Software Freedom 09 - Edit

What’s in??? •

Why do we need FOSS?

• Birth of Jaya FOSS Club • JFC Journey through Open Source... •

Web Admin’s cut

•

Jaya Open Source Research Centre Projects.

• Hot Technologies. • LinuxChix. •

FOSS Equivalent Tools.

• Top Ten Software

Software Freedom Day Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of the free and open source software. SFD is a public education effort, is used to celebrate the alleged virtues of free and open source software. It encourages its use to benefit the public. Celebration is a form of awareness to the worldwide, a kind of promotional activity. Jaya FOSS Club was build up with the support of National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software(NRCFOSS) and Indian Linux User Group, Chennai(ILUGC). SFD basically and every third week of September Saturday, Software Freedom Day is celebrated, worldwide. Jaya FOSS Club has also been very active in promoting and making an effort to aware the surroundings about open source, likewise, SFD is also denoted as a very grand opening every year in order to rejoice the freedom of the software. This is the first step towards SFD and the fulfilling process is still on. The Jaya FOSS Club is driving the effort, but the event depends largely on the grass root activities of open source software, advocates organizing small events at the local level.

Editor’s Desk “Liberty of software can be felt only in Open Source“ “Dream towards a better future……….” The wheels of progress turn slowly but surely, encompassing all within their turns. Jaya FOSS Club (JFC) is happy and proud to announce the release of its souvenir “FLOSSAGE” for the year 2009-10. Software Freedom Day (SFD) has given an opportunity to know how Open Source Software (OSS) has changed their lives and made their dream come true. SFD is a rejoicing venture to cherish the freedom of Free Open Source Software. JFC has been an active promoter in the field of Open Source. JFC is a contributor to the credentials of Prof. Mr. M. Kumaran, Advisor of JFC and Mr. Bharathi Mohan, Co-coordinator of JFC. Our Association, Jaya FOSS Club aims at providing every student with the basic foundation and knowledge so that we build upon in the field of Open Source society. It not only sows the seeds for the academic excellence but also gives equal opportunities to the enthusiastic and creative skills of every student. This magazine is a compilation of the thoughts, ideas, works and achievements of Jaya Engineering Students. I would like to place on record my sincere thanks to all those who have enthusiastically contributed articles for the souvenir. It is definitely not possible to sum up this eventful year in a few pages but still we have tried to recall the most rememberable events and freshen up their memories. The students have proposed various projects and have earned a good response in the OSS filed. We would like to thank Prof. Mr. M. Kumaran, Advisor of JFC for their guidance and support, also the office bearer s who have helped us, giving suggestions or just wishing for the magazine .It is the support which has shaped this magazine to its present form. My gracious regards and thanks goes to our sponsors for their support and good wishes.

"Thanks for the Software Freedom Day for giving us an opportunity to work, learn and celebrate together." Hope this newsletter reaches out to many and our efforts to promote and make the society aware on FOSS be a success. “Open source will pave the way for a bright career as the future is FOSS!” Future of technology will be open source. "I use Open Source and you???"

Editorial Board Editor in Chief

:

Prof. M. Kumaran, Advisor, JFC

Editors

:

Mamcy Samy , IV B.E CSE C. Madhuvanthiy, IV B.E CSE

Editorial team

:

D. Richy Gerard ,III B.E ,CSE B. Rekha, IV B.E CSE R. Raja Sugirtha, IV B.E CSE H. Swamynathan , IV B.E, CSE M. Vignesh , IV B.E, CSE Varun V. Kumar, IV B.E, CSE Christopher Jeyapaul, III B.E CSE

Messages Dear Readers, It gives me immense pleasure to congratulate the Jaya Foss Club on this occasion for all their efforts to promote Open source products in the college campus and in society. It’s good to hear that Jaya Foss Club has conducted various awareness programs in and around the city. Their suggestion for the use of Free Open Source softwares has economically benefited our Organization. JFC has gained our Organization a good recognition in the society. I wish them all success for their future ventures. My blessings for all. Prof. A. Kanagaraj, Chairman, Jaya Group of Institutions

Dear Readers, I am very glad that FOSS has paved way for the bright future of many students of Jaya Engineering College. Jaya FOSS Club (JFC) is an active community, which works to improve the academic and other extra-curricular activities of our students. JFC encourages and motivates the students academically to explore the current trends in software field and gain knowledge about various emerging technologies in open source. It is very interesting to note that many students of computer science department have opted FOSS as their elective in curriculum. It gives me immense pleasure to be a part of JFC and my best wishes to continue their good work. Prof. Dr.R.Raja Principal, Jaya Engineering College.

