FYI, Nepalese Wikipedia was the second Indic language to have born after Assamese. But other languages has, since then, rocketed on their growth and Nepalese Wikipedia has since lagging behind in number of articles and active contributors (falling at 8^th position on the scale of active contributors, and total number of articles being 18,818 till date; source: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/Indic_Languages#State_of_Indic_Language_Projects).

Wikipedia has contributed a lot in content development in local language, as well as to develop the language and expose it to the whole world. With the start of 2012, Wikipedia stepped into its 11^th year of continued service. Nepalese Wikipedians also took it as an opportunity to meet and discuss together the future path of wiki-contributions over coffee and cookies. This event, named “Wiki 11 Nepal” hosted a brief meetup of follow wikipedians to share their minds and strengthen their commitments.

The event which lasted for about 2 hours 30 minutes became the melting spot for linguists, academicians, wiki enthusiasts and software developers. Most notable sharings came from Kedar Sharma, Prof. Tulasi Diwas, and Prof. Madhav Prasad Pokharel. The session included a brief discussion on:

• Introduction to Wikipedia by Kedar Sharma
• How Nepali Wikipedia was conceived? by Indiver Badal
• The current status of Nepalese Wikipedia by Saroj Dhakal
• Nepalese context and other languages in Wikipedia by Ganesh Paudel
• Digital Reading materials and content in Nepali by Abhishek Singh
• Contextual Nepalese News and use of Wikipedia by Basanta Basnet
• Status of Internet availability and connectivity in Nepal by Er. Shiv Bhushan Lal
• Nepal Academy in developing digital content by Sulochana Manandhar
• The relationship of language and technology by Prof. Tulasi Diwas
• Final comments by the chief guest, Prof. Madhav Prasad Pokharel

Besides the formal talking, much was discussed during the wik-coffee, where Wiki enthusiasts zeroed in on the current problems behind the slow growth and low number of contributors, how to solve the problem, and what should be the way ahead. The technical session that was scheduled after the coffee break didn’t yield much interest as most of the participants had already left. One major output of that session was creation of a page called झ्यामलोङ्मो (Nepali name of Mount Everest as quoted by a Nepalese author) by Prof. Madhav Prasad Pokharel.

All in all, the event did bring most of the active contributors of Nepalese Wikipedia at a common melting point. It was nice being at the event talking to fellow wikipedians, and discussing over wik-coffee. But Nepalese Wikipedia needs more attention and contribution. With the current number of contributors and the rate of growth, we are too far from reaching a critical mass. Where, in other countries, local languages have spruced up with enormous contribution, our national language is lagging behing in Wikipedia despite of the fact that about 29 lakhs of people from India also speak Nepali and it is also a state language recognized by the Gov’t of India. I hope we would get more contributors and activities in coming days.

For some photo-happy people out there:

Check the album for a full set.

With emerge of Gnome Shell (3.x series), there have been some changes with gnote, and which are inconvenience to old gnote users. These changes are below:

1. Gnote status icon not visible: It is because the gnome shell does not have any panel where you can add any applet/icons.
2. Lack of Gnote default menu interface: In previous versions, when you access gnote through the applet icon, you would have seen a list of your old notes and menu items to create new note or search existing notes. This is no more the case with default gnote installation. If you launch gnote, you’ll see the “Search all Notes” window.
3. Gnote not triggered up on startup: The previous versions of Fedora and/or other GNU/Linux distributions used to fire-up gnote applet program on startup, but this does not happens now. So every time you need gnote (and assuming that you’ve closed previous gnote windows), you’ll have to open gnote from the applications menu (or from command).

The solution to these problems are easy enough, and are available on Gnote Help documentation under the FAQ section. To solve all these aforementioned problems, follow these steps:

• Open Terminal, and enter into root account.
• Enable the gnote icon through gsettings:

: gsettings set org.gnome.gnote use-status-icon true .

• This command will now persistently display gnote icon in the bottom right panel of gnome shell if gnote is fire up, and will not vanish even if you close any open gnote window.
• Now you need to set gnote to fire at start-up. In previous versions, you could have done through Startup Application preferences. But this item is not directly available under applications nor under System Settings. So you’ll have to use terminal to fire-up this application:

gnome-session-properties

• A Start-up preference dialog box will open up. Click on the Add button.
• Put “Gnote” as the name, “/usr/bin/gnote” as the command, and “Gnote – Gnome’s note taking application” as the comment. (Note: You can put anything in the name and comment section).

Add Gnote to Startup

• Click on Add button.
• This will add gnote to startup. So from the next time you open up your linux box and log in, you’ll see gnote status icon visible in the bottom right panel.

