An hour into Linux Mint 13 “Maya” made me certain that this is finally a Linux distro I can suggest to the new-comers. Given it’s a bit boring for some of us (and the number of this “some” could be like real small) who won’t really enjoy using it regularly. We’re not the target audience.

So, with that out of the system, let’s see how the GNOME 2*ish-looking GNOME 3 works.

Mint 13 is based on Ubuntu 12.04, and likewise it’s an LTS edition which will be supported for five years. The installer’s look and feel has remained the same from last version — even the slides haven’t changed. The only addition is an odd-looking screen that shows up as the partitioner. It took me by surprise, and then I ended up clicking the “advanced partitioning tool” link to get back to the Ubiquity (Ubuntu installer) partitioner that I’m more familiar with.

The new partition screen that's added in Mint 13 installer

It took around 20 minutes to install on hard drive. The basic copying operation was done in a matter of minutes. It’s the connecting to online software repos and then fetching stuff part that took a helluva lot of time. Since it’s a 800 MB ISO, the Mint team could have also packed the language packs in it, rather than making one wait at the end of installation.

The installer makes you wait till the langues packes are downloaded and installed

Reboot. It takes 5 seconds flat to shutdown, and 28 seconds to boot up to the display manager (DM), on an average. The DM’s called MDM — a fork of GDM 2.20. Naturally, it comes with the age-old GDM settings options (available once you’re logged in obviously). Good news is, it’s themeable. Bad news? The default Mint theme would fail to give you the high.

From MDM to the desktop after login takes around a couple of seconds – now, that’s dead fast. The desktop looks like what we’re used to (assuming you’ve used Mint before)… a slim panel at the bottom, and the rest of the desktop space is yours to fill up with all sorts of random folders and icons (of course, who like it this way). The panel has the application menu (Mint menu) on the extreme left, followed by the show desktop icon, a few application launch shortcuts (Firefox, Terminal and Nautilus file manager, by default), the task manager, and finally the system tray that holds the clock, volume, battery indicator and Bluetooth, among other things. There is also a Cinammon settings menu shortcut (note the ^ icon) that additionally holds the panel settings options.

The Mint 13 desktop with Nautilus file manager in focus

I gotta say the desktop theme colour palette is very cool (excluding the wallpaper). The panel is a darker share of grey and the window manger color is a very subtle shade of grey. This is the Mint-X theme, and unlike the default GNOME Adwaita theme, this one is seriously much more elegant. In fact, it’s better than Ubuntu’s Ambiance, me feels.

The only regret is the icon theme — with all those Apple-like squarish icons it sort of looks hideous. But this can be easily changed to your liking, so a minor issue there. Although, it’s really about personal tastes, I can’t stand that Acdsee logo for image viewer (see screenshot below), and its Firefox icon is also ridiculous. Besides, many of the icons are just not obvious enough — for example, the Software Manager icon looks more like a favourites/bookmarks icon.

The Alt+Tab interface of Mint 13

The above screenshot is the default Alt+Tab toggle. I gotta say it looks much more pleasant and is functionally more usable compared to both GNOME Shell and Unity’s version of the same. Back to the quirks with the icon theme, in the above screenshot note that both System Settings and Cinammon Settings use the same icon/thumbnail, yet for the latter it looks scaled up.

Somewhere the Mint developers have actually applied logic is the Mint Menu for launching applications. Given, nothing much has changed for the last few years, but it’s the overall polish the menu has received that’s commendable — a much cleaner and saner implementation compared to GNOME Shell’s apps menu, Unity’s dash, as well as KDE’s Kickoff. Of course, given the overall design of GNOME Shell and Unity, implementing the Mint Menu in them would kind of look out of place.

The elegant and usable Mint Menu

As far as out-of-the-box applications are concerned, Mint more or less covers all segments. And unlike it’s upstream, which has taken the insane decision to rid itself of essential apps like GIMP just so the OS comfortably fits in a 700MB CD image, Mint takes a more pragmatic decision to increase the ISO size by a hundred megs or so to fit more apps. I mean, who burns ISOs in CDs anyway — and even when they do, the cost comparison of blank DVDs vs CDs hardly makes a difference.

Also, I appreciate the fact that Mint is trying to steer clear of implementing a global menu for all apps that both GNOME 3 and Unity are bent on to implement in their own ways. The major gripe most users have with a “global” menu is the fact that the developers are simply assuming everyone uses apps in full-screen mode. When the fact of the matter is, if I have a HD resolution screen or use multiple displays, adopting the global menu is actually a regression considering apps won’t always be full-screen, and rather side-by-side, in most cases.