Dear Readers , I am overwhelmed by the interest and involvement shown by my students for Open Source and Jaya Foss Club activities. FOSS has created a rapid revolution by its increasing popularity across the globe. FOSS gives the technocrats the freedom to explore beyond the constraints of the software. JFC has always been instrumental in inducing a curiosity among students to explore the latest technologies in open source. It trains and incubates them to meet the demands of the IT industry, thus making them market-ready professionals. Software freedom day (SFD) is an occasion celebrated by JFC. The various events conducted by JFC, provide the students with immense opportunities to exhibit their talents and skills. I would like to extend my wishes to all the students who have played a role in making SFD a grand event of Jaya Foss Club every year. I assure you that JFC will continue to work for the benefit of the student community and society. Prof. M. Kumaran Head, Open Source Centre, Jaya Engineering College Dear Readers, I am very proud that the members of Jaya FOSS Club have gone great guns in FOSS, FOSS activities and project development. The team has always been enthusiastic and actively working for the FOSS club. The souvenir is a reflection of the hard work and dedication shown by the club members. Convey my regards to all the team members. Mr.G.Bharathi Mohan Co-ordinator, Jaya FOSS Club,

Message from Richard Stallman

The students of Jaya Engineering College are fortunate that you are holding an event that will teach them about the ethics of free software: about the freedoms that they and all software users are entitled to. Teaching the use of computers and the writing of programs is not enough: the most important subject in computing is that of the freedom that users should have. Every citizen of cyberspace needs to appreciate and understand freedom. Every school should teach its students this, but most schools do not. By holding this event, you begin to fill this gap in the curriculum. In the future, the school should add this subject to the coursework, and give every student practical experience of living in freedom by migrating all the school's computers to free software.

If you want to work to help India move to free software, look at gnu.org.in and get in touch with the Free Software Foundation of India. Yours in freedom, Richard Stallman. Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of software whose source code is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.

Why do we need FOSS ? With the ever growing bottlenecks imposed by proprietary products, a migration to open source world is indispensable. An undying quench for innovation and ease of operating and development is what sets out the standards for open source development. With not many developers in this domain it can also be a prospective as well as a lucrative career option in the years to come. Though the primary focus is on the fact that open source offers a very low cost in development and deployment unlike other domains, it has also been proven for its reliability and performance. Product is made freely download able and the source code let out for further innovation and deployment. LICENSE In open-source software the copyright exists to protect the license. The only rights the copyright holder always keeps are to enforce the license. Otherwise, only a few rights are reserved and most choices pass to the user. In particular, the copyright holder cannot change the terms on a copy you already have. Therefore, in open-source software the copyright holder is almost irrelevant but the license terms are very important. The major licenses are: •

GNU General Public License (GPL): The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. The GNU Public License provides for free access to software published under its terms. Users are allowed to copy, modify, and redistribute GPL software. A license applied to a program to specify it can be distributed and modified to/by anyone, but if a modified version is distributed, the source must be distributed too.

•

GNU Lesser (or Library) General Public License (LGPL):The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the GNU Library General Public License) or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).The LGPL places copyleft restrictions on the program itself but does not apply these restrictions to other software that merely links with the program. Lesser General Public License, the license that accompanies some open source software that details how the software and it’s accompany source code can be freely copied, distributed and modified. A Lesser General Public License is used to license free software so that it can be incorporated into both free software and proprietary software

•

BSD-new license: The BSD license is a class of extremely simple and very liberal licenses for computer software that was originally developed at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB).The only restrictions placed on users of software released under a typical BSD license are that if they redistribute such software in any form, with or without modification, they must include in the redistribution(1) one should not claim that they wrote the software if they did not write it and (2) one should not sue the developer if the software does not function as expected or as desired.

A program licensed under the GPL or LGPL, which are copy-lifting licenses. Copy left licenses specify clauses which explicitly remove those restrictions the creator considers to not provide libre freedom to the end user. In software, open source copy left licenses place the primary restriction that information helpful in supporting modification of software (e.g. source code) must be made available to a user with a copy of the licensed software and allows the original author to be acknowledged. Most commonly these products rely over the GNU GPL due to its flexibility. Each freelance developer can let out their product for free download under the Linux licensing policy. Most commonly these products rely over the GNU GPL due to its flexibility.

LOCALIZATION This is an attempt to make every product available in the local vernacular to inhabitants apart from the English language in which every product is released invariably. This is out of the misconception that English is the most commonly spoken language over the world. By localizing every product the local population is made familiar to the software the eases out their interaction. LINUX Most users of software across over the globe often face the threat of virus and spams. Linux offers a relief over that as it is virus-free. • Low cost: The source code for operating system is freely available for the users and GPL license is provided. The liberty for changing the source code is also given. A community approach for development is followed instead of a corporate approach. Thus the applications are low cost. • Stability: The Linux is based on a strong kernel developed and tested by professionals and developers from around the world. Most of the development is done after a strong brainstorming session. So every product has a contribution from many people from around the world. • Network friendliness and security: In Linux standalones and Linux based networks a very strong security system is implemented. Every user is provided with a set of privileges and is grouped according to his authority. The core and hardware level operations can be performed only by admin and group users.

