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Education Software Portables Linux Hardware

Bridging India's Digital Divide With Linux 241

Posted by michael from the routing-around-microsoft dept.
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.
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Bridging India's Digital Divide With Linux More

Bridging India's Digital Divide With Linux

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  • Woo, background info on the front page! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:08PM (#11493600)
    It is unlikely that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, ever intended this open-source operating system to be put to military use.

    You're absolutely right. He wasn't looking to make money off of Linux. If he had, military use would have been the first place he would have brought Linux to.

    Called SATHI (short for situational awareness and tactical hand-held information, and Hindi for buddy), the 875-gram device helps soldiers coordinate with one another on the battlefield. It is one of the many spin-offs of a low-cost computer developed indigenously, the basic version of which is available on the market for about US$200.

    So a two pound device that has some sort of communication and GPS capabilities? Something like other handheld GPS units like the Garmin Rino which shows your location and the locations of others holding Rinos while having FRS radios attached. Crazy!

    While I applaud their efforts in creating these devices (supercomputers, educational computer, inexpensive computers for the masses, etc) this wasn't terribly informative or interesting. More well-known background information that could have been left off the front page.
    • Exactly, I think the thought of a tux with an AK47 in his hand is a logo for gaming not the real thing : /

    • First, I'll grant that there is a dearth of information wrt the capabilities of this SATHI unit in that article.

      But to claim that the capabilities of a unit like the Garmin Rino [garmin.com] is sufficient coordinating actions of individual soldiers in the achievement of a specific object is to vastly understate the requirements of a useful battlefield computer.

      The stated goals and capabilities of the SATHI [ncoretech.com] is a bit more complex. Whether this unit accomplishes all those goal is yet to be determined, though. That can
      • But to claim that the capabilities of a unit like the Garmin Rino is sufficient coordinating actions of individual soldiers in the achievement of a specific object is to vastly understate the requirements of a useful battlefield computer.

        While my example understated the necessary power of a decent battlefield computer it was on purpose. The link you provided, while nice, is nothing more than a press release with pictures of nothing.

        My favorite is that it includes "non-battlefield uses" such as MP3 playi
        • small correction... iQue is a PalmOS PDA with GPS, not a PocketPC /Mark

        • Re:Woo, background info on the front page! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by anactofgod ( 68756 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @02:15PM (#11495170)
          Hmmm...you were able to glean, from that "...press release with pictures of nothing..." all those facts related to "non-battlefield uses".

          So, apparentlly there *was* some information in that press release, after all. Who what other information can be gleaned from that "brochue" (Encore's spelling, not mine). *grynn*

          As for the "...it's nothing more than a PDA with GPS" comment -- my laptop is nothing more than a PDA with a faster processor, keyboard, bigger screen, more memory, hard drive, FireWire, etc. etc. Your point?

          *My* point in providing that link was to show that this is low-cost, ruggedized, general purpose computer with features that may (or may not) be useful to coordinating soldiers in the field. At the very least, if the Indian Army does decide to deploy these units to the individual soldiers, the soldiers will all have access to a fully featured, ruggedized computing platform that can be configured for a variety of uses.

          Contrast that with the experience of some friends of mine in the US military, who had to provide their own laptops (mostly for personal use, though some did find "unofficial, official use"), many of which failed after a relatively short period of time due to conditions on station.

          The US military is itself researching the development of battlefield computers that can be deployed at the unit level. It's stated goals are a lot more ambitious than the relatively modest ones of the SATHI developers. But I'd be very surprised if they aren't going to be viewing the Indian military's experience in this area with more than a little interest, if for nothing else then to gain some "lessons learned" from real-world, field deployed units at someone else's expense.

          For these reasons alone, I'd say the development is interesting enough to warrent reporting. And the fact that SATHI uses Linux in the provision of a real-world solution, and not a proprietary OS, is also interesting enough to warrant reporting, IMHO.

          If gentle readers will indulge me further, let me make some observations intended to actually advance the discussion, instead of holding in back thru trivialization. In observing the approaches being employed by the US and Indian military approaches to computerizing the battlefield, there appears to be an interesting divergence.

          The US military appears to be following an approach where they are building up a centralized command and control computerized structure, and then rolling out integrated systems down the chain until, eventually, the individual soldiers and sailors are integrated in the chain. The Indian military appear to be working from "the bottom up". They appear to be putting general purpose "battlefield computers" in the hands of their units without first thinking thru how to integrate all those units into a centralized backend.

