This is the August 11 version of the LinuxInIndia newsletter. CopyLeft2002 GNU/GPL v2 or later. Co-edited by Frederick Noronha and Parag Mehta (pm at linuxindia dot org).
In this issue:

• TUG 2002 comes to India
• Linking projects to students
• ELX Linux in the news
• FSF-India mailing list change
• Experiences from the classroom
• Links you could use
• Solaris mailing list
• Scripts for a terminal server
• Kaii Linux PDA

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TUG 2002 COMES TO INDIA: Registration is now open for the TUG 2002, the
annual conference of TeX Users Group scheduled for September 1-7 at
Technopark, Trivandrum, India. This is the first time that TUG conference is
being held outside Europe and US.

The TUG conference is one of the worlds leading TeX users/developers
conferences aimed at the experienced developers and at the the same time
novice users as well. One day tutorial for novice users which is followed by
a two-day tutorial on advanced topics, take one to the four day conference
of presentations and discussions by developers in the TeX world. The
conference language is English.

Organized by the Indian TeX Users Group (TUGIndia) in association with
international TeX Users Group, the TUG 2002 will bring together for the 23rd
time. TeX enthusiasts from around the world for talks about TeX, XML,
metapost, multilingual typesetting, non-Latin and Indic scripts, graphics
and much more. You can also join your fellow developers in
birds-of-a-feather sessions, sample the local beer at our social event.

The Organizing Committee Chair is Satish Babu (sb@inapp.com), Internet
Applications Technologies, Trivandrum, India and Program Committee Chair is
Sebastian Rahtz, Computing Services, Oxford University
(sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk), Oxford University, UK.

The conference takes place at the Park Center, Technopark, Trivandrum
and is co-sponsored by IT Mission Group, Government of Kerala. On
Sunday, September 1 through Tuesday, September 3 there are four
tutorial to chose from. The conference itself will open on Wednesday,
September 4 with a keynote, “TeX, XML and the State of the Art” by
Hans Hagen, Pragma Advanced Document Engineering, Netherlands.

For all the details and online registration have a look at our web page:

http://www.tug.org.in/tug2002/

Contacts: Organising Committee TUG 2002 (tug2002@tug.org.in)
Thanks to Radhakrishnan (cvr@river-valley.org) for these details.

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LINKING PROJECTS TO STUDENTS: An attempt to offer students interesting
GNU/Linux projects. Check the following sites.
http://www.ilug-bom.org.in/wiki/
http://www.ilug-bom.org.in/Volunteer/

Suggests Trevor Warren: “Lets get started with volunteers/mentors listing
their names as project guides….And start using Wiki to create a list of
Projects for Students to come and visit. I would humbly request all to get
started on the same ASAP…….which would b in accordance to the spirit
with which all of us are doing our best to get the student community
involved with Free Software.”

Contact for Trevor Warren: trevor@zenith-india.com

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ELX LINUX IN THE NEWS: Sunil Rajanala (Economic Times) reports from
Hyderabad that Everyone’s Linux (ELX) in association with Maxil Technology
Solutions, US, is gearing up to launch a Linux-based operating system, ELX
Power desktop version across North America, Europe, Latin America and
Australia anytime now.

ELX is India’s first commercial Linux-based Operating System, which claims
to match Windows by every feature and provides the additional advantages of
Linux’s robustness and security. The Linux operating system has been
developed by Hyderabad-based Everyone’s Linux, formerly 3T solutions.

Economic Times quoted Maxil Technology’s MIS director, Raj Kosaraju saying
the soft launch of ELX Power Desktop Version 1.0 took place during late June
this year across North America including Canada. ELX also plans to launch
the product in India soon for just Rs 900 for Indian customers.

Kosaraju said during the test phase, the pre-release version of ELX had
89,000 free downloads between April and June 2002, with most of the
downloads from educational institutions, colleges, and universities.

See http://www.elxlinux.com
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=15402221

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FSF-INDIA LIST CHANGE: Recently a change has taken place in the names of the
FSF lists. fsf-friends is the list to which you need to send the mails (to
take part in discussion on Free Software in India). fsf-india is now the
announcement list of fsf-india, and fsf-friends is the list where
subscribers can post their emails. This tip from Nagarjuna
(nagarjun@hbcse.tifr.res.in)

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EXPERIENCES FROM THE CLASSROOM: Leo Fernandes narrates
his recent experience with the Linux-in-schools project in Delhi: “Well,
Monday was my first day in school! Was wonderful to be in the company of
peers in Class 4. I learnt some logo commands. It’s a great programming
language! I think I will continue my education….