• Flexibility: Linux being open source can be customized and altered in any way according to the users wish. Thus providing an intense option for flexibility. •

Compatibility :

Linux and Linux applications are designed in a generic manner so that they are compatible everywhere. • Choice : Linux and Linux applicationa comes with a variety of flavors (like debian, ubuntu, open suse) with a varied package combinations and package managers like (dpkg, yum, rpm, zypper). • Fast and easy installations: Linux package managers are so user friendly that installations is fast and easy. The installation of a package can be done by a single command line or just a click away. • Multitasking: Multitasking refers to running more than one process at a same time using the same processor. This is implemented very promptly by the Linux kernel. It also provides a facility to use seven parallely running terminals which runs independently apart from the multiple desktops provided for each user logging. • Open source: The source code is open and available for the users and developers, the freedom to edit the code and the liberty to redistribute it is provided so that they can modify the code and customize it according to their requirements.

Birth of Jaya FOSS Club Foss is a new technology for the students to learn and it is of great help to them. The existing ones were old and it did not provide a good cause to work for it. Foss provides an opportunity for the students to contribute something to the software society. Most importantly Foss has something that will make students to meet the demands of current software technologies. Foss is being recommended by the Industry and other governing bodies, as there are FOSS equivalents available that can be suitable replacements. Some career oriented and on demand courses will pave the way for the student’s bright future. JAYA ENGINEERING COLLEGE wanted their students to have an exposure to the open source community and wished to enrich them with the knowledge of FOSS .Thus Jaya FOSS Club (JFC)came into existence in the year 2006 with the support and motivation of NRCFOSS, ILUGC and other governing bodies. The Chairman, Prof.A.Kanakaraj, of Jaya engineering college showed a lot of interest in establishing this club spearheaded by Prof.M.Kumaran, Head of ComputerScience department, who is a part of NRCFOSS as a resource person. Initially Jaya FOSS Club started with faculty training program that significantly improved the adaptation towards open source. The Orientation program for students was conducted which created a general awareness in the young minds. The knowledge in Foss was enlightened among the students by conducting various seminars and workshops. Lab sessions provide real help to them to understand the concepts thoughtfully.

Students were encouraged to attend guest lecturers to acquaint themselves to Foss. Guest Interactions helped the students to educate themselves with the current trends in Foss. JFC motivated students to take FOSS as an elective with support from National Research Centre for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS), Indian Linux User Group – Chennai (ILUGC), National Informatics Centre (NIC), International Business Machine (IBM), mailing lists, online communities and the Internet. Students were very much interested and they showed greater enthusiasm wanting more guest lectures. They were keen towards to have some hands on experience. Students had good contacts with the experts and guest lecturers. They had participated eagerly involving themselves in the advocacy programmers. With knowledge and experience gained students have started their own organizations which involve purely open source and free software development. Small organizations have been guided by some students for their migration and support. Students have been motivated and encouraged for Entrepreneurship. Jaya Engineering College Linux User Group ( JECLUG) is a student governing body. It celebrates Software Freedom Day, a mega event in the eye of Free and Open Source Software encompassing 4000 participants. It gives advocacy programs in more than 18 colleges in and around Chennai. Seminars and presentations have been taken up in rural areas for panchayat officers, School Head Masters and District judges.

JFC Journey through Open Source... The Jaya FOSS Club was established in the year 2006. The main objective of the club is to adopt and promote the Free and Open Source Software. The club is well supported by the Indian Linux User Group, Chennai and the National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) which is funded by Ministry of IT, Govt. of India. It gets frequent help from CDAC, Chennai, IBM Academic Initiative and National Informatics Center (NIC), for their continuous resource sharing with our students. The Jaya FOSS Club aims to create awareness on FOSS and to promote its usage among the student community, professionals, government officials and the public. Apart from the advocacy program, the club also concentrates on consultancy, training and development of Open Source Technology. Jaya Foss Club also makes the students to actively participate in various open source events and encourages them to learn open source technologies in the form of participation in various demo stalls, technical talks, etc. From the inception of the club, the members have conducted 28 advocacy programmers in various schools and colleges. The club conducts technical programmers such as workshops, technical talks, seminars, demo and the like, once in a week. These technical programmers are based on Open Source Technology. The Linux User Group, Chennai are of great help to us in conducting such events. Two of our faculties participated in three different Teacher Training Programs conducted by NRCFOSS. It is a source of inspiration for our students.

Anna University introduced two electives in the area of Open Source for B.E (Computer Science), B.Tech (IT) and MCA. The electives are 1. Free Open Source Software and 2. Enterprise Application Development using FOSS. Jaya Engineering College is one of few colleges offers the elective courses on FOSS. So far, around 850 students have opted for these courses as electives, from our college. The Jaya Foss Club conducted a mega two day Free Software Demo Day and a seminar on Open Source Technology, during August 2006. Around 4500 visitors visited the exhibition. The visitors included students from various schools and colleges, professionals from various organizations and the public. Prof. M.Kumaran, Head of Jaya Foss Club was part of NRCFOSS Team as a Resource person and he conducted a Teacher Training Programs for the faculties in Allahabad (UP) and Ahmadabad (Gujarat) during August and September 2007. The Jaya FOSS Club conducted a one month free training for Judges of Thiruvallur District on basic usage of Linux and various other open source tools during the months of September and October 2007. 24 judges participated in these training programs and were benefited. The Jaya FOSS Club celebrates Software Freedom Day, in third week of September every year, in a grand manner. More than 2000 students participate in the celebrations every year. Software Freedom Day is a promotional event that is being celebrated in order to bring eminence to the open source free software among the professionals. It is welcomed by all the categories excluding to that of the related. The Jaya FOSS Club has been conducting a National Conference on Open Source and Web Technology (WEBTOPS), for the past five years in the month of March, in association with CSE and IT Depts. More than 50 technical papers have been presented during the conference and many technical talks have been given by the experts.