          If true, it was interesting to me to hypothesize why this is the case. Even more intriguing, I think, is continuing to observe how the two systems develop, to see which method results in a more effective overall platform. It seems to me that the US military's approach is more likely to follow the mantra of "this is how we want our people to use the system, so these are the features we'll provide." The other is more likely to follow the mantra of "this is how our people actually use the system, so how can we support that?" Now, I think that *that* is very, very interesting, *especially* since this is a military organization we are talking about. The success of the latter approach will be predicated on smart people actually getting continual feedback from the end-users, and incorporating that feedback into an incremental development cycle. Sound familiar to anyone?

          And, lastly, in a related, but slightly off-topic issue... ...someone still needs to solve the battery problem.
    • Military communications should not be easily jammed or decrypted. Consumer-level GPS handhelds do not fit here !

    • SATHI (Score:1, Insightful)

      by angryelephant ( 678279 )
      Does anyone else find it amusing that they used English words to form a Hindi acronym?

      Says something about Indian culture.

    • More Info (Score:5, Informative)

      by tanveer1979 ( 530624 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @01:05PM (#11494326) Homepage Journal
      Since you want more info, here [simputer.org] 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 :)

      • Re:More Info (Score:3, Interesting)

        by maniac_inside ( 725792 )
        It's all OK, but do you know that
        a) The website simputer.org [simputer.org] was last updated in 2001.
        b) That it fails to satisfy the goal of providing computing to common man in India. Where by common man I refer to the 650 million+ population who live below poverty line.
        c) That being an Indian, I have never heard anyone talking about it. Except the press which carried an article about 3 years back when simputer was not even launced.

  • Still moving forward (Score:2, Interesting)

    by R0UTE ( 807673 )
    Yet another large group to make use of open source. Lets just hope this trend keeps moving forward and we see many more take up the initiative, not a bad application for a free piece of software, hopefully this will show others tha tthis is one possible way forward!

  • If they can do it, why can't we! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by untwisted ( 779622 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:16PM (#11493702) Homepage
    This sort of thing really needs to hit america. Its really hard to convince americans (even computer science students) to even look at linux. They have windows so pounded in to their heads they won't even look at something else. I'm glad that the rest of the world is starting to pick up the ball though, eventually we won't be able to avoid it here in america (unless it ends up like the poor, poor metric system)
    • ...

      they use it because its free, not because its "better", if your going for "better" you go OS X anyways, not linux.

      • Re:If they can do it, why can't we! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Perl-Pusher ( 555592 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:50PM (#11494115)
        I have a brand new iMac and a powerbook. I would not say it's "better" than linux. I also have a linux x64 system that is faster, alot cheaper (home built) and the interface (KDE) in my opinion is just as easy as the Mac. My wife and kids found adjusting to kde easier than the shift to Mac. OSX is a nice operating system, but it is not perfect, there is no perfect OS for everyone everywhere. OSX is not better than Linux, it's just different. You can take a person who has mastered Office 2000 on Windows and watch them get totally befuddled on OSX. There is still a learning curve and the curve is less going from windows to kde in my experience, mileage may vary. After several months my family still leave programs running on the Mac because they just closed the window! In addition, linux is inside the Linksys router, and nobody not even me really cares because it's totally unobtrusive.

        My wife likes to play lbreakout2 and klickety. My daughter like kstars and gnome-mahjongg. Those came from linux, they were just re-compiled for the Mac under X-windows thaanks to projects like Fink. That's why they use linux, it runs under x86 and almost every other common processor such as ARM!

        How many PDA's run OSX? How much hardware is supported under OSX? Your definition of better may not meet everyones definition.

    • That is because ever computer science I ever knew was busying running *BSD. We only run Linux when BSD doesn't support our hardware.

      • Speak for yourself.

        I'm a Linux user since 1993, when (as a Computer Science and Engineering Student at a University of Texas school) I realized that Linux supported gcc making my projects easier to port to a DEC Alpha running Unix.

        Since then, I've graduated, and still run Linux as my primary OS at home. I write Windows apps at work for pay, but even there I'm trying to get the company I work for to start using Linux.

    • Its really hard to convince americans (even computer science students) to even look at linux.

      At my school, *nix is required. Your apps must compile and run as expected on school hardware, which runs some varient of *nix.

      To the Universities who force students to use Windows exclusively: You're doing your students a horrible disservice. Stop it. Thanks.
      • That was the same thing at my school (except for that 1 Windows programming class using the Win32 API).

        We had to have our C and C++ programs compile on Solaris (we each had an account and could telnet in). If it wouldn't compile, you had like 1 day to fix it (in some classes).

