General

We have been running a highly popular Request CD program for the last one year. Through this people across India have been requesting Free and Open Source Software from us and we have been downloading and writing these on to CDs and DVDs and sending to these people. We have only been charging for the cost of the media and the shipping and handling charges from the people because we wanted to use this program to promote Free Software across India. We have prepared the list of software that are currently available from us through RequestCD and are publishing it here

We had a query from one of our customers to help them migrate their local mail server to Google Apps. They wanted to do this because they did not have the sufficient in-house capability nor have the funds to get paid external capability to support an internal mail server. One hurdle that they were facing was that they had around 40GB of mail left on the local mail server that they wanted to migrate to the new mail accounts they created on Google Apps.

Continuing the good work we have been doing in the area of Free Software we had recently volunteered our team and resources for the Free Software Free Society International Conference on Freedom in Computing, Development and Culture. The conference was a resounding success in terms of the exposure that it gave to Free Software to the public in Kerala (primarily over internet and media) and more importantly the exposure it gave to the Free Software community in Kerala to the International Free Software Community.

Recently we had to provide support on a Red Hat Server where there were hundreds of users and the user directories organized into hierarchies. Normally we change to a users directory using cd ~username. We had some extra time on our hands and wanted to play with the /etc/passwd file and tried to use awk to do the same thing. The following one liner will do this the hard way :-)

If you use GNU/Linux as your development environment then you inevitably has to use the find command at some point of time. A very common need while developing web applications is to search for the occurrences of a given string in files, very often with different extensions, under a given project. The command 'find' is a very powerful search utility that can be wielded according to our convenience and can be used in this scenario.

Zyxware Technologies, today announced that they will be releasing India's first Freedom Toaster in a function to be held at Park Center, Technopark on 1st Sep at 4:30PM. The toaster will be inaugurated by The Hon'ble Minister for Education, Government of Kerala, Shri. M.A. Baby who will also inaugurate the 5-day GNU/Linux Install fest which will be held at the same venue from Sep 1 to Sep 5.

There is no free lunch. Nothing is free in life. Well not exactly. Not if you are a Free Software Fan and you work in Technopark and you get GNU/Linux installed on your laptop during the coming GNU/Linux Install Fest in Technopark from Sep 1-5.

Zyxware technologies joins hands once again with GNU/Linux Users Group Trivandrum to organize the third install fest of the year in Trivandrum. This time the event is planned on a much more massive scale than the first two install fests. The earlier events were 1 day events targeted at the general public. This time it is targeted at the IT community in technopark and it is a full week program. The program is scheduled to be conducted from Sep 1 to Sep 5 at Park Center, Technopark, Trivandrum.

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

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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.