto their office PC while the boss was away.
Says Thaths: “The most major development that happened [on the Linux front in India] was the explosion in awareness and membership to the mailing lists. From five or six members when I joined, by the time I left in early 2001, there were over 2,000 active and non-active members.”
“The Simputer project is one of the things I’m most proud of. Even though it did not directly come from the Linux-India efforts, I’d like to believe that the groundwork of popularising Linux that I did, helped the Simputer project in some way,” he adds.
“I would say the major milestones were Bangalore IT.com, the trips to India of Jon “maddog” Hall and Richard Stallman, the Simputer project, and localisation of KDE into Indian languages by the IndLinux project.”