know that will enable them to better their lives. For people who use computers,

this means sharing the recipes you use on your computer, in other words

the programs you run."

Hundreds of coders across India are putting this into practise.

Besides Linux, there are also other Unix variants like FreeBSD, drawing

attention of India. Take the case of Joseph Koshy's FreeBSD Pages.

Bangalore-based Koshy (33) volunteers to fix bugs, tweak documentation,

and "do random jobs here and there in the source base". His projects include:

CIEE Database (website for distributing information on various government

funded schools in the Indian state of Karnataka), and Indian BSD (adapting

FreeBSD and other BSD-derived OSes to support the languages of the Indian

subcontinent). <http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/

>

On the Free Software front, coders from India are involved in projects

such as Guile (a library designed to help programmers create flexible

applications), Cool Hurd Translators (like the bzip2, reverse, Tar file

system, and quote translators), the Visual Emacs Calculator, GNU Hurd Asynchronous

Message Debugger, MiG > CORBA, Linux Device Drivers Emulation in Hurd

Space, porting Netfilter to Hurd, documentation for GNU OS Hacking, and GNU

Geek (a highly extensible framework for building console-based data entry

tools powered by GUILE and READLINE).

Other parts of South Asia are also following suit.

www2.linuxpakistan.net

is the site of Linux enthusiasts across the border. From Bangladesh,

the site www.muquit.com

lists a whole range of free software, quite a few linked to

Linux.

Most noteworthy are the efforts being made to Indianise Linux.

From down south, www.chennaikavigal.com

are working to develop an office suite "like MS-Word, Excel and Access"

for Linux. It's already some way there. There are also other products available

-- like Pacman in Tamil!

Linux is offering software that might be relevant to India, even though

it is not created in India. Take the case of

www.postvan.net/tablabeat

TablaBeat is a simple set of Perl scripts and a C++ program to permit