The Init Mag 04

IOE FOSS Community

Pulchowk Campus http://ioefoss.ioelive.com mailto: [email protected]

The init magazine, Issue #4

editorial We feel very proud to bring yet another issue of 'The init Magazine'. Also, we'd like to apologize to our dear readers as we could not publish this month's issue on time. However, 'better late than never'. From now onwards our 'the init magazine' will be published on 1st of each calendar month. Thank you all! From this issue we have started a new section - Guest. In this section we'll publish the articles submitted by non IOE students. This month yet another version of KDE - v4.2 code named 'The Answer' was released. Find the review of slick and sexy KDE 4.2 inside. I hope you'll enjoy this issue like the previous three. Do share the word around about the magazine. Send us your articles and encourage your friends too. Besides articles, feedbacks and suggestions are also most welcome. Write to us at [email protected].

Contents FOSS articles

Commercial market of FOSS ........,,,,,,,,,. p3 FOSS for Windows................................... p5

Questions and Answers............ p8 Guest Section

OpenSource Software History & importance............................................. p10

Reviews

Hadoop................................................... p12 KDE 4.2................................................... p14

Cheers, The init Magazine Editorial Team

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

p2 .

You are free to Share and to Remix this work, under the conditions that you must attribute the work in the manner specified (Attribution) and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license (Share Alike). For more on this license, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/

The init magazine, Issue #4

Articles

Commercial market of FOSS

Commercial market of FOSS Niju Shrestha (062BCT)

A

ll of us know number of persons who make tons of money selling their software. When I first came across the concept of FOSS, I pondered upon- “How come they work so hard to create innovative software and still not expect being paid

for that?” Upon this questionnaire to anyone they would say, “Silly, FREE does not mean FREE OF CHARGE it means FREEDOM OF USE.” Let me give some more light to above answer. To many the following sentence may come up as a surprise- “Open source is commercial software.” There have

been free and open source vendors selling solutions in this space for over 15 years. At no stage do open source licenses preclude the commercial exploitation of the software. Open source licenses are not anticommercial; they are anti lock-in. Open source is not suddenly going 'commercial'; it always has been. Write a program, but have two versions of it. One version is licensed for retail consumption and must be paid to use. The second version is licensed under GPL (General Public License) or similar OSS license, but can't be used for retail purposes; it can only be used for continuing open-source ideas. For example, say I created a database program. The first version you have to buy from me but you're free to use it for your company to create profits for you. The other version is GPLed and totally free financially, but you can use it only for non-financial purposes. You can't make money off my work unless you compensate me first. Open source developers make money through services. The open source

p3 .

The init magazine, Issue #4

Articles revenue model is one based on a service revenue stream rather than a license revenue stream. Most open source business models focus around giving away the software and selling some ancillary service, like support or consulting. And not only support, free software allows you to get paid for changes in the code (features, etc.) requested by companies that need them. This fosters competition amongst vendors for any class of software. Most open source software is copyright, but released under licenses which allow free re-distribution. It is this attribute which allows for the distinctive economic benefits that open source accrues. And it is this in turn which attracts a number of potential customers to consider using software which is sourced from smaller development houses. The simplest answer to how open source software developers make money would be that they provide services that people are willing to pay for. Proprietary software may make some money at the initial stage, but it is in providing maintenance services where the real money lies. With FOSS software whoever buys software may

p4 .

Commercial market of FOSS turn around and give it away. So the answer again is in the service revenue of supporting the software, whether a Linux distribution or just one application. The most beautiful part is that FOSS allows us to go to the best service provider. The following examples will clarify a lot more about the commercialism of open source software.

Paid support (e.g., Red Hat and JBoss) -Most of the revenue of the Red Hat and JBoss models is derived not from selling software, but from varying levels of support packages. Dual license (e.g., MySQL) -- The approach taken by the popular open source database company MySQL offers the software under the GPL for open source developers. The catch with

the GPL license is that if you bind closely to GPL code in your application, you must also GPL your code. For companies that decide they want to sell their application that incorporates MySQL, the organization offers a traditional paid license. Upgrade to proprietary software (e.g., SourceFire and Sun) -- Sun uses this model with its tools line, offering an entry point with the open source IDE NetBeans. From there, if developers want all the bells and whistles, they can move up to Java Studio Creator or Java Studio Enterprise. The same holds true for OpenOffice.org users who want support and advanced features buy StarOffice. Hence, in answer to the question of "How do people make money with free software?" They don't. They make money by providing a service that people want. You only get to use the FOSS software FREE OF COST for nonfinancial purposes. Thus, ‘free’ of free and open source software means ‘free of cost’ only to some extent but it definitely means FREEDOM OF USE.

