Bridging India's Digital Divide With Linux

Kinnu provides a pointer to this story about India's increasing use of Linux. They mention a battlefield PDA running Linux, making Linux the standard OS for students, and some more about the Simputer.

Comments

Recall that...

[GillBates0]

The President of India Dr. Abdul Kalam is a nuclear physicist, and a renowned scholar who advocated open source in a speech given at the Indian Navy's Weapons and Electronic System Engineering Establishment last year.

Richard Stallman also visited the President and interestingly, the President had prepared for the meeting by downloading and reading Stallman's biography from the Internet."

For the curious, the President of India's website runs Apache/PHP on Linux.

Linux in Military Computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I attended the presentations on SATHI and Simputer at BangLinux 2004. According to them, one of the reasons they chose Linux was the ready availability of a lot of device drivers, ease with which they could do a remote NFS mount, an rlogin and such stuff.

As for as the number of programmers who are using Linux, it is still a very miniscule percentage. Most of the IT companies use Windows for the desktops and the Sysadmins sometimes bullshit the management that having Linux on the desktop means more support costs. Windows and most of the apps running on it are available at dirt cheap prices for the pirated copies. Slowly, the student community is picking up Linux and are doing their academic projects on Linux. They are now having Linux in their home PCs along with Windows. However the profs in the academia are now pushing for Linux based projects. This should mean that Linux would pick up in a big way among the next generation IT workers (3-5 years from now)

--Hemanth P.S.

Re:Good for OSS projects

[jalilv]

India already has its own Linux Distribution :-) Take a look at ELX Linux. Every couple of months, PCQuest Magazine distributes a CD with the magazine with customized version of Debian on it. The customization is good enough to be called its own distro.

HTH,

Jalil Vaidya

More Info

[tanveer1979]

Since you want more info, here it is. And it is not your gps+mobile. I have played around with the device and it is actually a very very capable handheld. A friend of mine did the body design, the the specs were simple. We intend it to be used in vilages, so it should be immune to drops from about 4 feet and also immune from dust and little rainfall exposure :)