“So folks, we have passed through the first two days of having a Linux
server in a school computer lab in Delhi for classes 4 to 8. We have RH 7.3
running on a Pentium 4 server with 640Mb ram and 20 diskless workstations
booting off the server into X. LTSP is cool

“Software setup was painless. However identifying hardware problems took 90%
of time and energy. Defective bootroms, network cable probs, mouse probs
etc..etc… We were also hit with DCOPServer errors. Couldn’t figure out
what went wrong. We worked around that by avoiding multiple logon with the
same id. However running X with KDE 3.0.0 from 20 diskless stations made
everything crawl — that’s when we upgraded to 640Mb ram. We are looking at
options to improve speed.

“Now the real test begins — how the students and teachers take to it.

“There’s a lot of hand-holding to be done and numerous mundane tasks to take
care of – like web pages with helpful documentation subitable for teachers,
for students at higher classes etc. Some guide to basic operations is very
much needed.

“The whole setup was done as part of the hardware and network system upgrade
that the school was undertaking. So we need to ensure that teachers can
continue with their current work and projects within the framework of the
present curriculum. They are open to new ideas too.

“We have Openoffice for wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentations. LOGO
programming, and Bywater BASIC. Hopefully teachers and students will be able
to cope with this new environment.

“These initial days are crucial. Any help and suggestions to enhance the
acceptability to this new environment is always welcome.

“I wish to express my thanks to Dhruv, Prateek and Pai for their help and
support. Dhruv and Prateek have been particulary helpful in taking time off
to visit the site and make their contributions. More on this as we progress.
Leo”

We’re all awaiting your updates, Leo. Positive or otherwise. Let’s learn
from our own and each other’s experiences. (Leo is a great guy, and work by
people like him in the ‘nineties helped me to get access to e-mail when it
was still not commercially available in the market…-FN)

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LINKS YOU COULD USE: These are some useful contacts one came across during a
seminar on deploying GNU/Linux in government, held in Goa many months ago.
Please check if the contacts still work though…

Shrikant Navelkar, Sales Consultant, Red Hat India
navelkar@redhat.com

Mukul Mathur, ASEAN/SA Linux Manager, IBM
mmathur@in.ibm.com

Ajay M Kapoor, Channels Head, India, Red Hat India
ajayk@redhat.com

Sachin Dabir, Head-Enterprise Sales, Red Hat India
sachin@redhat.com

Info about Red Hat in India. http://in.redhat.com

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SOLARIS MAILING LIST: Check out this list. Not exclusively GNU/Linux, but
focuses on IT and development issues. Solaris–independant forum for IT &
development issues. Un/sub info: solaris-request@mail.sarai.net with the
word “help” in the subject line or in the body of the message. URL:
http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/solaris/
archive: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/solaris/

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SCRIPTS TO SET UP A TERMINAL SERVER: Heard about GLUE, the education-related
version of GNU/Linux? Ajith (ajith@nsc.ernet.in) writes in to say: “There
are several people (in Calicut/Kozhikode) now who can setup LTSP. The job of
setting up LTS has been made a bit easier now. The new version of GLUE
contains a script that will make the computer a Terminal Server. If the
clients have video cards that are auto detected by XFree86 version 4, you
don’t need to do any configuration. It will make boot floppies for the
terminals and, if you are lucky, the terminal comes up with the GUI. Proper
hosts, dhcpd.conf and lts.conf files are made by the script. NTOP is
installed to monitor the health of the network. It also installs the ICE
Window manager and installs a menu with all the software installed from the
CD and other required stuff. IceWM is light-weight, fast and flexible.
Starts much much faster than KDE or GNOME. Installation of other packages on
the CD also done by the script. If you copy the CD to the Web Server
Document root area (no need to run the web server) all the science applets
also can be accessed from the Window Manager Menu. All tested on a RedHat
7.3 installation. If anyone interested in trying it out, let me know.”

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KAII LINUX PDA: A sneak preview of Infomart’s “Kaii” Linux PDA
Rick Lehrbaum (Updated March 18, 2002)
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8619741565.html

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* FOOTNOTE: Frederick Noronha (fred at bytesforall dot org) is a Goa-based
freelance journalist, who writes on IT-for-development and GNU/Linux themes
regularly, and is cofounder of BytesForAll . In
the past year, he worked on a print media fellowship to study India’s
contribution to GNU/Linux, from www.sarai.net (Sarai-New Delhi) Parag
Mehta is webmaster for Linux India, listadmin for
Ilug-bom, Country Manager of India for Linux Counters (do get counted as a
GNU/Linux user!). Visit his personal site at: http://pmehta.org

C|Net previews the LinuxWorld conference by saying Linux has become an unavoidable part of the computing landscape, like it or not.