The init magazine, Issue #4

Articles

FOSS for Windows

FOSS for WINDOWS Sanjana Bajracharya (062BCT)

W

hile there is a trend in the industry moving towards GNU/Linux and Free and Open Source Software - FOSS Microsoft Windows is still a dominating force. Many applications have been developed around it and many continue to do so. Most of this software is also proprietary and includes heavy license fees. Proprietary software may cost anything from a few hundred dollars to millions of dollars for licensing fees alone. As a developing country, most individuals and even companies cannot afford such prices and resort to using illegal copies of software. Pirated software may cost only a fraction of the actual price but the implications can be far greater.

p5 .

So are there viable alternatives to be used in the Windows environment? The answer is YES! Alternatives that don't have exorbitant licensing fees and will

not result in intellectual property violation lawsuits being slapped against you! Alternatives that do not

involve high maintenance costs either, are customizable, regularly and quickly provide security fixes in response to feedback and also have community driven support. What are these wonderful viable alternatives? It's Free and Open Source Software that run on Windows too! A large and wonderful catalog of FOSS applications exist for Windows users today. From Web browsers and mail clients to graphics software and content management systems, it's all out there ready to download and use! In educational institutions, both staff (administrative and academic) and students require a suite of office productivity software consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software. Microsoft Office

The init magazine, Issue #4

Articles is the most widely used productivity suite. However, the FOSS productivity suite, OpenOffice is gaining much popularity as its features are becoming comparable to the proprietary Office suite. It is a multi platform, multi lingual free office suite which is easily available at www.openoffice.org. It can be run on Windows side by side with Microsoft Office. The look and feel are similar to Microsoft Office. A prominent feature of the latest version of OpenOffice is the ability to export documents directly to pdf format. This feature is not available in its proprietary counterpart. There are a number of Open Source browsers available such as Mozilla, Konqueror(for KDE desktop) and Galeon(for Gnome Desktop). Mozilla is a popular browser. Apart from a browser it also contains an email client, a Web authoring tool and other utilities. It is cross-platform and a version for Windows is available that can be downloaded and installed without affecting existing Internet Explorer installation.

p6 .

FOSS for Windows Sumatra PDF is a free and open source, light weight pdf reader designed for Windows. Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features. It's small and starts up very fast. It's designed for portable use: it's just one file with no external dependencies so you can easily run it from external USB drive. Like Winzip and Winrar, 7zip is a free and open file archiver with a high compression ratio. You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don't need to register or pay for 7-Zip. A wide range of multimedia FOSS is available, including graphics editors and video players that can serve as tools for enhancing educational content and its delivery. GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program http://www.gimp.org ) is the most well-known FOSS for image editing and graphic design. It is a desktop application that can be used for various purposes by both academic

staff and students. As it supports various image file formats, interoperability with other programs should not be an issue. GIMP is considered to be the FOSS equivalent of the proprietary Photoshop software. Visio and Smartdraw are some proprietary programs that allows the drawing of diagrams. FOSS equivalent called Dia (http://gnome.org/projects/dia) has been designed to provide similar functions. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to facilitate the drawing of flowcharts, network diagrams and simple circuits. The program is available for the Windows platform in addition to FOSS operating systems. Audacity(http://audacity.sour ceforge.net) is a FOSS audio editor through which you can record sounds, play editor through which you can record sounds, and import and export files in various formats. It can be used to edit your audio, mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. This software will be useful when there is a need to digitize audio or make

The init magazine, Issue #4

Articles recordings for incorporation into multimedia educational content. It runs on most Unix systems (including GNU/Linux )and Windows. VideoLAN-VLC Media player(www.videolan.org) is another FOSS cross platform media player that supports a large number of audio video multimedia formats without the need for additional codecs. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a highbandwidth network. You can secure Windows with free and open security tools. ClamWin is a

p7 .