The College has 3 FOSS labs with around 200 computers. Various Linux Distributions are installed and used in these Labs.Most of the Laboratory sessions are conducted in FOSS Labs. We use Open Source Tools for Data Structures Lab (GCC), Object Oriented programming Lab (G++), Networking Lab (Shell Script and GCC), DBMS Lab (PostgreSQL), CASE Tools Lab (Umbrello, Python, MySQL) and Internet Programming Lab (Java, PHP, Python and MySql). The Students are encouraged to participate in various National and International conferences on FOSS. Our students won the Winner and Runner prizes for the Best Project Award, at the FOSSCONF'08, held at MIT, Chennai. The award was presented by Mr. Brian, Co-founder Apache and Founder of Subversion. Our student was the Winner for the Best Project Award, at FOSSCONF'09, held at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. We encourage the students to do their academic projects using Open Source Tools. 60% of our student projects are Open Source Based. Some of the projects developed last year that were highly appreciated are 1. Centralized Tamil Spell Checker for GNU/Linux 2. SMS Travel Guru for Tourist 3. Automated Bandwidth Monitoring and Controlling system. 4. Automated Ophthalmic Testing System 5. Linux Thin Clients Monitoring and Controlling of Local Device 6. PHP Code Builder 7. Information Integration System for Revenue Departments 8. Linux Kernel Proxy Firewall. 9. Web Based SQL Tutor 10. Web Based E-Book Reader in Tamil Some of the ongoing projects are : 1. iText for Python 2. Structural indexing for SOLR 3. Python Categorizer

4. Enhancement of Drupal Installation Profile for E- Learning 5. SQL Manager for LINUX 6. Video conference module for Drupal List of Events organized and participated: The Jaya FOSS Club activities for the academic year 2008-09 was inaugurated on 21st August 2008, by Mr. Karthi Swaminathan, Technical Director, Collabnet and Mr. A.Bhuvaneshwaran, Software Engineer, Collabnet, Chennai. On the eve of the Inauguration, we conducted an On-Line Quiz for the members of the Jaya Foss Club. Around 700 students participated and top 10 scorers won attractive prizes and certificates. Software Freedom Day was celebrated on 20th September 2008 and the following events were held: a. Online Events – Quiz and Web Puzzle b. Evolution of FOSS – Video c. Talk – FOSS in India, Why should I migrate to FOSS, How to migrate from Proprietary to Open Source. d. Seven Wonders of FOSS – Demo Stalls e. Terminal Hack f. Multimedia and gaming in FOSS g. BOF session h. Grab the Gadgets. Mr. Kiran Chandra, Director, Free Software Foundation of India and many other guests were present at the celebration. The Book titled “Kattatra menporul” in Tamil, written by Mr. Ramadoss, an active member of the Linux User Group- Chennai, was released on that day. Forty of our students participated in Seminar on “FOSS Employment Opportunities” which was organized by NRCFOSS, in association with ILUGC, on 29th November 2008, held at MIT, Chennai. A one day workshop on “Open Source RDBMS Tools” was organized for the faculties on 18th December 2008. Around 34 faculties from various

colleges participated and were benefited. Mr. P. Raman, senior ILUGC, member was the resource person for the workshop. A one day workshop on “ NS2” was organized for the faculties on 22nd January 2009. Around 42 faculties from various institutions participated in the workshop. Sixty of our students participated in Carte Blanche '09, an open source symposium organized by MIT, Chrompet. Our students actively participated in the Demo stalls and Project demos. Our students won First place for the Best Demo stall, titled “Compilers and Debuggers”. Mr. J.G.Sivaji of our college, won the Best Project Award for his the Project titled “ SMS Travel Guide “. Mr. K. Ashwin Kumar of our college won the Second place for Technical Writing on the topic “Open Source Licensing”. Forty of our students participated in FOSSCONF '09, a National Level Open Source Conference held at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai from 27th February to 1st March 2009. Our students participated in four demo stalls and displayed twelve Open Source projects. The Project titled “Centralized Tamil Spell Checker for GNU/Linux” by Mr. S. Selvam and Mr. S. Sathyabalan was awarded the Best Project Award. Our Student Mr. R.K. Rajesh Kumar was the speaker for the topic “Magento for E- Commerce” in FOSSCONF '09. A workshop on “LAMP” was conducted for beginners on 19th March 2009.A Seminar on "Economic Recession and Employment Opportunity - The Power of Open Source" was given by Shri. C. Umashankar IAS on 2nd April 2009, on the occasion of WEBTOPS'09, a National Level Conference on Web Technology and Open Source. An Online Quiz on Free and Open Source was launched on 18th April 2009 for First Year B.E/B.Tech/B.Sc/BCA /MCA/M.Sc/MBA students of the Jaya Group of Colleges. 1024 students from various institutions of the Jaya Group of Colleges participated in this quiz.. The top 10 scorers won attractive prizes and certificates.