OSNews.com has the story about the office suite being open-sourced. “FreeRadicalSoftware’s business plan requires them to GPL the popular office suite, allowing everyone to access gobeProductive’s source for Windows, Linux and even BeOS.”

bryam writes: “one image say more than 1000 words: look (on Sun.com).For future references: here. Great for Sun!”

–By Grant Gross –

Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group defends his organization’s recent attempts to gain control of some Unix-related domain names by saying companies that license the UNIX trademark from The Open Group need that trademark to maintain its value.
“The reality is the customers depend on us being able to continue to certify against the UNIX trademark,” Brown said in a wide-ranging interview with NewsForge. “If we don’t protect the Unix trademark, that doesn’t help the customers. It becomes a generic, like cellophane or something.”

But why now, after the owner of Unix.com had the domain for nine years? Brown says he and The Open Group’s board recently became concerned after seeing one Unix domain name put up for sale on eBay for $1 million.

“At that point, we said, ‘oh-oh, that’s not so good,'” he added. “Also, we’re concerned about not losing the trademark.”

While The Open Group gained control of Unix.net and Unix.org, it lost its attempt to wrestle Unix.com from the hands of long-time owner Tim Bass. Brown said he’s not quite sure if The Open Group will continue to pursue the case, but his organization may be willing to work with Bass on its trademark concerns.

“If the site is being used in a way that doesn’t hurt the UNIX trademark, and doesn’t abuse it, then that’s great,” he said. “But if it doesn’t, we’d be concerned. I think what we’d like to do is chat with him on some of the uses, because if you look at Unix.com, the word ‘Unix’ means something different than we’d like it to mean.”

Brown said he recognizes that many of the features on Unix.com do fit with The Open Group’s vision of what UNIX is. “If people are using it in ways that make us comfortable, that’s okay,” he said.

Despite criticisms that its domain-name grab were “anti-open,” Brown sees no conflict with The Open Group’s larger mission of pushing for open standards and interoperability between computer systems. Brown noted several Open Source projects the organization is working with, including the WBEMsource initiative and a certification package for the Free Standards Group. The Open Group also provides Open Source versions of a handful of its software packages, including Motif and the Unix Test Suite.

“Open Source is a great tool for getting standards done,” Brown said.

The Open Group is advocating for “boundary-less information flow” not only with UNIX, but with all computer systems so that the IT market can grow. “The concern I have about the industry right now is people are fighting over a diminishing market,” Brown said.
“So there’s all sorts of nonsense going on in the market right now to get market share for bunches of small organizations.”

Brown sees greater interoperability as a cure for the current stagnancy in the IT market. “I know that it isn’t very fashionable to say this to the supply side, but in reality, if we could grow the cake, they’d do so such better,” he said. “I strongly believe that the emphasis on services rather than interoperable products is holding back the market.”

The Open Group’s work toward interoperability has its roots in X/Open, its predecessor group. Brown isn’t sure if X/Open’s pulling together of warring Unix vendors and their customers can be a model, for the Open Source community, but it did work for the UNIX community.

“There was always a huge fragmentation in the UNIX industry, and what X/Open was trying to do all that time was to pull them all together, by saying, ‘Regardless of which one you buy, it needs to conform to this X/Open Portability Guide.'”

In 1994, those UNIX vendors did come together, and Brown said it’s amazing how similar the baselines of all the different flavors of Unix are.

Brown hopes UNIX and Linux can “live in harmony somewhere” and become compatible “backwards and forwards.” He believes there’s work to be done before that happens, because of Linux’s relative youth compared to UNIX, but he doesn’t try to suggest one is better than the other.

“I really don’t have an opinion on whether Linux is better than UNIX or Windows is better than Linux or whatever,” he said. “At the end of the day, however carefully organizations try to implement technology, they’re going to buy different things from different vendors. The cost of integration is just a nightmare — people just can’t throw out their legacy and start again.

“I would love to see Windows certified as being compatible with UNIX so that you’ve got the same measure of portability across UNIX and Windows platforms.”

