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 C-
DAC, 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 non-
technical 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 error-
free!

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 SQL-
injection 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, Kexi, PgAccess, Rekall,
Galeon, Konqueror, Knoda, OOBase
Mozilla, Nautilus,
Netscape, Opera
OOCalc, Gnumeric,
MS-Excel, KSpread
Lotus123,QuattroPro
OOImpress, Kpresenter
MS-PowerPoint

Entertainment Windows mediaplayer, Windows mediaplayer,

winamp winamp

Graphics Photoshop,3d studio max Gimp, Artofillusion,

Ayam,Blender

Database Tools Oracle, Microsoft SQL MySQL, PostgreSQL,

Firebird, druid,
GNUdata
Internet Microsoft Internet Epiphany, Firefox,
browsers Explorer, Firefox, Galeon, Konqueror,
Netscape, Opera Mozilla, Nautilus,
Netscape, Opera
Web servers IIS, Apache Apache, iPlanet, thttpd,
lighttpd,
Antivirus Norton/McAfee Antivirus, ClamAV, AVG
Software ClamWin, AVG Antivirus, Avast Home
for Linux
Software Microsoft visual studio, GCC, Java,
development Xcode FORTRAN, Perl,
Python, Ruby, Lisp,
Ocaml, Glade, Qt
Backup tools Veritas Backup Exec, BackupPC, Bacula,
Cobian Backup Amanda, Veritas
Netbackup, Simple
Backup Suite,
RESTORE
UML Rational Rose Eclipse,Umbrello
Mail clients Outlook Evolution, Kontact,
Thunderbird
Text editor s Notepad, Wordpad KWrite, Kate, Gedit
Zipping / 7Zip, Winzip, Winrar Karchiver, File Roller,
Compression ark
Utilities
PDF creator / Adobe Acrobat With Ghostscript,
convertor Distiller, PDFCreator many Linux apps can
software print or export to
PDF, OpenOffice.org,
kprint can fax,
convert to pdf, and
combine pages
 TOP TEN COMMERCIAL AND OPEN
SOURCE TOOLS

Commercial!!! Open Sources!!!!!

1. Clonezilla
1. Visio
2. Dia
2. Photoshop
3. OpenOffice Draw
3. AutoCAD
4. Cinelerra
4. Dreamweaver
5. Gimpshop
5. Nero Burning Rom
6. Quanta Plus
6. Norton Ghost
7. StarUML
7. Illustrator
8. Avidemux
8. Movie Maker
9. InfraRecorder
9. MSN Messenger
10. Publisher 10. Komodo Edit