World's First Solar Powered Desktop PC

How would you like to own a Desktop PC that runs on solar power ? A solar PC that can work upto 3 - 4 days without sunlight ? A PC that helps you reduce your carbon footprint thus helping you contribute your mite in saving the environment ? And - drum-roll please - one that comes pre-loaded with Linux ?
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Home Computer - Green, Palm Sized Computer For Rs 5000

elLoka Techsolutions Pvt Ltd a Hyderabad based product design and manufacturing company that delivers Ultra Low Cost Computer Platforms(ULCCP), has come up with a palm-sized computer that is very cheap and consumes very little power.

The computer is on display at the Rambagh SMS Convention center in Jaipur, Rajasthan where a three-day Commonwealth and information technology meet is on.

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High end Lenovo and Dell laptops for sale at 40% discount

Would you like to acquire a sufficiently high end brand new laptop sporting upto 1 GB memory (RAM), an Intel dual core processor, 120 GB hard disk et al manufactured by a company like Dell or Lenovo for just around 60 % of its street price ? Well you could, provided you are living in the Indian state of TamilNadu and more importantly you are a bona fide student enrolled in a school or college in TamilNadu.

The scheme is the brain child of Electronics Corporation of TamilNadu Limited (ELCOT). ELCOT is a wholly owned Government of TamilNadu Undertaking, registered under the Indian Companies Act(1956). It is the nodal agency for Information and Communication Technology projects for the Government of TamilNadu.

Now this news coming from TamilNadu, I am not the least surprised. TamilNadu government (doesn't matter which political party is ruling) are famous for rolling out people friendly schemes. To list a couple of them which come to my mind, there is

• The Free bicycle scheme for all students studying in 12th standard
• Distributing 20 KG rice per month for just Indian Rupees 2/KG which in US dollars is equivalent to 5 cents per KG of rice.
• Distributing Free Colour television sets [Link]
• And now high end branded laptops at a hefty discount. Wow ... make that double Wow.
  

So people in TamilNadu are getting a fair deal from their government as far as the number of free schemes are considered. Perhaps the the respective state governments in the rest of India should take a leaf from the government of TamilNadu and roll out such people friendly schemes. For example, we could have a scheme of providing $25 computer desktops free of cost for all school students on the lines of the $100 laptop project (er... is it still called the $100 laptop?). But I digress here.

Coming back to our story, ELCOT purchases these laptops at their market price of $1100 each (Indian Rupees 44000) and then is selling it at a massively subsidized discount rate of less than $800 (Indian Rupees 29000 to 32000). Additionally you also get $140 worth extras like a 3 year international customer carry in warranty, an adapter and a carry case. The discounted laptops are available only to the students living in TamilNadu and enrolled in a government recognized school or college there.

Guess what the laptops will be running ? Full marks to you if you guessed it right. It will be running what else but Linux of course. The laptops will be loaded with OpenSuSE Linux and will be fully Linux compliant with all the Linux device drivers made available at their website. Do check out the specifications of the laptops on offer. And here is a list of the software pre-installed on each laptop.I bet you will surely be tempted to accept domicile in TamilNadu and then enroll your children in a school or college there just to lay your hands on the laptops at such a bargain price.

Shiksha India - taking strides in providing Open Source multimedia driven educational material

Shiksha is a word in the Sanskrit language which means "to instruct" or "educate". Shiksha India - a non-profit organization, is an initiative of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and was launched during the India Economic Summit on 2nd of December 2001. It is managed by the Shiksha India Trust. The main aim of this organization is to provide good quality multimedia driven educational material. It has the blessings of the Indian government and it has partnered with the Ministry of Information Technology of India to provide good quality educational content in the public domain.

Mark Rais writes about how this non-profit project is playing a pivotal role in imparting education to more than half a million under privileged students. What is more important is the manner in which Open Source plays a significant role in this project.

In India, most Government controlled schools in the cities run in a relatively smooth manner and on an average have a teacher student ratio of 1:40. But as you move to the outskirts, in villages and in many remote areas, the so called government schools are just dilapidated structures with not enough teachers. And if there are teachers, the people in that area are so poor that they feel sending children to school will be a waste when they would rather ask them to do odd jobs and contribute to the family income.

To overcome this inertia among the people and to encourage them to send their children to schools, many state governments have started the free mid-day meals scheme in all government run schools in their respective states which has shown results in greater attendance in classes.

By embracing Open Source and Free Software solutions in public institutions including government run schools, India can save a huge amount of money in licensing costs which can be diverted to meet more pressing humanitarian needs. At present, the official stance of the Indian government is to use the most efficient technology in IT be it proprietary or Open source. And which one to use will be decided on a case-by-case basis. So there are no clear guidelines for or against Open Source or Free technologies. In recent times though, there is a growing awareness in many official quarters on the advantages of embracing Open Source solutions in public institutions.

Tip to properly render and read Indian language websites in GNU/Linux

Yahoo India has been on a drive to localize its web content. The result being a series of portals in a multitude of Indian languages which includes Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati and so on. And it has made it easier for the visitors to view the website in the Indian language of their choice by using the web address format as follows - which is :

http://in.yourlanguage.yahoo.com/

Suppose your mother tongue is Tamil, you can view the Yahoo India web page content in Tamil by typing the address 'http://in.tamil.yahoo.com/'. Cool isn't it ?

Fig: This is how the website rendered before Indic fonts were installed

But while viewing the website rendered in the Indian languages, I was not able to read the content as the relevant Indian fonts were missing on my machine. After some search, I found that there is a package containing a variety of Indian language fonts available for Linux. They are popularly known as Indic fonts.

Fig: Website after indic fonts were installed

If you are using a Debian based Linux distribution, you can easily install the fonts via the command :

# apt-get install ttf-indic-fonts

which will install all the Indian language fonts on your machine. And once they are installed, it will be possible to view and read the Yahoo India websites in your regional language.

Fig: Yahoo webpage rendered in Malayalam

Fig: The same web page rendered in Hindi

You can even copy and paste pieces of text from the website to a text editor provided the text editor has been compiled with Unicode support.