2004.08_Guiding Planes, Norwegian Cities, European Philosophy.pdf

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Norwegian City Migrates

While schools in the Norwegian capital

Oslo fight with the city bureaucrats for

the right to use Linux (see Issue 41 p10),

their counterparts in the country’s sec-

ond-biggest city, Bergen, won’t have a

choice: In June the city’s IT department

decided to migrate its central databases

as well as the educational network from

Windows and Unix-based systems to

Linux in the course of 2004. Thus,

15,000 city clerks and the 100 local

schools with 35,000 pupils and teachers

will benefit from the new server infra-

structure, which is to be set up by IBM

and SuSE’s mother-company Novell.

Sadly, Linux on the desktop, both in

schools and at the city offices, will have

to wait. Though the outcome of a first

test run in schools was positive, there

will be another one next year. The main

problem here is special software that

hasn’t been ported to Linux yet.

What today looks like a fast move,

actually started in 2001 when the city

council demanded evaluation of alterna-

tives to Windows.

A Matter for Philosophers

First it was about programming, then the

economy entered, and finally the Open

Source movement became a matter of

interest for philosophers: In “Project

Oekonux” their aim is to study the eco-

nomic and political aspects of free

software. From May 20 through 23, the

Department of Philosophy at Vienna

University played host to the 3rd

Oekonux conference, the manifestation

of an otherwise virtual project.

Interestingly enough, Project Oekonux

was founded in Germany, a country

famous for its philosophers from Kant

and Leibniz through Marx to the

Frankfurt School around Adorno and

Habermas. This year’s conference titled

“Wealth by copyleft: Creativity in the

digital age” was the first one held out-

side its country of origin, though it

hasn’t left the German-speaking sphere

yet: Despite its English title, most of the

150 participants still came from Germany

and Austria, and the strong German-

speaking background was inconvenient

to non-German speakers. But in defiance

of the language barrier, vigorous discus-

sions took place during the conference,

borne by a strong community feeling.

Among the 35 presentations, talks

about free hardware (e. g. Open Collec-

tor), free science (e. g. Wikipedia, the

Open Archive Initiative, and Open Band-

width projects such as BitTorrent or

Open Spectrum), and social networking

(e. g. Indymedia, Open Craft) were of

particular interest. Nearly half of the

speakers presented in English, backing

the effort of the organizers around

Oekonux founder Stefan Merten to inter-

nationalize the project, which is trying to

bridge the language gap by developing

an infrastructure for translation and

forming a community of translators.

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http://www.oekonux-conference.org/

http://www.oekonux.org/

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Sudanese Airplanes and Students to be Guided by Linux

Being subject to US trade embargoes is

not synonymous with being a US prod-

uct-free zone: Like in other countries

where embargoes apply, Microsoft and

other major US software companies have

a huge market share in Sudan – in form

of pirated copies. Now that the embargo

is expected to be lifted soon, the coun-

try’s government is taking measures for

the time after and offers orientation pro-

grams for ICT decision makers. Says

Marc Lepage, Deputy Regional Coordi-

nator ICT for The United Nations’

development organization UNDP: “What

I actually like about it, is the strategic

planning ahead, that we so seldom see in

developing countries.”

Since neither private companies and

organizations nor governmental institu-

tions see it as a priority to pay and

budget for ICT infrastructure, things look

promising for Open Source solutions

even if Microsoft and other companies

were to establish sales agents shortly

after the embargo ended. Furthermore,

according to Hassan Baba, a technical

advisor to the orientation program, the

country has no lack of well qualified

software developers, system and net-

work specialists who prefer Linux, “and

as the economical situation is developing

positively and rapidly, many experts are

migrating back to Sudan”.

The first organization to take part in

the program is Sudan’s Civil Aviation

Authority. Two of its departments, the

RADAR data treatment and the commu-

nications department, are currently

planning to make the move to Linux,

and, at the end of the transition process,

will run most of their applications under

Linux. At the same time, engineers and

administrators are being trained.

A second organization on the move is

the University of Khartoum’s Faculty of

Engineering. With the help of the

scheme it intends to migrate the faculty’s

academic laboratories to Linux in order

to have students do their application and

system development projects using Open

Source software. At the time of writing,

actual planning had begun and the train-

ing programs had started.

Despite these promising beginnings,

lack of money and resources might soon

turn out to become an issue. Says Hassan

Baba: “We’re seeking foreign parties to

support us technically and financially.

For RHCE training programs and certifi-

cates we’ve been in contact with some

Indian institutes, which offer courses

and exams at affordable prices, but since

airway tickets would be needed, we’re

still looking for alternative solutions. It’s

not very likely that people here will be

willing to pay a lot for that.”