        Before I graduated, my school bought a bunch of those thin Sun workstations for the library. They were neat, but they really needed a better UI. They were using string X-Windows or whatever which turned a lot of *nix newbies off.
    • "I think the metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"
      - Abe Simpson
    • Lets not get carried away by that article. The linux base in the US is much bigger than one in India. The big motivator is ofcourse the free (as in beer) factor. With tons of legacy software on MS, it will take a while for most indian companies to recongize the true value of switching to linux... Thankfully though resources about learning linux are quite freely available thru books - cheap asian editions - and the net for developers (like me).
    • Actually, my college's Computer Science Department ran Solaris, and shunned Windows completely except for the courses not intended for CS majors. Although I've since heard that there has been a bit of a shift, as one of the intro to programming courses apparently now uses Visual Studio.

      As to running Linux, I don't. But I have in the past (was dual booting Red Hat/Win 2000). The only reason I don't anymore is not a lack of interest, but a lack of time. That and the fact that I work in a Windows-only env

    • Freshness (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gilesjuk ( 604902 )
      If you are around the age of 30 like me you will remember toying with 8-bit computers, not the most user friendly and easy to use computers. No gui, no mouse and often no disk drive.

      But we loved those 8-bit machines, they were fresh, something new and exciting. Just like a PC will be to someone who has never owned a computer before. If you are starting out in computing now then you aren't likely to have 10 or so years of Windows experience behind you. You will approach things with an open mind. Windows use
      • Funny, but all my Windows experience has taught me is that Windows is the hard OS.

        I also started out waaay back with 8-bit CPU's, then started using Unix before being forced into the MSDOS, and then Windows, worlds. What struck me from the very early days was how poor the MS products were, even compared to the old Z80 proprietary OS that I'd worked on.
        • Windows is fine until something in the registry gets trashed, something that the automated repair processes won't rectify. Then you're up s**t creek.

          With Linux and Unix variants you'd be able to rectify this somehow editing files in /etc.

          I had /etc go screwy on me one day, probably a hard disk bad block, fstab was trashed and I couldn't edit it. I went in as runlevel 1 (single user) copied everything from /etc to /etc2, fixed the bad file and renamed the two directories.
    • I am both an American computer science graduate and a software engineer so I will attempt to explain to you why some of us, but most assuredly not all of us, are reluctant to look at Linux in our careers.

      1. People can say what they want about Microsoft, but at the end of the day, from the developer's prospective, 85-95% of the jobs currently available (and that is being generous to Linux) involve Microsoft in some capacity. Thus, for many of us who have bills to pay each month and families to feed the de

  • Tough choice... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by skeptic1 ( 852999 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:17PM (#11493718)
    Hmm...let's see, on one hand there's "Windows Lite" and on the other there's open, free Linux.

    Is it really that surprising that India chooses Linux?
    • Who uses Windows Lite in India when they can get professional or home edition cheaper than the lite.
    • Why wouldn't India go with OS that 1) they control (while they don't control Linux, they can more easily audit it and tailor applications to their own needs than with a commercial OS that they may/may not be able to audit), 2) costs them less up front, and 3) depends on having lots of smart people around, which coincidentally, they happen to have.

      If you have lots of people and some money, the tolerance for throwing people at a problem is greater than that of throwing money at a problem. The past histories
  • NEW DELHI, Jan 27 (IPS/TerraViva) - Anyone who doubts the power of Linux needs only to get hold of a nifty, hand-held device that the Indian army plans to issue to soldiers in its million strong army.

    http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27191 [ipsnews.net]

  • Right thats it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by flumps ( 240328 ) <[matt.corby] [at] [gmail.com]> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:20PM (#11493746) Homepage
    ..I'm moving to India. I'm
    a) more likely to get a job
    b) get a better rate of pay with regards to living expenses

    and

    c) more likely to be able to use linux and not windoze at work.

    now wheres that plane ticket gone...

  • Good for OSS projects (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bvankuik ( 203077 ) <slashdot_bvankuikNO@SPAMvankuik.nl> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:21PM (#11493761)
    Imagine if the vast armies in Bangalore and Hyderabad get to know Linux and open source software in general, and all start scratching their personal itches. This could mean a giant boost for both existing and new open source projects.

  • Kind of interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:21PM (#11493771) Homepage Journal
    That 80% of development jobs are being outsourced to India but don't seem to pay enough for developers to buy their own product.

    It'd be just desserts if this sinks the companies involved. They want employees to understand that a "world economy" creates natural downward forces on jobs in affluent nations but want every customer to pay like they live in the U.S.

    Irregardless, managing for long-term viability is a dead concept.

  • Recall that... (Score:5, Informative)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:27PM (#11493855) Homepage Journal
    The President of India [presidentofindia.nic.in] Dr. Abdul Kalam is a nuclear physicist, and a renowned scholar who advocated open source [slashdot.org] in a speech given at the Indian Navy's Weapons and Electronic System Engineering Establishment last year.

    Richard Stallman also visited the President [slashdot.org] 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.