Installing and using new gnome-shell theme

• Create a .themes directory in your home.

mkdir ~/.themes/

• Download the desired theme, extract it, and put the resulting directory into ~/.themes/. Note that you can put any number of theme sub-directories into the ~/.themes directory.
• Install User Theme gnome shell extension.

sudo yum -y install gnome-shell-extension-user-theme

• Now install Gnome Tweak Tool.

sudo yum -y install gnome-tweak-tool

• Open Gnome Tweak Tool, and click on the Shell Extensions item in the left pane. On the right pane click on the toggle button next to User Themes Extension to enable the extension. Close the window.
• Reload Gnome Shell. Press [Alt]+[F2], type r, and press [Enter].
• Open Gnome Tweak Tool again, and click on the Theme item in the left pane. On the right page, you’ll see a list of available gnome-shell themes in a drop down box. Select the theme that you want to activate.
• Enjoy the theme that you applied.

The problem with the current version

With the current setup, gnome tweak tool will report “Shell user-theme extension not enabled.” This might be due to version mismatch between gnome shell (3.2.1) and user theme extension (3.2.3). See the screenshot below (you need to hover on the orange notification icon to see that message).

Gnome Tweak Tool Theme Problem

Temporary Fix

To fix this problem, you’ll have to change the dconf settings manually. This requires you to know the name of the theme folder in advance. As of example, if you want to set Faience as your default gnome shell theme, and there is a directory named Faience in ~/.themes/ (e.g. ~/.themes/faince), then you need to remeber the name faince (remember that you need to remember the name of the directory and it’s case sensitive).

• Install DConf Editor.

sudo yum -y install dconf-editor

• Open DConf Editor. You’ll see a list of hierarchical controls (in a tree-view) in the left pane, and relevant settings of the selected node on the right pane.
• Expand to org > gnome > shell > extensions > user-theme on the left pane. On the right pane you’ll see a key-value pair field with the key named “name”. Double click on the value field for that key, and type the name of the theme directory (e.g. faience in this case).
• After you set the value, close the editor. You’ll now see the required gnome shell theme.

ZCS does not natively support Procmail, and hence there are 3 ways to use procmail with ZCS:

1. Use ZCS with a MTA set to a server/installation with procmail configured (e.g. ZCS has a MTA set to another machine which has postfix with procmail configured and all the filtering is done by that server)
2. Use ZCS as normal, and run procmail on your mailbox (through the procmailrc file), to do the sorting/filtering.
3. Use ZCS with procmail as a pipe for mail delivery. (This guide will discuss this way of using procmail.)

Let’s assume:

• The mail server with ZCS has already been installed and configured. If not, check my ZCS installation guide and install ZCS.
• We want to use procmail to filter all emails.
• We want to discard emails with attachments that are destined for outside of our domain (i.e. test-example.com), but allow email with attachments for inside our domain.
• We are using a CentOS 6 machine (works on Fedora, RHEL as well).
• sudo is configured for the user or we are executing commands as root user.

Install Procmail

sudo yum -y install procmail

Set ZCS Transport Map

• Login as zimbra user.

su - zimbra

• Check the currently configured transport map for postfix:

cat /opt/zimbra/postfix/conf/main.cf | grep transport_maps

The output should look like:

transport_maps = proxy:ldap:/opt/zimbra/conf/ldap-transport.cf

• Add the transport file to the zimbra configuration.

zmlocalconfig -e postfix_transport_maps=' hash:/opt/zimbra/postfix/conf/transport,proxy:ldap:/opt/zimbra/conf/ldap-transport.cf'

• Add procmail pipe to the transport file (requires to edit the file as root user).

su -
vim /opt/zimbra/postfix/conf/transport

Add the following content to the file:

*    procmail-pipe

• Create the db file for the transport map.

su - zimbra
postmap /opt/zimbra/postfix/conf/transport

• For the pipe to work, a corresponding set of configuration needs to be done in the postfix’s master.cf file. In this case master.cf.in file.

vim /opt/zimbra/postfix/conf/master.cf.in

Add the following text at the end of the file:

procmail-pipe    unix    -    n    n    -    -    pipe
flags=    user=zimbra    argv=/usr/bin/procmail /opt/zimbra/procmail/procmailrc

Create the Procmail Recipe

• Create the Procmail recipe file (i.e. /opt/zimbra/procmail/procmailrc file that we have configured in the previous step).

mkdir /opt/zimbra/procmail/
cd /opt/zimbra/procmail/
touch procmailrc
chown -R zimbra:zimbra .
vim procmailrc

Add the following content to the file:

SHELL = /bin/sh
PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:.
MAILDIR=/opt/zimbra/procmail/ # You better make sure it exists
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
LOGFILE=.procmaillog
LOCKFILE=.procmaillock
VERBOSE=yes

:0
* !To:.*test-example\.com.*
* ! ^Content-Type:.*text/plain.*
{
:0B
* ^(Content-(Type|Disposition):.*|[ ]*(file)?)name=("[^"]*|[^]*)\..*
/dev/null
}

• Restart Postfix.

zmmtactl stop
zmmtactl start

Thanks to the Zimbra forum entry and Zimbra Wiki on Configuring Postfix to work with piped scripts from where I adapted my installation and hence wrote this guide.