■

August 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

■

World

NEWS

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Indic Localization Moves On

When India’s President APJ Abdul

Kalam in May 2003 criticised that “The

most unfortunate thing is that India still

seems to believe in proprietary solu-

tions” and demanded that “Open Source

software needs to be built which will be

cost effective for the entire society”, his

speech was seen as a signal by many

Open Source proponents. As a conse-

quence, Indic localization is gradually

generating more interest across the

nation, and the level of coordination

between the major groups who have

taken the onus of guiding the emerging

language teams in completion of their

projects, has been intensified.

An example of this can be seen in the

Assamese Localization Project Luit,

which was founded in May 2004 and

derives its name from an Assamese

name for the Brahmaputra river. Using

the same script as Bengali, Assamese has

the distinct advantage of utilizing the

already mature work of the Ankur

Bangla Project (see Issue 42 p12). The

group is being helped along by IndLinux

(see Issue 43 p12) which has recently

taken the initiative to bring out a regular

newsletter aimed at updating subscribers

on the status of Indic localization efforts.

The Luit project is on the lookout for

volunteers who will take on the chal-

lenge of translating the strings for

GNOME and KDE. Currently a prelimi-

nary font is in place and available for

download from the project’s homepage.

With the initial bottleneck of rendering

Indic scripts through Pango on the verge

of being solved by Red Hat’s Owen Tay-

lor, other Indic localization groups will

find it easy to release a print-enabled dis-

tribution of the Linux OS in their respec-

tive local language.

One of them would be the Free Soft-

ware Localization Initiative for

Malayalam, a Dravidian language, pre-

dominantly spoken in the South-Indian

state of Kerala. It was initiated by the

Free Software Foundation of India and

helped at various stages by bodies like

the Asia-Pacific Development Informa-

tion Programme (APDIP) of the UNDP,

which appreciated the efforts towards

providing a local language computing

environment.

Believing that taking the project for-

ward with a limited number of

developers was making it “closed”, the

project took on a new form as Swatantra

Malayalam Computing or SMC. This

move enabled the team to develop and

release a LiveCD based on Morphix (see

picture). SMC has plans to create a com-

plete Malayalam office suite consisting of

OpenOffice, DTP software, an online dic-

tionary and Malayalam optical character

recognition software.

Sajith VK, one of the earliest members

of the team, and Arun M from the Free

Software Foundation of India say that

“There are technical issues that are

required to be solved before an enter-

prise scale deployment could be rolled

out. However, we have managed to do

some limited deployments of the tech-

nology and the feedback received has

enriched the effort further.”

With respect to localized office soft-

ware, their Bengali counterparts already

have gone a step further: Indranil Das

Gupta, the project leader of the Bangla

Native Language Team for OpenOffice,

recently announced that

“string translation is at

40 percent while the

OpenOffice.org glossary

is being updated for Ben-

gali”. The project aims to

provide a complete Open

Source office suite in

Bengali and complement

the localization effort of

the Ankur Bangla Pro-

ject.

But not everything is

the work of unpaid

volonteers: NeoLinux

Solutions, an Open Source company

from Ranchi, the capital of the East-

Indian state of Jharkhand, has released

the NeoLinux Indic Component Suite, a

PHP API for handling Indic language

data in database-enabled web-sites and

portals. The components run as embed-

ded Web server extensions to existing

PHP modules and offer a set of

Javascript-based input methods. Apart

from a Javascript enabled browser, no

client side installation is required.

The software converts ISCII data to

UTF-8 for rendering in a browser, con-

verts UTF-8 input to ISCII, stores it in a

MySQL or PostgreSQL database, and pro-

vides search/sort facilities. Currently

support is available for ten Indian scripts

and languages, namely Devanagari, Ben-

gali, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Tamil,

Telugu, Kannada, Assamese, Malayalam

and Oriya.

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http://luit.sourceforge.net/

http://www.bengalinux.org/

http://indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/

NewsLetterIssue3

http://www.keralaindustry.org/

malayalam/

http://smc.sarovar.org/

http://bn.openoffice.org/

http://neolinuxsolutions.com/products/

Linux to Shuffle Parcels

in China

In future, whenever Chinese people com-

plain about parcels not reaching their

destinations in time, soon Linux may be

to blame. This is due to the fact that the

Chinese package delivery service uses

the postal service and rail transportation,

of which the latter will soon be managed

by a Linux infrastructure: As an outcome

of a sales contract between the Chinese

Ministry of Railways and the Japanese

Linux distributor Turbolinux announced

at the beginning of June, 14 railway

offices, 230 train stations and more than

440 package delivery service facilities

will be migrated in China.

In the end, almost 200 million parcels

anually – accounting for about 95 per-

cent of the total freight volume – will be

handled by a high-availablity system

based on Turbolinux.

■

http://www.turbolinux.com/

www.linux-magazine.com

August 2004

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