Back to the software selection, Mint comes with its own tweaked version of Software Centre called Software Manager. As you can see in the following screenshot, it’s nicely categorised. It also advertises – in a subtle manner – that the manager currently has almost 60,000 packages to offer. That’s actually a lot to play with. And this is exactly where Debian and it’s derivatives shine. Of course, being binary-compatible with its upstream, most Ubuntu PPAs should work with Mint — it’s just a matter of configuring these. (Hint: Get GIMP 2.8 from one of them PPAs.)

The Software Manager home screen starts off with the categories

Another nice thing is, the Software Manager also offers subcategories of apps. In the following screenshot, you can see the subcategories inside the Internet category. This is really, really handy when just want to browse the manager. Besides all those scores next to apps from the users really help new-comers to pick and choose. And just like Ubuntu Software Centre, this one also has comments/reviews for most of the popular apps from the large community of users. I wonder why the Fedoras and openSUSEs of the world haven’t yet integrated this feature to their respective GUI software managers.

The subcategories inside the 'Internet' category

The final point to take note of is Compiz — our darling window manager from the second half of last decade. We all used to love it and show off the effects to the Winduhs users — yep, those were the days, when we’re young :-) Yes, of course, most of the effects were counter-productive… and since many users loved to royally screw up their systems playing with it and then probably blamed stability issues on the distros, most upstreams slowing moved away from it. Both KDE and GNOME now come with it’s own set of desktop effects integrated right into their default window managers. The only two major distros that uses Compiz now is Ubuntu for its Unity effects, and Mint.

The CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager) plugin is of course missing. [EDIT: Regret the error. Mint 13's Cinnamon desktop effects are not because of Compiz, but something called Muffin (a fork of GNOME Shell's window manager Mutter).] And the distro comes with some of the effects enabled out of the box. What I like most is how the workspace switcher of GNOME is integrated with Compiz Expo-like feature… Take your mouse cursor to the top left corner of the screen. You see the current workspace zooms out to show you the second workspace (Mint has two enabled by default). The window in focus is maximized in the workspace. Move your mouse back into this workspace, and all the open windows will scale appropriately to give you an overview.

Next to this workspace you see the secondary workspace that is activated by default. Once you hover your mouse on any workspace, it additionally shows an X (close) button on the top right corner of the workspace. And on the extreme right center edge of the screen, you have the + (plus) button to add more workspaces as and when you need them, and then move windows from one workspace to another. Deleting a workspace with open apps in it won’t kill the apps — relax, they are moved to the previous workspace.

Mint 13 uses the Expo feature in a smarter way

The usual compiz shortcuts work — Ctrl+Alt+Right Arrow key to move to the next workspace, Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow key to move to the previous, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Left Arrow key to move the in-focus app to the next workspace and the like.

That’s more or less it. Overall, although Cinnamon as a GNOME 3 fork is brand new, and the developers note that it’s still not stable enough, functionality wise compared to older Mint releases, Mint 13 is a solid incremental update — with nice polish added throughout the desktop. The best part is it doesn’t force it’s loyal userbase to unlearn and relearn new UI additions just because they feel that’s the right way to go forth. And it’s commendable the effort they have taken to accommodate the old-timers also with simple things — for example, the availability of Synaptic package manager by default when Ubuntu has abandoned it, and the older more common-sense desktop user interface compared to Gnome Shell and Unity.

A day of usage doesn’t tell you a lot about stability of the desktop, but I didn’t encounter anything remotely nasty to report. The best part, because it hails from a country that doesn’t encourage software patent lays yet, naturally Mint comes packed with all the multimedia codes available right out of the box. It comes with VLC and Banshee installed, so can throw most formats at these and they should be able to play. It comes as a surprise why they chose to keep Totem as part of the default install, when VLC is also included.

The downside, as the developers note, it might not play nicely with your system if your 3D graphics card is not supported. Unfortunately, there’s no Cinnamon 2D like Unity 2D available. So, the Nvidia and AMD/ATI users should test extensively in the live moved before installing it on the system.

That’s all folks! Please leave you impressions of Mint’s Maya in comments. Meanwhile, allow me to go ahead and install Maya’s MATE edition and see where the GNOME 2 fork is headed.

In this article, we take a look at four of the most well known and commonly used virtualisation software for Linux.

When it comes to virtualisation, Linux unarguably has more prowess and offers better performance as the host OS than most other operating systems. Mac does indeed allow you to run MS Windows in a virtualised environment, but it is only Linux that offers all-encompassing support for most popular operating systems.