Further Reading

• Postfix Dedicated Transport Howto
• Configuring Postfix to work with piped scripts - Zimbra :: Wiki
• Postfix manual - transport(5)
• Zimbra and procmail - Zimbra :: Forums

CentOS Version: 6.0 x86_64
ZCS Version: 7.1.3 GA 3664 for RHEL 6 x86_64 Open Source (Release 7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64_20110928134428)

This guide will take you through installing Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) which is an integrated bundle of Mail Server, web-documents, and other collaboration services enriched with easy web-administration interfaces. This makes ZCS a good choice for those who do not want to install and configure all the tools and service needed to support the features required for email, and web administration + web-mail interface is quite a time and effort saving feature of ZCS.

This guide makes a few assumptions about the prerequisites that have already been made/configured/handled:

• The server will handle email for the domain test-example.com.
• The server will be hosted on a machine named mail.test-example.com.
• The DNS is properly set up for resolving the names, and as well as for the MX record for test-example.com.
• The machine for mail server has access to the DNS server and can resolve names.
• The installer for ZCS (RHEL 6) has been downloaded.
• The mail server has access to the Internet (for installing/updating packages, as well as to contact external relay MTA)
• sudo is configured for the user, or the commands are used as root user.

Pre-Installation Tweaks

• Disable system installed postfix/sendmail as ZCS runs its own postfix. System-wide installed postfix/sendmail interferes with ZCS’s postfix.

sudo service postfix stop
sudo chkconfig postfix off
sudo service sendmail stop
sudo chkconfig sendmail off

• Install nc package

sudo yum -y install nc

• Disable SELinux (I’ve not yet found a way to use ZCS with SELinux on).

vim /etc/sysconfig/selinux

In the file, set:

SELINUX=disabled

sudo setenforce 0

• Allow a few ports for Zimbra beforehand (not required before installation, but makes no harm in pre-setting it)

sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT #HTTPS
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3930 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 110 -j ACCEPT #POP3
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 143 -j ACCEPT #IMAP
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 993 -j ACCEPT #IMAPS
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 389 -j ACCEPT #LDAP
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 995 -j ACCEPT #POP3S
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 7025 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5800 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 5900 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 7071 -j ACCEPT #Port for ZCS Web Administration
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3894 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3895 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT #HTTP (for webmail) 

• Fix the hosts file.

vim /etc/hosts

Put the name of the machine (i.e. mail.test-example.com) in the hosts file (assuming that the IP of the machine is 10.0.0.253):

10.0.0.253    mail.test-example.com mail

The hosts file should look like this:

127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1          localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
10.0.0.253   mail.test-example.com mail

Install ZCS

• Deflate the installation archive (in this case zcs-7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64.20110928134428.tgz file).

tar -zxvf zcs-7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64.20110928134428.tgz

• Start the installation:

cd zcs-7.1.3_GA_3346.RHEL6_64.20110928134428
./install.sh --platform-override

• You’ll be asked various questions during the installation, use the default or obvious answers.
• Before completing the installation and writing configuration parameters to the configuration file, you’ll be prompted to review the settings or to fix some unset configuration. At this step, make sure you set the password for the admin user. It has a menu based approach. After reviewing/setting configuration, get out of the screen and save the configuration.
• Let the installer do the rest of the configuration, at the end of which you will be notified of the completion of the installation.

Access Zimbra Collaboration Server

The default location of ZCS installation is /opt/zimbra/, and the installer configures a init.d/service script through which you can stop, start, restart and check the status of ZCS. All zimbra components and daemons run as user zimbra. ZCS Administrative web-interface is available at 7071 port and the webmail runs at the default http port (i.e. port 80) of the machine. For this instance, the administrative interface would be available at http://mail.test-example.com:7071 and the webmail would be available at http://mail.test-example.com.

Though Web 2.0 has proved itself as a cheap and efficient tool for sharing and connecting, most of these happen at a virtual surface, and people still want to interact in real. The only way to reach out to large audience, in real, is through conferences. But conferences on the other hand have limitations; to name a few, they are limited in interaction and are more or less one way delivery of ideas and content, they are limited in access and not everyone is able to make their way to conferences, they are heavy (in terms of overhead) on the organizers, and most of them are costly to attend. So it seems that conferences are a platform for the privileged, and a large mass of unprivileged group is still left out to participate and create.

But no more! Now we can “unconference”. Still bewildered on how to unconference? Wikipedia defines unconference as “An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term unconference has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization.” Unconference provides you the same benefits of a traditional conference sans the limitations. It is as informal as reunion with your friends, and as creative as working in an innovative task-force setting. This style of unconference has been attracting a lot of interest, and many unconference styled events have been popping up around the world, to name a few, FooCamp, BarCamp, BloggerCon, and Mashup Camp.