FOSS for Windows free antivirus for Microsoft Windows. Its features are high detection rates for viruses and spyware; Scanning Scheduler; Automatic downloads of regularly updated Virus Database; Standalone virus scanner and rightclick menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer; Addon to Microsoft Outlook to remove virus-infected attachments automatically. There are FOSS alternatives for databases and content management. Drupal is a free and open source modular framework content management system. Drupal can run on any computing platform that supports: a web server capable of running PHP (version 4.3.5+), including Apache, IIS, Ligthttpd and nginx, a database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store

content and settings. There are many more FOSS desktop applications, games, multimedia, graphics editors, network services alternatives for Windows. I personally encourage the readers to go for FOSS because they avoid penalty fees and lawsuits, reduce high costs involved in purchasing and maintaining commercial enterprise software, are tailor software to suit your specific needs, bug fixes are turned out regularly and quickly in response to feedback and provide large knowledge base available along with support contracts if necessary. FOSS Nepal has also compiled Free and Open Source Software for Windows, Nirvikalpa and it was distributed in CAN Infotech 2009.

The init magazine, Issue #4

QnA If you have any questions regarding FOSS send them in. We will try our best to explain them in this section. Send us your questions at [email protected] 1. I just removed a Desktop Manager (KDE or Gnome), and i am still getting the old display manager. How do i get my display manager back?

Ans :sudo dpkg-reconfigure = gdm or kdm in above case 2. I recently installed an Operating System on virtual box, but i can't still access my pendrive on guest operating system. How do i do that?

Ans: - Add a following line to /etc/fstab none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0 3. My vi on ubuntu does not behave as it should. It inserts many symbols and characters at different situations. It is very hard to write something. I even want

p8 .

syntax highlight for my programming. How do i do that? More over i want not to leave vi for running any commands.

Ans:- create a file called .vimrc in the home directory and insert the following lines set ai sw=4 wm=5 sm syntax on

To run commands from inside vi in command mode run :! e.g :!gcc -o myprog myprog.c

Search vim on synaptic and install vim, vim-common and vim-runtime and remove other previously installed anything that says it's vi. Now enable 4. I have a mobile phone that has micro sd card. Until Intrepid Ibex i could easily connect it with Ubuntu. But in intrepid ibex it does not mount. How do i mount it?

Ans:- Download these two files and

extract them http://www.esnips.com/doc/2ca0b83 3-cae6-4522-81ff-d6d0439ddf70/65persistent-storage.rules.tar http://www.esnips.com/doc/79f10bc4 -bb62-439c-995d-398a7b9ac210/40permissions.rules.tar Rename 65-persistent-storage.rules to 60-persistent-storage.rules Copy 60-persistent-storage.rules and 40-permissions.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/ cp 60-persistent-storage.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/ cp 40-permissions.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

Now try to mount your phone, it should work. 5. I recently downloaded a video of a musical show from youtube. I want to extract only the song from the video. How do i do that? Ans:- run this command (install

The init magazine, Issue #4

QnA ffmepg before doing this) ffmepg -i source.flv mysong.mp3 ab 128k 6. I recently installed Ubuntu intrepid ibex. I now know compiz does not run on intel 845 on ibex. But the screen still flickers. How do i correct this.

Ans: - If you have intel i8xx and i9xx family of mother board, add these line inside /etc/X11/xorg.conf, inside the Device section. My Device section look like this. Adjust your Section "Device" Identifier "Configured Video Device" Driver "intel" Option "AccelMethod" "exa" Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy" EndSection

After adding these lines flicker should be gone. One thing to note though. Don't use a higher resolution that does not support at least 75 Hz of refresh rate, else your eyes will start to strain if you see the monitor for a longer time.

p9 .

The init magazine, Issue #4

Guest

Open Source Software: History and Importance

Open Source Software: History and Importance Sarba Raj Bartaula A-level, Rato Bangala School

S

upposedly developing for the past 25 years, Open Source Software has always had a great importance – it has created historical milestones through its salient features. But the bitter truth is: no matter how promising Open Source has been, no matter how versatile, how how compatible and how stable it has been through the decades, it has not yet truly reached the public. Awareness is the key here – it's something that the general public doesn't have even today. “What is Open Source? How did it come to existence? What are its importance; how do I benefit from it? How can such a thing even exist?” - such are the questions that the people – the trained and aware people – usually face while handling Open Source awareness programs.

