General

IT Mission, Government of Kerala in association with SPACE-Kerala is organizing a 3 day International conference titled - Free Software Free Society - during the month of December. As part of the conference, help was sought from the community to set up a conference management system and the conference website. We, being the local Drupal experts, had volunteered to develop the website for the conference. We are happy to announce the launch of the website fsfs.in.

We install Ubuntu on almost all systems built at Zyxware. One common request we have heard from our customers was for a simple printed user manual that they can use to learn and start using Ubuntu. We have been guiding people to the web to learn the ins and outs of using the operating systems but this does not always work very well. As a permanent solution to this problem we are embarking on an ambitious project to create a print ready Ubuntu Manual. As the first step towards this we have created a website dedicated to compiling content that can go into the ubuntu manual. You can check out the ubuntu manual site.

We had recently been involved in a project to set up a Conference Management System for an International Conference to be conducted in Kerala sometime later this year. We had zeroed in on Pentabarf as the solution we were going to base the system on. Pentabarf is a Ruby on Rails solution that has been used for the last couple of DebConfs. Pentabarf as such is an excellent system, being a system created by programmers for programmers, but it heavily lacked in documentation both on their site and on the world wide web. We however managed to get it installed on Ubuntu with Apache, Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. We are sharing the installation instructions for Pentabarf on Ubuntu here

// Are you a software developer working on drupal and frequently uses site:drupal.org search on google? Are you tired of typing site:drupal.org whenever you search something drupal related? Well here is our simple solution to your problems. Now you can do drupal site search directly from Firefox.

Matrix Screensaver is a very popular screensaver based on the digital rain shots (moving text) in the blockbuster movie trilogy - The Matrix. This is available as a screensaver in popular GNU Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian with their default installations. But the default Matrix Screensaver that comes with these distributions contains only falling English alphabets. Now Santhosh Thottingal of SMC (Swathanthra Malayalam Computing) has modified this for Indic scripts and has made it available for everybody.

Drupal 6 was released on Feb 13, 2008, 13 months after Drupal 5 was released. Extending that estimation Drupal 7 should be out around March or April 2009. That is around 8-9 months from now, Drupal 5 will become obsolete. There has been talks going to extend the support life cycle of Drupal 5 beyond the release date of Drupal 6 but nothing as of now. We are happy to announce that we will be able to support people who would like to convert Drupal 5.x modules to Drupal 6.x. If you want help to port a Drupal 5 or Drupal 4 module to Drupal 6 contact us to get a quote for your requirement.

The world is moving online. With this a huge and ever-growing chunk of the world advertising spending is moving online. A slice of this pie is for yours to take provided you do the right home work and take the right effort and persist in putting it for a sustained period of time. As with any task that generates revenue it is not as easy at it sounds like because if it had been so, it would have been tried out by too many people leading to a ruin of the revenue potential of the task.

With a view to promote free software across Kerala, we have decided to promote district wide groups and as part of this initiative we have started GNU/Linux Users Group Alappuzha. This group is specially focussed on Free Software Enthusiasts from Alappuzha District erstwhile known as Alleppey . We will support all free software including but not exclusively all GNU/Linux distributions. We invite all Free Software Users and Supporters from Alappuzha district to join this group and have fun. You can join this group by sending a mail to ilug-alp-subsribe @ googlegroups.com or you can join from the Alappuzha GNU/Linux Users Group Website.

Most of the web based systems that we build at Zyxware uses Drupal as the content framework. The following are the steps involved in setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL and Drupal on a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.04 system. If you follow the instructions you should be able to set it up as is but if you face problems let us know and we will try to help you.

Zyxware Technologies joins hands with GNU/Linux Users Group Trivandrum (ilug-tvm), SPACE-Kerala and FSF India to bring to the public the second GNU/Linux Install fest in Trivandrum in the last 3 months. This time the event is arranged to coincide with the Worldwide Mandriva Linux Install Fest so as to pledge our cooperation with the Mandriva Community. The event is arranged for the 14th of June 2008 at Cotton Hill Lower Primary School, Vazhuthacaud.

We recently had a customer who had Windows Hosting with IIS and she had two WordPress blogs hosted on two subdirectories on the same hosting space. Windows hosting should be the last thing that should come to your mind when you want to do WordPress hosting as it will never come close to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) functionalities. Now the problem was that she could not set up Permalinks on both blogs. There was an already published solution on how to setup Permalinks in Wordpress on IIS but we had to tweak that a little to get it working in this scenario.

Fedora team has been closely working with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) team to get most of the SMC patches upstream and setting up Malayalam has been relatively easy on Fedora. Since most of the patches have gone to upstream fedora you don't have download any rpm other than Swanalekha (Malayalam transliterator) on your own to be able to read and write Malayalam on a Fedora 9 machine. Follow the basic instructions to set up Malayalam on Fedora 9.

Altair HyperWorks is an Enterprise level Computer Aided Engineering software that is widely used for rapid design exploration and decision-making. This software is supported both in Windows as well as Linux. The Linux version is tested to work with SUSE and RHEL. However with a little tweaking this can be made to run in Fedora.

Raaga.com is a very popular online music station that has a very large collection of Indian movie and classical songs. They use real media and they have a player that requires the real media player. Now the default installation of Real Media player will not allow you play music from Raaga.com and the player popup from raaga.com will stay in the 'Initializing Player, Please Wait' and 'Loading' state permanently. There is a simple work around for this situation.

The recently held GNU/Linux Install fest in Trivandrum was a grand success in terms of reaching out to the masses. People turned out in good numbers for fest and many came and installed different flavors of GNU/Linux on their systems. The most popular distros were Ubuntu and Fedora. Some of the people who could not bring their systems signed up to have GNU/Linux installed on their systems at homes. Print and Radio media covered the event generously.