Our Student Mr. J.G. Sivaji, participated and accepted a project in the Google Summer of Code 2009 (GsoC'09). His Mentoring Organization is Drupal and his project is titled “Enhancing the Drupal Quiz module”. He released the Alpha version of his project recently. Four of our students and a faculty, are working in association with Essentia software solutions, on a project titled “SOLR Search Engine”. Eight advocacy programs have been conducted in different schools and colleges. The IBM Academic Initiative has given prominent help for the students from departments of computer science, information technology and master of computer applications. Four day Technical workshop has been worked out from 2.8.09 to 5.8.09. Various students got benefited from IBM Academic Initiative in IBM DB2 Software tool for IBM Certification. Mr. Mowri Kumar, Senior Technical consultant from Webtek Labs has trained the students. IBM Certified training was given free of cost for the students. Proposed Plan of Activities of the Jaya FOSS Club : • Planned to host a National Level FOSS Conference (FOSSCONF'10) during first week of Feb, 2010. We plan to conduct Free Software Demos(40 stalls), Technical Talks(30 talks), Open Source Project Exhibition, Online Contests, and other On-stage and Off-stage events. • Planned to start an Open Source Research Center and develop the abilities of the students with concern to open source. And it has been done with a motive to bring out the talents.

• Planned to have collaborative work with various organizations. • Planned to conduct more FOSS Advocacy Programs for the students of various schools and colleges. •

Planned to conduct more value added training programs in the area of Open Source.

• Planned to conduct training programs for government officials and the public. •

Planned to recommend the Anna University to make FOSS as Elective and mandatory for the students of all discipline.

• Planned to recommend Anna University to introduce more elective courses for CSE/IT/MCA students. •

Planned to conduct Faculty Development Programs on Open Source Elective courses during winter and summer vacations.

• Planned to start more Working Groups & Learning groups on open source technologies to carry out various projects, consultancy works and training. • Planned to make the students work under open source environments in various engineering. • Planned to initiate various programs in FOSS among schools and colleges in and around Chennai. • Planned to initiate and inculcate implementation of FOSS tools among the students of various departments for their engineering career.

Web Admin's Cut The web site http://www.jayafossclub.org is not only a web medium to portray the activities of Jaya FOSS Club but also a resource for the technical tutoring, FOSS news and event updates. The site was built on Joomla (CMS) and was started by the ex-web admin J.G.Sivaji(2005-2009).The site was first published on 23rd Feb,2008.The theme after a series of changes was finalized on SFD '08. The site is enriched with resourceful information in the form of news , which includes the regular issues of FOSS News and latest updates of FOSS events happening throughout the world. Any happening or past event of local FOSS clubs or LUG's are also covered in this section. The site also houses many direct links to technical, programming and nontechnical sites for the convenience of the user, so they won’t have to search throughout the WorldWideWeb. The gallery hosts the photos of events since 2006 in a flash based GUI using "expose". An active mailing list maintained by Linux users and professionals is embedded into our site, here one can clear basic Linux doubts as well as high technical queries. The mailing list is also used to spread the word of FOSS and FOSS events of the club. It also gives new users a chance to interact with the professional world. All the projects of Jaya Open Source Center have been enlisted in the development section along with the direct links to their source codes. This section of the site provides development ideas and technology base for future projects.The articles published on this site were submitted by the users, students and professionals from FOSS fields . The polls and the photo arena are the eye candy of the site and have always been a hit with the users. The website is always maintained by the final year student representative of Jaya FOSS Club. -H.Swamynathan [Web Admin, jayafossclub.org] A.Pranav [Asst. Web Admin, jayafossclub.org]

PROJECTS CENTRALIZED TAMIL SPELL CHECKER: The Centralized Tamil spell checker has been exclusively designed for Tamil as regional language. It automatically finds the errors while typing in Tamil and provides necessary alternatives for the typed word. The miss-spelled Tamil words could be rectified in this manner. This is of great use to the users who type in Tamil language. Centralized Tamil Checker in GNU/Linux makes way for Tamil typing easier, faster and errorfree! SMS TRAVEL GUIDE: SMS-Travel-Guide is a prototype application project which lets the commuters to know about the local public transport facilities available in a particular place via SMS. People who are new to a particular place or don’t know about the locality can obtain valuable information to travel from one place to another with span of seconds. It’s being developed on LAMP architecture using Drupal Framework and Gnokii. ACCESS PROTECTION FOR PEN DRIVE: Project based on setting permissions in accessing the files in the pen drive. Our aim is to make the pen drive protective which does not need higher software requirements to work. We are going to use the language Java that is supported in both windows and Linux platform. This is of great use to the users who wish to protect the data on the move. Authentication is provided with user name and password to access the data in the removable disk. It enables only read access to the user using the pen drive and he doesn’t have the rights to modify the content. And the main advantage here is easy intrusion of virus is avoided.

