General

Zyxware was invited to participate in the recently conducted ICFOSS Consultation of “Future Directions of Free Software in Kerala” held at Tejaswini, Tehcnopark on 9th August 2011. Anoop John, CTO, presented Zyxware’s perspective on how to create a viable commercial Free Software ecosystem in Kerala. The state has grown in leaps and bounds in terms of end users for Free Software but not much has happened on the commercial front. You can see our presentation at  

When a file is deleted, only the pointer to the file is overwritten and the original file will still reside in the blocks of the storage device and will be kept there until it is overwritten by another file. In a sense, you can always write a file but you can never delete it. So if you have ever faced the dilemma of trying to recover a deleted file in Ubuntu then look no further. Linux offers a wide range of tools for recovering deleted files. These tools work by retrieving the pointer to the deleted files.

By default, Drupal serves all its files publicly via http. This means that any unauthorized user can directly access all the files through a browser by entering its path. This is also true for files which have permissions for them. The solution provided by Drupal, which is to make the entire file system private is resource intensive and can bring down the server. However there is another less costly workaround to this issue. Read on to find out more.

Zyxware is happy to announce the fact that the Malayalam wikisource community has released the off-line version of their Wiki today, which is touted to be the very first version of such a venture. You can get a copy of the Malayalam wiki source offline version via our RequestCD program. This is the first time in history that a wikisource project has released the off-line version of their content. This is in addition to the release of the first version of Malayalam Wikipedia a year back. With this release, it has become the biggest off-line digital archive of Malayalam books. The Malayalam wiki team can be proud of their achievements.

Zyxware, in association with Vidya Academy of Science and Technology(VAST), is conducting a one day workshop on Drupal at VAST, Thrissur on March the 26th, 2011. The workshop will be conducted by Drupal developers, Smruthy Rajendran and Jijimol K. John of Zyxware Technologies. The workshop is targeted at beginners who wish to learn the basics of building a website using Drupal. Update:The workshop has been rescheduled from the 26th of February to the 26th of March, 2011. The request form remains the same.

We are looking for more Software Engineers to join our fast growing team of Drupal developers. Like earlier we are looking to hire people with 2+ years of experience in PHP/MySQL. Visit Zyxware Careers to get a general feel of the qualities we expect in prospective hires. As always we would love to hire Free Software contributors, so if you have creditable Free Software contributions do mention it in your resume. Confirmed Full Time Positions Open

BSNL had recently launched their 3G services in India with speeds of up to 3.6Mbps. Interestingly the 3G USB modem provided by BSNL also comes with a wvdial front end targeting GNU Linux users. Welcome change from the national telecom provider. Unfortunately the 3G USB device(ZTE MF626 HSDPA with device id 19d2:2000) had the same problem with switching the mode from the storage device, that it gets detected by default, like its predecessors. Here are the steps for configuring the BSNL 3G modem in Ubuntu. This should work with minor variations in other GNU Linux distros as well.

We have ported and contributed yet another drupal theme. This time it is jQ, ported from one of the most popular wordpress themes of the same name. You can see the Drupal jQ theme here.

One of the more cried about limitations of Drupal has been the seeming lack of quality themes. Wordpress, another popular CMS framework, has a vibrant design community and therefor has some breathtaking themes. Additionally all themes published on Wordpress.org are GPLed. We have taken one of the recently created wordpress themes - icandy - and have ported this to Drupal and have contributed it to the community. You can see the Drupal icandy theme here

A new breed of USB wireless modems with inbuilt flash storage containing the driver to install the wireless modem have been invading the Wireless Connectivity marketplace. A typical example is the Reliance Netconnect 1.x. The USB Modem gets detected as a cdrom when you plug it into your laptop. However a GNU/Linux user does not have anything to cheer about the driver in the flash storage, as these drivers are all Windows drivers (so far). Here is how to install the Reliance Netconnect in Debian Lenny. The instructions should work for debian variants like Ubuntu, Mint etc.

If you have ever hosted a reasonably good site on a shared hosting service then you would definitely have come across the dreaded "exceeded the email limit per hour" warning. If you use Drupal then you don't have to worry about this any more. If you are using Drupal then all you have to do is to install the MailQ module to queue all your mails.

Adding to the growing list of community contributions we have taken up the support for yet another Drupal Module - MailQ. Zyxware Drupal Profile now boasts commit rights for 6 different modules. A few more modules are in the queue and should be out there soon.

When you you wish to run multiple services bound to different IPs possibly under different subnets from a single machine the simple way is to create multiple virtual adapters tied to a single physical card. The following instructions are for CentOS but should also work for RedHat and Fedora. You will require su/sudo access for the following steps

While designing fixed width layouts it is advantageous to use percentage based width for inner containers in the layout to make it easy for easy scaling up of the layout for other widths. When doing so you should be very careful about setting the actual percentage values. The percentage based width should result in a whole integer as the width. If not, you will end up with fractions as widths of containers leaving the rounding off to the browsers.

The Views module in Drupal provides a Feed display that will allow for site owners to publish the content on their sites as RSS feeds. However, unlike a page or block display, the feed display does not allow for addition of custom tags inside the feed using the Views administration UI. There is however a way to add custom tags, attributes and values into the generated feed using hook_nodeapi.

If you use drupal as a blogging platform you would want to auto tweet your new posts on to twitter. Twitter and Shorten module provides you with the basic framework required to do this and all you will need to get it working is to configure these modules. There is also a small patch that has to be applied to the twitter module (until the patch goes into the CVS) to allow the use of shortened URLs in the tweet.