Prakash Advani's Blog

From an Infoworld article.

If Indian developers get more involved in open-source projects, they could do wonders for the country and the open-source community at large, according to Advani, of IndLinux.org. For now, however, the Indian developer is concerned with earning his “bread and butter,” he said.

“They can only start thinking of making free contributions to the open-source community and society at large after they ensure that their basic material requirements are met,” Advani said.

Read the full article.

Larry Augustin is the founder of VA Linux, one of the early Linux companies.. Here is his view on India’s contribution to Open Source.

From the Article

Perhaps his most interesting statements concerned the “threat” of competition from India and China. If they want traction in the software market they, too, need to give a little bit.

“I still don’t see many people from India and China contributing to open source. It’s when the people in those countries get into the process that you’ll see things. It’s not going to happen until you see the contribution level increase.

Wiki is a great way for multiple people to collaborate and work on documents. TiddlyWiki is a personal Wiki and is very easy to use. Here are some good features.

- Doesn’t require any setup to be done.
- Doesn’t require any hosting, anyone with a browser can use it.
- Supports most of the Wiki formatting tags.
- Open Source.

People often ask me what is the best way to partition a PC used for a laptop/ home desktop or professional workstation for Linux.

Here are some ideas on how you should do it.

1. If you plan to dual boot, the first primary partition can be Windows – Fat 32, this makes the partition read-write enabled on Linux, so makes it easy to switch files between Linux and Windows.
2. The second primary partition is Linux mounted as /
3. The third primary partition is Linux mounted as /data (optional)
4. The forth partition is extended for the rest of the file system
5. The firth partition is a logical partition formatted as swap which is twice the size of RAM but need not be more than 1GB for a office workstation/home PC.
6. The sixth partition is a logical partition mounted as /home which will use up the balance space..

The third partition can be used when you wish to install another version of Linux without disturbing your existing one. For example I am using SUSE Linux 10.1 which is installed in the second partition. When I want to install 10.2, I can install it in the third partition and mount the same (firth partition) as /home.

The second (mounted as /) and third Linux partitions can be 10-15 GB.

As per this article a windows PC was so badly infected with virues and spyware that Mr. Steve Ballmer and Microsoft’s top engineers couldn’t clean it!