FLASH DRIVE MUSIC PLAYER: Mini-kernel simply is a kernel which does not include unnecessary things. Most of the advanced functionality can be compiled as modules, which means that you can decide at runtime which functionality you want to plug into the kernel - no need to recompile the kernel every time. It makes a boot process from pen drive which eventually displays an interface built with mp3 and video player. Using this entire boot-up of the system OS is required which includes loading parts of the kernel that would not be required for playing songs. This is time consuming. In our project, we attempt to devise a Flash Drive MUSIC PLAYER which would be capable of booting the kernel part that is required to play the songs alone. SECURE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS ADHOC NETWORKS: Most of the multicast routing protocols proposed for ad hoc networks assume a trusted, non-adversarial environment and do not take security issues into account in their design. Here, we investigate the security of MAODV (Multicast Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector protocol), a well-known multicast routing protocol, and identify several attacks on it. We show, via simulation, that these attacks can have a significant impact on the performance of MAODV. We present an authentication framework for MAODV and propose countermeasures that can prevent or mitigate the impact of these attacks. A GENERIC INDEXER FOR DOCUMENT: Indexing files of various format which can then be searched and the respective content can be retrieved. Our indexing will make it possible to index files of formats such as odt,doc,jpg,pdf,jar,zip and so on .It supports over 20 file formats. We use Apache Solr and Apache Tika module which are powerful and growing open source tools. Apache Tika module needs to be embedded within solr and configured to extract the metadata and the textual component of the document.

User will be given a lot of options to customize the search. The search keywords need to be remembered by our software which will list the keywords in future. Solr requires http protocol to post files, But we will make the solr to receive documents from local file system rather than using http protocol to make the file posting faster. Our indexer can take URL as input and index the web page. MONITORING AND CONTROLING OF REMOTE SYSTEM : The remote desktop monitoring system is a open source software used not only for monitoring the system as well as for controlling the distant System. RDMS uses JAVA RMI (remote method invocation) along with SSL/TLS in order to establish a secure connection between the server and client. It has the functions like handling keyboard and mouse events, taking the screenshots, mainly for data and file transfer, a remote file manager used to see and access the client system files, data compression, SSL authentication & encryption and more importantly the monitoring functions are added such as used to view the disk usage, ram usage, CPU usage, network usage both the upload as well as download usage.

WEB CONFERENCE E-LEARNING SOLUTION FOR DRUPAL: A module for e-learning solution using Drupal which provides a platform for teachers/professional to conduct online classes using video/audio/text interface.

LANGUAGE DETECTOR FOR PYTHON USING N-GRAM Language detector - as the name suggests is a program that is capable of detecting the language for any given description. The system will have a specific pattern for each language, which it uses to identify the language of the given

description based on the closest matching pattern. In data analysis operations, we may need to restrict to a limited set of languages getting into the system - where the Language detectors comes in handy. The existing language detector available for python is 'oice.langdet' - it lacks several features that a STANDARD language detector is expected to have. Few of the features are, • Ability to detect multiple languages (currently only 3 languages supported) • It does a "Bi-gram" analysis on the input data. Which can lead to wrong predictions in some cases? (Lesser accuracy). • It is available only for 'python' / usable only by python-programs. Shouldn't it be usable by other programming languages? The well-known standard for any language-detection system is TextCat by Gertjan van Noord. Textcat supports 76 language/encoding pairs. This project is to extend the 'Langdet' module to use the "Text-cat" language modules which will overcome the drawbacks of the existing language detector like: •

It can support 76 extra language • Implementation of an n-gram analysis on the text for more accuracy. . • An interface that will enable the application to be started in 'server' mode in addition to the ability to be imported as a python-module and make it listen on any given port will be developed. This gives the application the ability to serve other programming languages also.

TAMIL FONTS FOR GNU/LINUX This project aims at creating new unicode Tamil fonts and fixing bugs in already existing Tamil fonts for GNU/Linux . The total number of Tamil fonts properly free software licensed and made available at GNU/Linux distributions are very little. Not all fonts that we use today for Tamil are perfect Unicode fonts.

This made us to start to this project and contribute to tamil computing. Modules used:

▪ Font Designing (artistic work) • Vector drawing (or) • Hard drawing ▪ Unicode Mapping (mapping designed character to unicode number/string) ▪ Combination Rules (For deverived letter and words)

Implementing Tamil Language And Building GUI For Tesseract –OCR Tesseract -OCR is an Open Source Optical Character Recognition used across the world. Currently Tesseract is being built to support only in six languages that converts an image file into an editable text. This project is used to implement Tamil Language and used to create a GUI which may be used for the beginners.  In GUI, we have the option to convert the different languages into an editable text.  We have a selection menu to select the languages and the Tesseract wil set to tha language.  It is developed as an multi platform tool to be supported for different platforms.  The Beta version of the GUI wil be released by the end of November '09. 'PYANO' – VIRTUAL MUSIC GENERATROR  A GUI based Virtual Music Generator is designed in Python. The keys on

the keyboard are mapped to the real musical notes of Piano, Guitar, Bass, and Strings.  It runs on most Operating Systems including Linux, MAC and in Windows. The binary sounds are played using the pygame module of the present GUI designed in TK inter.