Nepal is in its first decade of knowledge sharing, where it has been realized by at least the youths, and they have started sharing. Besides the Web 2.0 technologies, the country witnessed an organized gathering around change and innovation since 2009 with the name of “BarCamp”. BarCamp is an ad-hoc ‘unconference’ born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is about the Open Source Way of producing, sharing, and consuming ideas and content. It is not centered on an agenda with only the host making a presentation or a speech, and quite in opposite to being a formal gathering of black suits, the event cherishes in hosting itself a an open floor for all those who strive to share and achieve despite their backgrounds, interests, and status. It is where ideas get shared, created and advanced.

BarCamp means a lot to developing countries like Nepal, where conferences on the theme of change and innovation are a rarity. Barcamp has been a melting pot of all Nepalese innovators since its inception in the country. Barcamp is depicted, here, as a youth event where you enjoy the sheer joy of meeting people who think along your line of though, and discuss ideas among others who supports your initiative and make suggestion. All-together, BarCamp is about being in a creative sphere of innovative ideas, where it is discussed, dissected, reconstructed, advanced and disseminated. More and more people are joining BarCamp. They have a voice and a keen interest to share it; thanks to BarCamp for being the platform for this change.

With two successful events in Nepal (in 2009 and 2010), BarCamp Kathmandu is up again this Saturday on 6 August. The plan is to span out and go large this year, with parallel discussions going, on various topics. More and more speakers are turning in and registering their sessions. Some of the most notable sessions registered for BarCamp Kathmandu 2011 are Disrupting education the open source way, “Hello, messy political economy! Part 2”, The Latest in Hobby Electronics, and State of the Nation. Besides these, there are also a lot of other interesting discussions on social media for change and the future of Internet. With two more days for registration, a lot of other sessions would be added. Did I forget to mention that you can also organize impromptu sessions on the day at the event itself? Isn’t that cool? People love the freestyle of the event, mostly the open access – you do not need to pay registration fees or get yourself sponsored to attend the event. You just need to register online or at the event itself (free of cost).

Welcome to the new world of sharing and discussing the open source way! BarCamp is not only at Kathmandu, Nepal, it might be happening just beside your house. Do you think you have an idea to share, or just want to see what people are discussing upon? Join people like you and me at BarCamp. The registered sessions worldwide are enlisted at barcamp.org. Details on BarCamp Kathmandu 2011 is available at www.barcamp.org.np. I’ll leave you with the intro video for the BarCamp Kathmandu 2011.

• Shutdown item not visible in user menu (you can get around by pressing [Alt] key).
• Hibernate item missing from the user menu.
• Adwaita Gnome-shell theme contains unnecessary padding.
• Gnote icon is displayed in the bottom panel than the top panel.
• Only close button is displayed on the window title bar.
• Today’s date is not displayed, instead just the time is displayed at the top panel.
• Network Manager applet does not have a option to disconnect from a connected resource, either it be wired or wireless.

There might be some others as well, but these are the one that were hindering the usability in my perspective. Discussed below are some of the tasks that will make your Fedora 15 machine more usable (disclaimer: you might have to install non-free software while following this post).

Configure SUDO access

On a Fedora machine you generally have a root user and a general user with no root privileges. Sudo is a mechanism that helps a user run commands and applications as a root user, or with root user’s privileges without logging-in as a root user. To set up a user with sudo access:

su -
echo 'username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers
exit

To run a command with sudo, just prefix the command with the keyword “sudo”. Example:

sudo <command>

Set up RPM Fusion Repository

RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; you can use the RPM Fusion repositories with tools like yum and PackageKit. RPM Fusion hosts two yum repositories – free and nonfree. The “free” repository hosts RPM packages for free software and the nonfree contains RPM packages for non-free software. We’ll set up both the repositories, follow these steps:

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Install mp3 and essential media codecs

MP3 and some other non-free media codecs are not packaged with Fedora, but are available at the non-free repository of RPM Fusion. Given the popularity of those codecs/formats, you will certainly want to have it installed, else you can not play much of the media files. But still you have the freedom to choose to play media file with a open source compliant format. To install non-free and other related codecs:

sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-free gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg xvidcore

Install VLC

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols. It is some sort of universal media player. To install vlc:

sudo yum install vlc

Install plugins for file archiver for 7zip and rar

7z is the new archive format, providing high compression ratio and rar is one another popular format for compressing files. We can install plugins for both of these file formats for the file-roller utility. To install both the plugins:

sudo yum install p7zip p7zip-plugins unrar

Install Adwaita Improved theme for GNOME Shell

“Adwaita Improved” is just an improved version of the default GNOME 3 theme called Adwaita. Improvements include reduced the overuse of padding in combo boxes and the primary toolbar(breadcrumb Nautilus bar) and blended the sidebar colour into the background colour. To install this theme:

mkdir -p ~/.themes/
wget -t0 -c http://www.deviantart.com/download/206172213/gnome_3__adwaita_improved_by_half_left-d3eqzhx.zip
unzip gnome_3__adwaita_improved_by_half_left-d3eqzhx.zip && rm -f COPYING
mv Adwaita/ ~/.themes/

After you’ve copied the Adwaita Improved theme to the “~/.themes/” folder, press [Alt] + [F2], which will open up the run dialog, press [r] at the dialog and hit [Enter]. This will reload gnome shell.