  • The desktop revolution (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the.rhorn@NoSPAm.gmail.com> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:43PM (#11494030) Homepage Journal
    Articles like this keep making me think that if there is ever a desktop revolution, that it will happen in a developing nation like India. They aren't quite so tied to Windows.
  • Isn't this exactly the mandate of Ubuntu? A super easy to install, maintain, and use OS for the developing world. (And "developing world" also applies to many communities with few resources in developed countries). It might not be 100% there yet, but from all the brochures, its all about different people hugging.
  • It is unlikely that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, ever intended this open-source operating system to be put to military use.

    Then again, what was created to entertain the Chinese became a staple tool of warfare. (see also, Gunpowder)

    But taking good with bad applications is what you must be prepared for when creating anything. However, I keep reading these article replies speaking of the advantage it gives India over the US unless we 'get on the wagon' but it doesn't seem to be happening. Why? The
    • The majority of American people are lazy.

      Don't feel bad America, stay lazy, make sloppy code, and become a virtual despot.

      Excuse me? Can someone please mark the parent flamebait? Even if you had a good point elsewhere in your statement, I can't get past the obvious problems with the two statements above.

      Americans work longer hours than anyone else in the industrialized world. Americans also get the least time off. Americans are the most productive as well.

      Besides those points, let's look at the
      • Well the original parent had a point. American lazy-ness might be the thing that saves Microsoft. People don't want to waste time install linux if they don't have to. They'd rather plan their next trip to Disney world.

        We Americans are innovative yes. But we do a half ass job following thru. We lost the opportunity to be the automobile powerhouse. Asian countries build far better Stereos, DVDs now. It's a matter of time before another country build a superior computer, OS, internet etc.
        • build a superior computer
          Well unless your using a Sun, thats already happened. Most of your computer was made in Asia and simply assembled and branded in the US. Hell if you buy a Honda in Western Canada it was made in Japan, not in any of the Canadain factories. Marty McFly said it best, "All the best stuff is made in Japan."

  • Linux in Military Computer (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:54PM (#11494167)
    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.

  • ignorant story title (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sbma44 ( 694130 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:57PM (#11494211)
    I'm glad to see Linux adoption by other countries' governments -- yes, even their militaries -- but the title to this story is just ridiculous. The idea that FOSS can "bridge" the staggering gulf between rich and poor in India just beggars belief. Let's not fool ourselves by pretending that Linux means anything to the citizens of India beyond the elite. Maybe in a few decades...
    • I'm glad to see Linux adoption by other countries' governments -- yes, even their militaries -- but the title to this story is just ridiculous. The idea that FOSS can "bridge" the staggering gulf between rich and poor in India just beggars belief. Let's not fool ourselves by pretending that Linux means anything to the citizens of India beyond the elite.

      Clearly you do not understand Architectures of Control and how they affect not only our daily lives, but the daily lives of everyone on the planet.

      Copyri

  • The official site for SATHI is: http://www.ncoretech.com/sathi/ [ncoretech.com]
    It contains pictures of the device and show examples of soldiers handling it.

    A complete PDF brochure for the product is available at: http://www.ncoretech.com/sathi/pdf/brochue.pdf [ncoretech.com]

    It looks rugged, modern and seems to have been built with certain ergonomic principles in mind (e.g., one-handed use during battle).

  • Language Support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sukh ( 620783 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @02:31PM (#11495363)
    I think the largest problem with India bridging the divide with Linux is (or was) poor language support. Thank fully these problems have been slowly addressed using Unicode.

    However there are still issues outstanding. All the major Indian scripts encoded using Unicode are based on Devanagari (used to write Hindi and other languages). This has caused headaches for some scripts and has made other scripts unneccessarily complex. Take for example Gurmukhi (the script used to write Punjabi) - Gurmukhi is a simple script and doesn't have the complexities involved in some other Indic scripts. However to maintain compatibility with other scripts, independent vowels are encoded seperately which is unnatural for Gurmukhi. This causes problems with typing and adds and extra layer of complexity.

    As the author of the Punjabi Computing Resource Centre [sourceforge.net] I have actively been looking into such issues (others exist). However as I see it, we have been forced to accept a standard that hasn't been fully thought out for individual Indian scripts. It is a standard we can live with, but is not perfect. A lot can be blamed on ISCII!
    • Hi,

      All the major Indian scripts encoded using Unicode are based on Devanagari (used to write Hindi and other languages).

      Untrue. All South Indian languages use Unicode for encoding, and yet, none of their scripts are based on Devnaagri.

      Take for example Gurmukhi (the script used to write Punjabi) - Gurmukhi is a simple script and doesn't have the complexities involved in some other Indic scripts. However to maintain compatibility with other scripts, independent vowels are encoded seperately which is un

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