Brown chuckled at that last remark. “But I don’t don’t have control over that kind of thing. Wouldn’t it be great if ISVs and the developers could have a common set of APIs, at least a base level?”

“A chain is formed when an intermediate certificate is trusted between server and client. Supposedly, the intermediate is accepted only if it’s signed by the certificate authority as safe for the purpose. If it’s merely signed by another certificate’s key, it ought not to be trusted, or at least the user should be warned. Unfortunately, due to a preposterous security engineering oversight, IE and Konqueror don’t bother to check this, so if a tricky site owner signs an intermediate cert with another valid cert, users will be none the wiser.” More at The Register.

“A security hole in the widely used Macromedia Shockwave Flash file format used with Web browsers can allow an attacker to execute code of their choice on affected systems, according to a new security alert released Friday by eEye Digital Security.

The vulnerability is limited, however, to Shockwave Flash files edited by hand with a binary editor, meaning that the Flash application will not produce files that contain the vulnerability on its own, according to a separate security alert from Macromedia, which is based in San Francisco.” More at PCWorld.

PCWorld: “The saga began last April, when SnoSoft co-founders Adriel Desautels and Kevin Finisterre told HP they had found 22 vulnerabilities in Tru64, the company’s Unix operating system. The SnoSoft researchers, who had worked with HP previously on an unrelated project, say they decided to use their findings as leverage to get HP to hire them to audit Tru64 for more bugs.”

I have a confession to make. In spite of driving a four door sedan, I’m not tentative with the accelerator pedal. Occasionally, I’ve heard the dreaded “license and registration please,” from a law enforcement official, I don’t fault the authority for pulling me over and doing their job. However, I would have a problem if an officer pulled me over with no provocation and proceeded to threaten me if I didn’t confess to some past transgression. Yet, that’s exactly what happened last week.
Only it wasn’t a police officer accosting me, but rather the self-appointed software police known as the BSA (Business Software Alliance). Let me explain – or better yet, let me quote verbatim from the letter they sent to me.

“You may have heard that the Business Software Alliance is investigating San Diego area organizations that use unlicensed software.”

The letter goes on, “BSA recognizes that, for whatever reason, your company may not have managed its software assets properly. That’s why from August 1-31, 2002, BSA is offering a Software Grace Period to businesses like yours in San Diego.”

“The penalties for copyright infringement are serious – sometimes totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Further on, they talk about how by repenting immediately, if my “organization becomes the focus of a BSA investigation, BSA will not seek to impose penalties for any unauthorized copying that occurred before August 31, 2002”.

It’s likely this is a form letter they blanketed San Diego businesses and will soon hit your city if they haven’t already. I don’t fault BSA for attempting to educate consumers about the laws relating to the purchase and use of software (which they do in other parts of the letter). What’s disturbing is the tact at which they take which is to put forth unsubstantiated accusations with their “assume everyone is guilty approach.” Can you imagine getting such a letter from the music industry about your CD collection? Or how about from the movie industry inquiring about video tapes you might have made or possess? No other industry I can think of treats their customers as criminals by default.

The letter demonstrates what is wrong with the computer software business. Rather than getting simpler and more affordable to purchase software, it’s getting more draconian and complex. In an effort to maximize profits, many companies are resorting to complicated payment and registration schemes all of which are designed principally to charge consumers more. (Microsoft just enacted License 6.0 which has 24 different payment options, price levels, maintenance plans, licensing agreements and customer categories, according to a recent InformationWeek article.) They’re paying companies like BSA to be their attack dogs. It’s becoming more complicated to buy computer software when it should be becoming easier and cheaper. Juggling registration codes makes it even more costly. (At the same time I received the BSA letter, I received a solicitation from a different company offering to sell me software which keeps track of my other software and licenses – yikes!)

So what can you do about it? Investigate and embrace alternative ways to acquire software which are straightforward and affordable. I think one of the best alternatives is the LindowsOS membership, or think about purchasing one of those Walmart computers that comes with LindowsOS. For an affordable fee of $99, a user can gain access to a catalog of software to accomplish just about any general computing task. Click here for a list of our most popular titles. Instead of licensing individual titles for hundreds of dollars each and tracking which users have which ones, a computer user can pay one fee and install well over 1000 programs – each with a single mouse click . If you’re in an office with multiple people, then simply purchase a LindowsOS membership for each user and you’ll not only be saving a bundle over the traditional costs of software, but be side stepping complex license tracking issues. Supporting those companies that don’t embrace complex licensing structures and instead offer low-cost solutions, is the best way to insure that the software business moves forward in a consumer friendly manner.