Install Gnome Tweak Tool with required plugins/extension

Gnome Tweak Tool is a tool to customize advanced GNOME 3 options. It is very helpful to tweak some configurations which would otherwise involve changing gconf settings using a gconf-editor tool. The plugins we will install are as below:

• User Theme: This plugins lets you choose a gnome shell theme among those available at ~/.themes/.
• Alternative Status Menu: This gnome shell extension will display additional items (viz. PowerOff and Hibernate) in the user menu.
• Gnote: This gnome shell extension pulls up the gnote applet from the bottom panel to the notification area of the top panel, and hence is visible all the time.

To install gnome tweak tool:

sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool gnome-shell-extensions-user-theme gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu
wget -t0 -c http://www.fpmurphy.com/gnome-shell-extensions/gnote.tar.gz
tar -zxvf gnote.tar.gz
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
mv gnote@fpmurphy.com/ ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/

After downloading and copying is done, reload gnome-shell by press [Alt]+[F2], pressing [r] followed by a [Enter] keystroke.

Tweak advanced GNOME settings

We will tweak the following GNOME settings to make the desktop environment more usable.

• Display date and time in the top panel instead of just time.
• Display minimize, maximize and close – all the three buttons in the window title bar.

Open Gnome tweak tool, on the left are various sections/categories of tweaks. Among them, click on Shell. Toggle the Show date in clock to “ON”. Set the value of the combo box for Arrangement of buttons on the titlebar to “All” to display all the three buttons in the window title bar. You might optionally need to reload gnome shell after making this changes.

Install other GNOME 3 themes

If you do not like the default theme that you get with Fedora 15 (which is Adwaita, with a few changes after you installed Adwaita Improved), you can install other Gnome shell themes as well. Two good repositories of Gnome shell themes are:

• Half Left’s gallery at Deviant Art
• Gnome Shell’s gallery at Deviant Art

Download the theme that you want to use/test. Extract the archive (if it comes as zip or tar.bz2 bundle), and copy the folder to ~/.themes/. After copying, open the Gnome Tweak Tool, click on the Shell section at the left pane. Select the required theme from the Shell Theme drop down box on the right pane. You might need to restart Gnome shell.

Install Flash Plugin

Although HTML5 has gone a lot ahead, Flash based content is still dominant on the web today, and you would require a flash plugin for your browser to view the flash content. At this stage you have two options for the plugin:

• GNU Gnash: The GNU Flash movie player, which is a free software.
• Adobe Flash Plugin: A proprietary flash plugin from Adobe Inc., the developers/maintainer of Flash

To install the GNU Gnash flash player plugin:

sudo yum install gnash gnash-plugin

The Adobe Flash player plugin is currently packaged for 32 bit systems as a RPM package. To install 32 bit version of the player:

wget -t0 -c http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install flash-plugin

A beta preview version of Adobe Flash player is available for 64 bit machines from Adobe Labs. To install the 64 bit version:

wget -t0 -c http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz
tar -zxvf flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz
sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

You will have to restart your browser if it’s already running.

Despite given such a prominent position, the development of XS software has stuck somewhat and have lost focus, with the last release on 7 October 2009. The most recent release of OLPC XS (version 0.6) is based upon Fedora 9. The upstream Linux distribution (i.e. Fedora) has made a lot of changes since its version 9 release, and has just released Fedora 15 hosting a lot of new and interesting features.

My work at Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal revolves around building customized images for OLPC XS, XO and bundling the content. I had always wanted to have XS maintained to keep up with the innovations going on at the upstream distribution, as well as to get benefited by new services and infrastructures supported by the newer releases of upstream distribution. We, at OLE Nepal had been doing some changes to the OLPC XS image to suit our needs, and adding services required, but I strongly believe the the worldwide OLPC community can benefit through collaboration, and hence building a general XS image to fit all (it would always be open for local customizations).

Below is a list of changes that I wish to have in the OLPC XS (some of which comes from our own list of customization):

Porting XS to new version of Fedora

Fedora Project has come to the release of version 15 of their Linux distribution host a lot of interesting features, but OLPC XS is still stuck with Fedora 9 (which itself has moved to “End of Life”). This state hinders us from using more stable software components, access to bug-fixes, and improved infrastructure. This also forces packagers to package software for Fedora 9. Porting XS to Fedora 15 will bring into all the awesomeness, but again it will be a lot of work porting the patches and packages (developed by OLPC community) to Fedora 15.