 In future the facilities to save the created music in mp3 format.  A new enhanced GUI will be designed in QT.  Its running as a live project at “http://launchpad.net/pyano” CENTRALIZED TAMIL SPELL CHECKER FOR OPEN OFFICE Spell checking applications present valid suggestions to the user based on each mistake they encounter in the user's document. The user then either makes a selection from a list of suggestions or chooses to ignore the suggestions and accepts the current word as valid. Tamil spell checker will be developed and integrated with open office for checking the correct spelling of words in the document. Each word needs to be compared against a dictionary of correctly spelt words. The grammatical mistakes will be identified based on a set of predefined rules for Tamil. The user can customize the dictionary of Tamil words. In order to catch the misspelt words, the checker would need to incorporate syntactic and semantic knowledge. PROTECTING WEB APPLICATIONS FROM SQL INJECTION ATTACKS Many software systems have evolved to include a Web-based component that makes them available to the public via the Internet and can expose them to a variety of Web-based attacks. One of these attacks is SQL injection, which can give attackers unrestricted access to the databases that underlie Web applications and has become increasingly frequent and serious. This paper presents a new highly automated approach for protecting Web applications against SQL injection that has both conceptual and practical advantages over most existing techniques. From a conceptual standpoint, the approach is based on the novel idea of positive tainting and on the concept of syntax-aware evaluation. From a practical standpoint, our technique is precise and efficient, has minimal deployment requirements, and incurs a negligible performance overhead in most cases.

7 We have implemented our techniques in the Web Application SQLinjection Preventer (WASP) tool, which we used to perform an empirical evaluation on a wide range of Web applications that we subjected to a large and varied set of attacks and legitimate accesses. WASP was able to stop all of the otherwise successful attacks and did not generate any false positives. CODEIGNITER-VIDEO WRAPPER The "Embedded Video" is a library for CodeIgniter (a PHP framework) intended to embed video and its associated information from various video service providers into application being developed using CodeIgniter. It will provide following functionality: 1. To generate HTML necessary to display videos. 2. To get the thumbnails of a video from various video providers. 3. To get the addition information about video like users who created the video, date of creation, hit rate etc. 4. Will be able to customize to suit application need like video height, width, color, border etc. 5. Will have options to communicate with API's provided by Video Service provider. This library will work with following video service providers YouTube*, Google, Blip.TV, Revver, MySpace, MetaCafe, Last.fm, JumpCut, SevenLoad, Spike TV, Daily Motion, Veoh, Vimeo, Tudou, imeem, Guba, Yahoo Music Video, and Live Video video formats. This library is based on drupal emfield module : http://drupal.org/project/emfield

HOT TECH ! 16 Years of Debian Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux. It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian. Only Murdock himself knows about the moment of conception and naming of the distro,but its birth is recorded in a mailing to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup on August 16, 1993, almost exactly 16 years ago. "This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch, in other words, I didn't simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new release." The SLS he's referring to is Softlanding Linux System, a distro put together by Peter McDonald in 1992 that was the first to go beyond just the Linux kernel and some basic utilities. SLS introduced the graphical X Window System, but it was buggy and led to some frustration in the Linux community. Among those frustrated was Ian Murdock. Debian is one of the oldest Linux distros, although Slackware predates it by just a bit. Just a month before Murdock announced Debian, Patrick Volkerding released Slackware 1.00. Unlike Debian's total rewrite, Slackware was a modified version of SLS.

Boxee Boxee is a cross platform freeware media center software with promising new social networking features. Boxee is based on XBMC media center, an award winning open source project. Boxee provides support for a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features like playlists, stunning audio visualizations, slideshows, and even live weather forecasting. An ever increasing list of third party apps is another important but obvious characteristic of boxee, being an Open Source application. Boxee can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from almost all kind of sources like CD/DVD's, flash drives and so on.

Get Ready for PHP 6 PHP, or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development, to produce dynamic web pages. It can be embedded into HTML and generally runs on a web server, which needs to be configured to process PHP code and create web page content from it. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on over 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. PHP 6, the next major revision of the popular Web application development language, looms on the horizon and promises many changes. Learn what’s new and what’s obsolete and how to prepare your code for tomorrow.

Although PHP 6 isn’t yet available as a pre-built package, you can download and install a development snapshot of PHP 6 now to check out the new features and verify your scripts remain functional. Since PHP 6 removes some backwards compatibility features (which, in the long term, is a good thing), you should test your existing code thoroughly. The Top 12 Myths about Linux: Myth 1: Linux is too difficult for ordinary people to use. Myth 2: Linux is insecure. Myth 3: It is not worth learning Linux because most companies use Windows. Myth 4: Businesses can't make money from Linux because it is free. Myth 5: Linux is a type of software piracy because it was copied from other operating systems. Myth 6: Free software is a kind of socialism and it destroys intellectual property. Myth 7: Linux has few application programs. Myth 8: Linux has poor support because there is no single company behind it. Myth 9: Linux is obsolete. Myth 10: Linux cannot survive because it is too fragmented. Myth 11: Linux cannot compete in quality. Myth 12: Linux has a higher TCO than Microsoft Windows.