As for the BSA’s demand to see my ‘license and registration’, I’ll have to let them know that I won’t be needing their offer of a “Grace Period Participation #55128” since I’m running LindowsOS and all the software on my computer is from the Lindows.com Warehouse.

Michael Robertson

LindowsOS and Lindows.com are trademarks of Lindows.com, Inc. Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft® Windows® operating system is a registered trademark or service mark of the Microsoft Corporation.

– By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols –

Remember when the only Linux business success story was the Burlington
Coat Factory? Things have changed. And Hewlett-Packard, with budding success stories at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security
Administration, Boeing, Walt Disney and DreamWorks wants you to
know about it. Whether it’s scientific, engineering or animation computing,
HP is deploying Linux.
Why would a company that already has two serious Unix products, HP-UX
and newly acquired Tru64, plus OpenVMS and a strong partnership with
Microsoft, be investing so hard in Linux? Because when HP
hired Bruce Perens, noted Open Source advocate, several years back, the company wasn’t doing it just for the public relations value. Company officials were doing it because they believed that Linux would contribute significantly to their bottom line.
And, with IDC predicting that Linux’s server market should grow at a rate of
23% a year out to 2006, HP believes that Linux will only continue to add
more revenue in the years ahead.

Judy Chavis, HP’s director of Linux marketing, says Linux already comprises 13% of one million HP server operating system shipments, and HP expects that number to grow to the high teens.

But HP doesn’t need to sell box sets from its Linux partners, Debian,
UnitedLinux, and, most recently, Red Hat. Instead, HP will find black ink in
its bank statements by supporting and maintaining Linux on its Proliant
server line. As Stacey Quandt, Giga Information Group’s Open Source
analyst, observes, “The Compaq relationship has enhanced the ability to
compete in the Linux market.” In particular, “the volume shipment aspect
extends HP ability with the Proliant to get into the mass x86 server market.”

HP sees this market of small to medium servers running on Intel Pentium
family chips as being important in the long run. Here, HP hopes to keep
existing Proliant customers from moving to Dell because, according to Chavis,
“Dell talks about servers but they aren’t good at following through.” IBM’s
xSeries is also a target.

Looking farther down the server road, HP is a big believer in the Itantium 2
chip family and plans on Linux playing a large role on that platform, probably
as the next generation of Proliant servers. To help make Linux a success
with these 64-bit chips, and bring more customers over to HP’s existing 32-
bit Intel offerings, HP will be introducing at LinuxWorld this week “several new express and fixed fee services to help users and ISVs port and migrate Linux” says Mike Ballma, HP’s Linux business strategist.

HP does more than just offer Linux for its complete server family, though. It
also offers it on its workstation and PC lines. Unfortunately,
however, you may still have to call to get the operating system of your
choice because most of the online catalogs default to a variety of Windows OS
choices.

In the Intel arena, HP, which has had a strong relationship with SuSE, looks to
UnitedLinux and, thanks to Compaq’s ongoing relationship with Linux, Red
Hat for help. On the company’s PA-RISC architecture, though, it works with Debian.

Debian, normally not mentioned in the Linux business space, has found a
friend in HP thanks to their work on PA-Linux. While the PA-Linux FAQ indicates that HP is
supportive of PA-Linux but letting the Open Source community take the lead
here, Ballma sees this changing. “We have a special relationship with
Debian, and while PA-Linux may not turn out to be strategic from a
commercial viewpoint, on a custom basis we will be putting Debian PA-Linux
on our systems for customers.”

At the same time, Ballma says HP-UX and Tru64 will become more and
more friendly to Linux applications. This starts with a continuation of HP’s
ongoing efforts to make give these operating systems Linux-friendly
application programming interfaces (API), but eventually HP-UX, at least, will
have Linux-friendly application binary interfaces (ABI), letting one run shrink-
wrapped Linux software, sans source code, on an HP-UX box if such
programs ever exist.

HP isn’t just building on Linux’s foundations. The company has also
added its own mix of Open Source programs, including Apache and
OpenSSL, TripWire, AMANDA and secure shell, into HP Secure OS Software
for Linux.

So it is on the eve of LinuxWorld’s summer 2002 gathering that HP, along with IBM and old-time Unix power Sun, continues to invest yet more time, money, and
resources into Linux.

Coming soon: HP’s Unix strategy.