Support for multiple architecture

Though XS is targeted to be run on generic low-end servers (mostly i386 architecture), but the recent trend of hardware price fall, deployers will tend to use more advanced hardware (which might support x86_64 architecture). Current XS effort is targeted at i386 (32 bit) builds, but adding x86_64 (64 bit) builds would not be that cumbersome, and would definitely attract deployers eyeing 64bit hardware.

Basic Self Tests

It would be great to have basic self tests embedded into the XS, which will help the school side to diagnose and fix the problem easily. Individuals at the school looking after the school server might not be proficient with GNU/Linux and would have a hard time to diagnose and fix a problem with XS; this is a case with the Nepalese deployments. Adding to this, for a fix, either the support team needs to be dispatched to the school (which might be located in a remote place), or the ask the school to bring back the school server to the support centre. Given the scenario in Nepal, with just a single support centre, this fix can cost a lot of time, effort, and money. Basic self tests, with mechanism to provide instructions on now to fix simple problems is greatly going to ease the hassle. The self tests can contain testing services, network status and such.

Inclusion of new packages

1. systemd: a replacement for SysVinit and Upstart that acts as a system and session manager.
2. usb-modeswitch: a library/utility for handling Mode-Switching USB Devices on Linux. This package is required to access internet through 3G cards (e.g. Mobile broadband).
3. ipcheck: a Dyndns.org client to register your dynamic IP address. It helps to configure the server with dynamic dns and with port forwarding enabled on the Internet gateway, eases accessing the schoolserver from anywhere on the Internet.
4. MySQL: a relational database server, and a de-facto backend for many services. Also it would be good to ditch PostgreSQL for Moodle. MySQL management is easy than PostgreSQL and there is more documentation, community support and human resource for MySQL.
5. PHP with required extensions: a powerful server-side HTML embedded scripting language. OLE Nepal’s digital library “E-Pustakalaya” runs on PHP and MySQL. Also we might need some PHP extensions like php-mysql, php-gd, php-xml.
6. Python 2.x and Python 3.x: an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language. Python 2.x should be included for backward compatibility as many python scripts and applications still use the 2.x version. Python 3.x should be included for forward compatibility — more apps would be coded in 3.x version in coming days.
7. Expect: a Unix automation and testing tool and used to automate interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, etc. E-Pustakalaya uses Fedora Commons which has a interactive setup; we use expect to automate the installation by providing all answers to the setup program. Expect is useful to create headless installers, and it also has a python wrapper.
8. libicu and unicode support: Adding unicode support in XS will help to have localized web applications hosted on the XS (using gettext framework).
9. Java: Adding a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) would add support for running java based applications (e.g. Tomcat, Fedora Commons, etc.)
10. tzdata and extensions: Adding timezone data and its wrapper libraries in various languages will help the support for timezone data in applications hosted on XS (e.g. SchoolTool needs pytz).
11. SchoolTool: a free administrative software for schools around the world. It provides a good administrative interface and facilities. I’ve already packaged SchoolTool for Fedora and tested it on XS. OLE Nepal is also in transition to pilot SchoolTool to a few schools. Also that a integration of Moodle and SchoolTool is being worked out.
12. Moodle 2.x: a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The moodle on current XS is outdated. Moodle 2.x hosts improved interface and additional features than its previous versions. With Moodle, a few other features would be interesting:
    • Using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL
    • Integration with SchoolTool: See http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:SchoolTool_Integration for details.
    • A mechanism to consolidate Moodle data. The scenario would be like XS would be shipped with some sample data, teachers and students at the school would create some data, and additional data would be pushed periodically through content updates. So there should be a mechanism to consolidate all the data and retain it, without losing the previous data while doing content update.

Content Updates

XO laptops with a limited storage can not hold much content, so heavy content (e.g. E-Pustakalaya) is offloaded to the school server. Also that the XS hosts sugar activity updates. In Nepalese deployment, we generate content bundles including E-Pustakalaya and E-Paath along with new releases of sugar activities every three month, and the deployment team would generally visit each schools and update the content. Nepalese XS is equipped with scripts to handle headless content updates. Additionally we are also doing content update through network/internet wherever feasible. Content update through network can be really troublesome with deployment scenario of schools having limited connectivity to internet and/or having only LAN level access among schools. Devising content update would involve creating a unified format for content bundles and devising a way to deploy content updates easily through network with a minimal payload on the content server. I would suggest a torrent based mechanism to handle content deployment – it will offload content through local peers and handle data checksums and all. Meanwhile a mechanism to support loading content on a USB harddisk would be great as it will help to deliver the content to the XS with no internet connectivity.

Web content filtering

XS with internet access are configured as a internet gateway for XO laptops and other devices connecting to the network. This poses one problem – children can be subjected to websites related with vandalism and pornography. A content filtering mechanism for web browsing would solve this problem. Additionally some file extensions and websites can be blocked, so as to help traffic shaping. I would suggest Dansguardian as a tool for this purpose. We have been using Dansguardian on NE-XS (the Nepalese clone of OLPC XS), and has been successfully using it. Dansguardian supports message/information templates in case a extension or a website is blocked. Also that it supports unicode message. Hence using a Dansguardian with customized message templates in local languages would help a great for content filtering, meanwhile displaying appropriate message in case of site blockades.