Open Source Software (OSS) is an initiative that has its roots in the “Free Software”, which are those softwares that the users have freedom to copy, to use and to

p 10.

modify, a concept that was prominently put forward for the first time in 1983, with the establishment of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The “Free Software”, however, did not necessarily mean “freedom from cost” such as in “free goodies” but “free” as in “freedom of speech”. This created a term ambiguity in the corporate world and the general public was also very confused. In order to counter these drawbacks, “Free Software” evolved into something much clearer, something that we today know as OSS. This evolution took place in 1998 through the introduction of a modification to the “Free Software” by the Netscape Corporation. OSS had two two major changes in comparison to its predecessor: firstly, the term “Open Source” was not ambiguous to the corporate

world and secondly, these softwares were totally “free”. That is, there was not only the freedom of usage, of distribution, and of copying as in the case of “free softwares” but also the actual freedom from cost. Therefore, OSS is also sometimes called the “free anti-commercial” software. But it just doesn't end there. As the name suggests, the source of the program is open. Therefore, the end-user can actually see the source code and modify it in accord to his/her needs and publish it under a suitable open source license, such as the MIT License or the GNU-GPL license. OSS has great importance in the world of software usage. In comparison to the “closed-source” programs (i.e. the commercial and non-commercial programs in which the source code is hidden from the end-user, such as the Microsoft Windows®), the major open-source softwares are generally more stable, more secure and with more frequent

The init magazine, Issue #4

Guest updates because of the Open Source Development Mechanism, which accounts for another article to be written on. Besides, OSS is a lot more economical than closed source software. According to the report by the Standish Group, the adoption of OSS has resulted in an global annual saving of about USD 60 Billion to the consumers (a.k.a. the end-users). Although it is difficult to believe that such a thing can even exist, especially when the multi-billion

p 11.

Open Source Software: History and Importance dollar closed-source corporations are thriving all over of the world, OSS has been existent for a long time: it is the public who was unaware of such an existence. It is a sad fact that although we have the power, although we have the better alternative, “they” are the major players of the industry: they have heavy economy to back their projects up, to advertise and to create “closed-source” chains. It is only public awareness through which we can succeed.

Even if you are not from IOE, We have a special 'guest' section reserved. Please send us your articles to [email protected] along with your name, grade and institute.

The init magazine, Issue #4

review Articles

Hadoop: OpenSource Map-Reduce framework

Hadoop: OpenSource Map-Reduce framework Suvash Sedhain (062BCT) Introduction: Parallel computing was favored from the early days of the computing. In early 80's vector-based model for parallelism was used by the supercomputers. With the need of more computing power the thread based parallelism was adopted. In the mid 80's people came up with the idea of massively parallel architectures and the Message Passing Interface(MPI). However, the bandwidth was a big problem. In the early 90's the cluster/grid architecture was getting increasingly popular. The adoption of the cluster computing reduced the installment and maintenance cost of the system drastically without the compromise in performance. The rise of Internet and companies like Google took the distributed computing to the extreme. Map-Reduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets introduced by Google research .

p 12.

The Map-Reduce is based upon the functional programming paradigm. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Hadoop is a software framework that enables distributed manipulation of large amounts of data using the Map-Reduce model and is written in Java. Hadoop is reliable since it maintains several copies of working data to ensure that processing can be redistributed around failed nodes in the case of failure. It is also scalable, permitting operations on petabytes of data. It relies on commodity servers, making it inexpensive and available for use by anyone. So any one with access PC's can turn their basement research to a high end computing lab . Applications on Hadoop may be developed using other languages such

as C++, python etc. Why should I Care? You should, if you think big..... Internet has become ubiquitous , the density of the information distributed over the Internet is extremely huge and ever increasing. However, the current problem with this data distribution model is the information is unstructured. So its a opportunity and challenge for every computer scientists and professionals to organize this unstructured data. Map-Reduce is paradigm and Hadoop is the solution if you are ready to take this challenge of information retrieval, data mining and data structuring. Yahoo! currently has the largest Hadoop Linux production architecture, which consists of 10,000 cores with over five petabytes of storage distributed among the DataNodes. Within their Web index, there are roughly one trillion links. But your problem may not require a system of that scale, and, if not, you could use

The init magazine, Issue #4

review Articles the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to build a virtual 20-node cluster. In fact, the New York Times used Hadoop and EC2 to convert 4TB of TIFF images—including 405K large TIFF images, 3.3M SGML articles, and 405K XML files—into 800K Web-friendly PNG images in 36 hours. This process, known as cloud computing, is a unique way to demonstrate the power of Hadoop. Google uses Map-Reduce for indexing every Web page they crawl. It relies upon Map-reduce with its proven efficiency in processing very large, unstructured datasets. Hadoop is a surprisingly versatile framework for development of distributed applications; all that's necessary to take advantage of Hadoop

Hadoop: OpenSource Map-Reduce framework is a different way of viewing problems. Hadoop has been used to help solve a variety of problems, including sorts of extremely large data sets and greps of particularly large files. It's also used as the core of a variety of search and recommendation engines. Besides Yahoo!, many other organizations are using Hadoop to run large distributed computations. Some of them include: • Facebook • IBM • ImageShack • ISI • Joost • Last.fm • The NewYork Times • Rackspace

References: • • • • •

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf http://hadoop.apache.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-hadoop/ http://code.google.com/edu/parallel/index.html

p 13.