LINUXCHIX LinuxChix is a community for women who like Linux and for anyone who wants to support women in computing. Its an international group of Free Software users and developers, founded in 1999 with the aim of “supporting women in Linux". Founder Deb Richardson described it as an alternative to the "locker room atmosphere" found in some online technical forums and gave LinuxChix two core rules: "be polite" and "be helpful." LinuxChix has been continually active for eight years, and its mailing lists have attracted over one thousand members worldwide. In addition, it has over fifteen active regional chapters. Deb Richardson started LinuxChix because she wanted to attempt to create a more hospitable community in which people can discuss Linux, a community that encourages participation and that doesn't allow the quieter among us to be drowned out by the vocal minority.

IN INDIA: From the Indian Chapter's website: http://india.linuxchix.org/ We are LinuxChix-India (LCIN), the Indian chapter of LinuxChix.org. LCIN tries to empower Indian women to use, develop and contribute to the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). It aims to bring together women around India involved in various FLOSS projects, foster participation and share knowledge. Our goal is to promote the usage of FLOSS and to help women in India to identify the avenues for contribution with various levels of expertise - users, newbie, enthusiasts, subject matter experts, geeks to various upstream projects. To achieve this vision, LinuxChix India intends to establish itself as a platform for knowledge sharing and facilitate women interested in FOSS from around India to talk, participate at events, volunteer, learn, mentor and help each other.

Courtesy – Vid Iyer

Working Groups on Open Source Jaya FOSS Club has active working groups working on Open Source technologies. Working groups conducts its periodic sessions regularly and works in enculcating knowledge to the students. Working groups has its active participation from all the departments. Regular workshops and seminars are conducted and various activities also forms the other means in educating all.Working Group of JFC aims to spread knowledge and makes awareness of the usage of Open Source technologies.

List of Working Groups in JFC : • Rich Internet Application. • Python For Scientific Computing. • LAMP • Ruby on Rails • Python for General purpose • Perl • Content Management System • Localization • Kernel Development • E-Learning • UI Programming • Relational Databases Tools

TUTORIAL LINKS Community list-->https://lists.ubuntu.com/ CMS TOOLS--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla OFFICE TOOLS--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org Database tools--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL Electronic tools--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation#Open_source_E DA_tools Graphical Editor--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Spot CD/Burner--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasero_(software) http://www.burnworld.com/software/cdrburning/linux.htm UML Modulator Tools--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrello_UML_Modeller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArgoUML

COMMON COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE AND THEIR EQUIVALENT FOSS OPTION APPLICATION

COMMERCIAL SOTWARE FOSS option

Operating System

Windows, OS X, Solaris

Linux (RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian etc)Free / Open / Net BSD, Minix, etc.

Office Applications

MS-Word

OOWriter, AbiWord, KWord

Epiphany, Firefox, Galeon, Konqueror, Mozilla, Nautilus, Netscape, Opera MS-Excel, Lotus123,QuattroPro

Kexi, PgAccess, Rekall, Knoda, OOBase

OOCalc, Gnumeric, KSpread OOImpress, Kpresenter

MS-PowerPoint

Entertainment

Windows mediaplayer, winamp

Windows mediaplayer, winamp

Graphics

Photoshop,3d studio max

Gimp, Artofillusion, Ayam,Blender

Database Tools

Oracle, Microsoft SQL

MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, druid, GNUdata

Internet browsers

Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Opera

Epiphany, Firefox, Galeon, Konqueror, Mozilla, Nautilus, Netscape, Opera

Web servers

IIS, Apache

Apache, iPlanet, thttpd, lighttpd,

Antivirus Software

Norton/McAfee Antivirus, ClamAV, AVG ClamWin, AVG Antivirus, Avast Home for Linux

Software development

Microsoft visual studio, Xcode

GCC, Java, FORTRAN, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Ocaml, Glade, Qt

Backup tools

Veritas Backup Exec, Cobian Backup

BackupPC, Bacula, Amanda, Veritas Netbackup, Simple Backup Suite, RESTORE

UML

Rational Rose

Eclipse,Umbrello

Mail clients

Outlook

Evolution, Kontact, Thunderbird

Text editor s Zipping / Compression Utilities PDF creator / convertor software

Notepad, Wordpad 7Zip, Winzip, Winrar

KWrite, Kate, Gedit Karchiver, File Roller, ark

Adobe Acrobat Distiller, PDFCreator

With Ghostscript, many Linux apps can print or export to PDF, OpenOffice.org, kprint can fax, convert to pdf, and

combine pages

TOP TEN COMMERCIAL AND OPEN SOURCE TOOLS

Commercial!!! 1. Visio 2. Photoshop 3. AutoCAD 4. Dreamweaver 5. Nero Burning Rom 6. Norton Ghost 7. Illustrator 8. Movie Maker 9. MSN Messenger 10. Publisher

Open Sources!!!!! 1. Clonezilla 2. Dia 3. OpenOffice Draw 4. Cinelerra 5. Gimpshop 6. Quanta Plus 7. StarUML 8. Avidemux 9. InfraRecorder 10. Komodo Edit