Journal Backup on a shared model distribution

I am aware that OLPC projec emphasizes the laptop distribution model having 1:1 child-laptop ratio, that is to say each kid owns a laptop, but sharing a laptops among few kids (say one laptop to be shared among 3 kids) can be beneficial sometimes. For developing countries like Nepal, it might take some time to arrange funds for mass OLPC deployments. In such a scenario, where mass deployments might take time, grounding on in available resources (XOs) would seem appropriate than to wait to gather enough resources for mass deployments. This focuses on having the XOs shared and utilized rather than keeping them unused. Having said that, physically sharing a laptop among few kids might seem no-brainer, but the complexity lies in how the XS interacts with the school server and how services are provided/consumed. One important aspect of this is Journal backup. XS has a service call id-manager (idmgr) which registers a laptop with school server. The registration uses the XO serial number as a unique key to maintain the list and various service like ds-backup is provided based upon the key. In the laptop-sharing scenario, the journal created on a laptop might actually belong to more than one user, and managing journal backups and restore can be troublesome. Meanwhile, multiple users using one laptop means that more journal entries would be created and hence the frequency for journal backup would increase inherently. To solve this problem, the idmgr and the ds-backup service somehow needs to recognize the user creating the journal entry rather than just based upon the XO serial. Unfortunately, I do not know how to force user logins on sugar; and forcing user logins consequently is going to confuse the kids. Another way might be to use one folder per user per XO serial. But then we need to tell idmgr and ds-backup on which journal entry should go into which folder. I don’t yet have a clear idea on how to implement this, but I would definitely like to have this feature included with the XS

Socializing/Communication Platform

I have always been looking forward to implementing a socializing and communication platform on the XS that will help users to socialize and communicate. By this I mean inter-school and intra-school communication. Also that this framework can be used to send messages and notifications to users (teachers, administrators, and students). Implementing an offline mail queue which keeps mail lined up and sends them when it has internet connectivity would be a great features. Schools in Nepal have sparse Internet connectivity, and such a mail queue might help inter-school communication. I’m looking forward to use Open Atrium as a tool for this purpose. Also a multi-node system of Open Atrium, if it can be implemented, with a inter-node communication, would ease the task a lot.

These were some of the customizations I envision would help a great deal with the XS. I’m not even sure if items off my wishlist are feasible at this time. What is your XS wishlist?

Set up your monitor profile

Colours are very important. If your monitor is not properly calibrated, the vivid colours would completely blow out and would look different. There are different tools on Linux to help you calibrate and set up a colour profile for your monitor. You can either use Little CMS (http://www.littlecms.com/) or Agryll CMS (http://www.argyllcms.com/). Also look for the driver CD that might have come packaged with the monitor that you bought and look for the device colour profile in the CD (you can also search for it on the vendor’s website). Fedora 14 come with a little tool called Color Management which you can access from System > Preferences > Color Profiles. Open up the tool, select your monitor, and on the other pane, select the Other item from the Color Profile drop down menu. There you can select the ICM color profile for your monitor, and thus you properly set up the colour profiling.

Install GIMP

GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program has come along quite a way through a series of evolution and now supports a lot of features. It is the best choice for image editing (except that it does not yet support editing in 16bit per channel, but 8-bit is the one you would be doing most of the times). GIMP is a nice tool for photo touchup and corrections, though it is not as powerful as Adobe Photoshop. I would recommend to install GIMP with a few of its useful plugins as below:

• GIMP extra patterns
• GREYCstoration plugin: GREYCstoration is an image regularization algorithm which is able to process a color image by locally removing small variations of pixel intensities while preserving significant global image features, such as edges and corners. The most direct application of image regularization is image denoising. By extension, it can also be used to inpaint or resize images.
• Resynthesizer plugin: Resynthesizer is a Gimp plug-in for texture synthesis. Given a sample of a texture, it can create more of that texture. This has uses including: Creating more of a texture (including creation of tileable textures), Removing objects from images (great for touching up photos), Creating themed images (by transfering a texture from one image to another).
• Liquid Rescale Plugin: It is a free, open source frontend to the Liquid Rescale Library, which provides an implementation of the Seam Carving algorithm as described in this paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.
• GimpFX Foundry Plugin: It is a collection of 117+ new scripts for GIMP that are not part of the graphic software’s standard installation. This plugin adds a new menu to GIMP and contains filters for a variety of purposes including cross-processing, photo effects, Roy Lichtenstein effects and a lot others.

