Monday, December 10, 2001		Article

Linux summit @ Bangalore
Frederick Noronha

IT is being billed as one of the most ambitious GNU/Linux event of its kind and is being staged in Bangalore, the South Indian city considered the ‘Silicon Valley’ of this country. Volunteer-organisers of the ‘Linux Bangalore-2001’ are already confidently promising that the three-day conference will cover a very wide canvas on understanding and using Linux.

To be held from today till December 12, 2001, this event is being built into an ‘applied technology’ conference. It is intended for open source and free-software developers, administrators, users and IT decision makers.

Mahendra M., currently the coordinator of the Bangalore Linux Users’ Group (BLUG) calls this major event one "for the Linux community, by the Linux community". Recent years have seen a spurt in interest in free software and open source usage in India, a country which is sometimes considered a software powerhouse, but where the lack of affordable Internet access till the late ’90s delayed the expected surge of interest in Linux.

Signs are now coming in, though, that a significant segment of a generation of college students and programmers in various parts of India are getting fascinated by this new way of working on software. It is expected that in a few years time, countries like India could contribute significantly to the global grassroots drive to build up the ‘free’ software world.

Mahendra, a young engineer said: "Linux Bangalore 2001 is a three-day conference on understanding and using Linux technologies. This conference aims to cover a large number of areas that include core Linux technologies, open source, embedded systems and other allied technologies. We are planning to give 72 talks over a period of three days."

This conference aims to cover a large number of areas that include core Linux technologies, open source, embedded systems and other allied technologies.

This event is being held at the impressive J.N. Tata Auditorium at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Incidentally, a team at the IISc itself is inching its way towards completing what it calls the ‘Simputer’. This simple and inexpensive sub-$ 200 (Rs 9,000) computing device that is expected to make computing affordable to the common man (and woman). Not coincidentally perhaps, the Simputer is to work on GNU/Linux.

Linux users will not be left out either. They can choose from learning more on Linux on the ‘corporate desktop’, multimedia under Linux, or 3D images and animations.

One area of interest to many would be Linux’s potential in VoIP (voice-over-Internet protocol, or Net telephony). For long banned by the Indian government, VoIP is expected to be legalised sometime after March, 2002.

What is also vitally important to the future of computing in India is the attempt to offer Indian-language Linux versions that could be accessible to the millions who don’t understand English.