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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.

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.

Purchases is one the most important processes in a retail business. Therefore managing and accounting purchases is a very important aspect of accounting in Zyxware. Documenting purchases serves two specific purposes. One is the regulatory purpose of preparation of monthly tax returns which will also include and require the maintenance of the stock registers. The second is that the details maintained in the Purchase registers helps in tracking a product back to the original source.

// 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.

We accept payments in several different forms like Cash, Credit Card, Paypal, Cheque or DD. Of these when we receive payments in either Cheque or DD the amount gets debited to our account only once the instruments are deposited in our bank account and the bank clears the amount in the clearinghouse and debits the amount to our bank account. Until this happens the payment against the sale/service is not considered as complete. In order to track this we use a Cheque/DD Register.

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.

A Delivery Challan (DC) is a document which contains details about all items that are being take from retailer's place to the customer. A Delivery Challan must be issued every time, when a new system or hardware is sold. An item sold from the office should not leave office premises without a Delivery Challan irrespective of whether the item is being delivered by the company or taken delivery by the customer. This is the responsibility of the person who prepares Sales Invoice and Cash Receipt.