To install GIMP with all these plugins on a Fedora Machine, execute as a root at the terminal:

yum -y install gimp gimp-data-extras GREYCstoration-gimp gimp-help gimp-lqr-plugins gimp-resynthesizer gimpfx-foundry

Install Raw Therapee

If you take your shots in a Camera Raw format, you definitely need this tool. I used and compared three tools to process RAW on GNU/Linux (viz. UFRaw, RawStudio, and RawTherapee), and found Raw Therapee to be the best tool. Although it is in alpha stage of development, but the product is very promising with a lot of interesting features. It has a powerful workflow, batch processing features, and high performance demosaicing algorithms (EAHD and HPHD and VNG-4). To install Raw Therapee on Fedora:

yum -y install rawtherapee

Install Hugin

I’m myself a fan of landscape and wide angle lenses/photography and panorama. Unluckily, I don’t own a wide angle lens. In such a case, when you need to create a panorama image, Hugin is the tool at help. You can take multiple shots of the place with a few degrees of overlap between two consecutive images, and then stitch all of them together using hugin to create an outstanding panorama. The interface of hugin is quite intuitive and eases the process. Remember, Panaroma is an art and hugin will produce good results only when you are good at taking proper shots. To install hugin on Fedora:

yum -y install hugin

Install Luminance HDR Imaging

Luminance HDR Imaging (formerly known as qtpfsgui) is a tool to help you produce High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. To create an HDR with a local tone mapping, all you need is three shots with -1ev, 0ev , +1ev exposure compensation; and then using those three shots with this tool, you can create a HDR image. You can use the Bracketing feature of your camera to help you take those three shots with different exposure. In case your camera does not support bracketing, you can take shots in Raw and then generate the required images using Raw Therapee. To install on Fedora:

yum -y install qtpfsgui

Install Shotwell Photo Manager

Shotwell is a digital photo organizer that runs on Linux. It is the default photo manager in Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14. There are other photomanagers like DigiKam, F-Spot, and Picasa. Among them DigiKam seems to be the most powerful with features, but it bulky and is a KDE application. F-Spot is also a good tool built around Mono .NET runtime environment. Picasa is another tool from Google which hosts good features, but lacks native Linux support and runs emulated through wine, also that it is not able to support other hosting services besides Picasa. I prefer Shotwell because:

• I’m not very much comfortable with KDE applications.
• Shotwell supports many file formats.
• Shotwell supports uploading images to different image hosting services like Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook.
• It is light weight and a native GNOME application.
• I don’t use photo managers to do image editing, and rather use them just to organize my photographs.

Note: You can use Cinepaint to edit the images in 16-bit per channel (but the interface is quite buggy). Also that if you send the image from Raw Therapee to GIMP, it will lose EXIF data. So if you would like to preserve the EXIF data, export the image as a file (jpg, or png) and then edit that image file in GIMP.

Further Reading

• The Grumpy Editor\'s guide to HDR with Linux [LWN.net]
• Comparing Linux Photo Managers...Which Is The Best For Your ...
• Linux for Professional Photography : Greg Laden\'s Blog
• Linux.com :: High Dynamic Range images under Linux
• Linux.com :: Tone-mapping HDR photos with Qtpfsgui
• Linux Tools for Professional Photography | Linux Journal

On the occasion of National Education Day 2067, Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) announces the launch of E-Pustakalaya, an education-centered electronic library that can be accessed from the Internet (www.pustakalaya.org), or installed at a school or community center without Internet access. The E-Pustakalaya contains a variety of material that fall into seven main categories, targeted mainly at teachers and students: Literature, Art, Course-related Materials, Reference Materials, General Educational Materials, Teaching Support Materials and Newspapers and Magazines. Content highlights also include audio books, a Nepali dictionary, school Wikipedia, educational videos, and E-Paath – a curriculum-based interactive digital learning materials prepared by OLE Nepal. It is hoped that E-Pustakalaya will enable students, teachers and families in different geographic and economic locations to freely access the same high quality educational resources. OLE Nepal believes that such an open and uniform access electronic library will help tackle to problem of quality, access, and disparity in education.

OLE Nepal has partnered and collaborated with various authors and organisations to make their works and publications accessible through E-Pustakalaya. The library already boasts a collection of over 1500 titles in English and Nepali, and the collection continues to grow every day. Users can browse various sections with ease, carry out search based on title, author or keywords, and cross-link to various resources. OLE Nepal's effort is being supported by the Danish Embassy, UN World Food Programme and the Nepal Library Foundation (NLF), Canada, who assist the Non -Resident Nepali Association to implement their Public Libraries Project.

OLE Nepal is a Nepali not-for-profit organisation dedicated to improving education quality and access by integrating Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based teaching-learning approaches into the regular school curriculum and mainstream pedagogy. OLE Nepal has been assisting the Nepal Government's Department of Education in implementing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme in the country. OLE Nepal's training programme prepares teachers to effectively integrate ICT in classrooms, including basic functionalities of E-Pustakalaya, and creative ways to use the digital materials within their classrooms.

Schools interested in installing the E-Pustakalaya through a local server can contact OLE Nepal at info@olenepal.org.