Conclusion: Hadoop is a very efficient, scalable and fault tolerant OpenSource Map-Reduce framework. It is suitable for crunching a huge dataset for the computational purpose. It has huge community support and is being used for wide variety of the applications. Visit http://hadoop.apache.org/ to grab the recent copy of the distribution and Start playing with hadoop. For getiing your hand dirty follow the link http://www.michaelnoll.com/wiki/Runnin g_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_(SingleNode_Cluster).

The init magazine, Issue #4

review

KDE 4.2.0 Review

KDE 4.2.0 Review Ruchin Singh (062BCT)

K

DE community, on January 27, 2009, released KDE 4.2.0. It is the latest major release in KDE 4 series. KDE 4.2 builds on the technology introduced with KDE 4.0 in January 2008. KDE community assures that KDE 4.2, codenamed “The Answer”, improves user experience, applications and development platform.

displayed in a unified fashion via the system tray.

different effects as window switcher, making changing windows most efficient.

Efficient and smooth window management To save space, system tray icons can now be hidden. The panel can now automatically hide in order to free up screen space. Widgets can be displayed in panels as well as on the desktop.

Tasks can be grouped The Plasma Panel now groups tasks and display multiple rows.

Highlights of KDE 4.2.0: New and improved applets It includes a Quicklauncher, weather information, newsfeeds, comics, quick file sharing via "pastebin" services. Plasma applets can now be used on top of the screensaver. New system and application notifications The enhanced system tray now tracks longer running tasks such as downloads. System and application notifications are

p 14.

New breathtaking desktop effects In KDE 4.2 it employs motion physics to give a natural feel to old and new effects like the "Cube" and "Magic Lamp". KWin only enables desktop effects in the default setup on computers that are able to handle them. Easier configuration Now KDE 4.2.0 allows the user to select

File manager-like desktop powered by Plasma File management becomes faster and more efficient. The Dolphin file manager now has a slider to easily adjust the icon size. Further user interface improvements include tooltips with previews and a capacity indicator for removable media devices. These changes have also been applied to the file dialogs in KDE, making it easier to spot the right file.

The init magazine, Issue #4

review New and improved applications KMail's email list views have been reworked by a Google Summer of Code student. The user can now configure the display of additional information optimizing the workflow for each individual folder. Support for IMAP and other protocols has also been improved making KMail much faster. Web browsing becomes better. The Konqueror web browser improves support for scalable vector graphics and receives many performance enhancements. A new find dialog makes for less intrusive searching inside webpages. Konqueror now shows your bookmarks on start-up.

p 15.

KDE 4.2.0 Review New and improved printer manager Printing is much easier and interactive than previous version. Supports new languages KDE 4.2.0 also adds support for many new languages, such as Arabic, Basque, Icelandic, Romanian, Hebrew, Tajik and various Indian languages (Bengali India, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Maithili). In comparison with previous, the 4.2 desktop looks modern and makes 4.1 stale :P. What's important is that it certainly doesn’t copy neither Windows Vista, nor Mac OS. It has its unique

identity in everything - in icons, widget theme, panel and desktop theme, window decorations, etc. If you just need one reason to switch to KDE4.2.0 - it's the look. The modern polished and stylish look makes your desktop experience as pleasant as possible. It might just be “The Answer”.

Thankyou P u bl i s h e d by I OE F OS S C o m m u n i t y P u l c h o wk C am pu s L al i t pu r N e pal

T e am s E di t o r i al S au r ab R aj k ar n i k ar , S u s h i l S h i l pak ar

L ayo u t S u s h i l S h i l pak ar , B i be k S h r e s t h a

C o n t r i bu t o r P r am o d N e pal

Send in your articles, questions and feedbacks at [email protected]

Join our mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/ioefoss

Our IRC Channel server: irc.freenode.net channel: #ioefoss

Release date for next issue March 1st, 2009