And talking about virtualisation products for Linux devices, the options are plenty. However, in this article, we will focus on four popular options — Qemu, VirtualBox, VMware Player and Parallels Workstation. Before comparing these, let’s first look at each of them in isolation.

The introductions

Qemu

Qemu can be used both as a machine emulator and as virtualisation software. It lets you run Windows programs on your Linux machine, as well as execute guest code directly on host devices. And the best part is that Qemu is open source software.

VirtualBox

Oracle VM VirtualBox, or just VirtualBox as it is popularly called, is full-blown virtualisation software typically meant for the x86 architecture. Even though Oracle primarily projects it as a product for enterprise use, VirtualBox can and does suffice for general computing enthusiasts who would like to try their hands at virtualisation.

In fact, VirtualBox is so neatly laid out and simple in operation that it should be your first pick if you aren’t already familiar with virtualisation. It supports numerous operating systems apart from Linux and Windows, including the likes of BSD, Solaris and even DOS or Windows 3.x. Like Qemu, VirtualBox is also open source software.

VMware Player

VMware Player is a commercial virtualisation product that lets you run multiple operating systems on your computer. The product is free (as in free beer) for personal use, and paid enterprise versions are available, but sadly, none of the offerings are open source. Beyond that, VMware Player offers excellent support for multiple operating systems, and binary downloads are available for both RHEL and Ubuntu users (32-bit and 64-bit).

Parallels Workstation

Parallels Workstation is paid-for, commercial, closed source virtualisation software available for Windows, Mac and Linux. A cheaper, non-enterprise version by the name of Parallels Desktop is also available. If you are compelled to compromise with closed source software, it is likely that you have a good “business” reason behind it, and so we will review Parallels Workstation in this article.

With that general introduction out of the way, let us now compare each option’s performance under separate heads.

Installation

Beginning with Qemu, the installation process is pretty simple. In fact, Qemu is nowadays offered in the repositories of almost every major distro and so, installation is just a matter of a few clicks. Also, Kernel Virtualization Machine (KVM), which is supported by Qemu, is nowadays a part of the standard installation of most notable distros, including Ubuntu.

Similarly, VirtualBox, too, forms a part of the repositories of many distros. However, just in case your distro does not offer VirtualBox, you can always download the binaries from here.

The installation of Parallels Workstation, on the other hand, is outright complex. You can either add custom repositories for third party software in your distro’s software manager, or you can download it from the Parallels’ website itself. If you are downloading it from the website, you’ll need to register for a user account (yes, that’s how it is with closed source software — you have to register). And speaking of registration, you will be required to give a plethora of information about yourself — your name, work information, address, and so on.

Thereafter, the URL to the download location will be sent to you via email. Since the software is paid for, you’ll have a 30-day trial period during which you can use the software without paying the licence fee, following which, you have to either purchase a license key or remove the software. During the installation process, you will also be presented with the End User License Agreement (EULA) which you need to agree to conform to, before carrying on with the installation.

Figure 1: The Parallels Workstation installation wizard (registration process)

Speaking of VMware Player, the installation is more or less similar to that of Parallels Workstation — you have to register for an account on the website (though in this case, you’re required to give only your name and email address), following which you can download the software’s installer. The installation process is self-explanatory, and yes, there is a EULA that you need to abide by.

Modus operandi

Beginning with Qemu — its interface, though clean, can be confusing for the beginner. If you are a KDE user, you can use QtEmu, which serves as a handy emulator. However, if, just like me, you are not a KDE and/or GNOME user, using Qemu’s emulator can be quite annoying at times — it simply refuses to blend with your DE. However, once you get accustomed to it, you’ll realize that Qemu is one of the best tools for virtualisation. You can enable or disable full acceleration, decide which processes to log, specify arguments for start-up, and so on. In fact, Qemu offers a much greater level of customisation than most other alternatives.

Figure 2: Customising Qemu (enabling full acceleration)

When it comes to the user interface and mode of operation, VirtualBox emerges as the clear winner. The interface is slick and resembles more of a media player (say, Banshee, for instance). For almost all the operations, there are setup wizards and the procedures are self-explanatory. The program offers all the abilities that you’d seek in a virtualisation tool, and is well backed by excellent documentation.

Figure 3: VirtualBox running Fedora as guest OS

Parallels Workstation, on the other hand, is neither as sleek as Qemu nor as polished as VirtualBox. A good portion of it is written in Qt, so again, KDE users can feel at home. Speaking of the mode of operation, there is a Virtual Machine Wizard, but since the product itself is more geared towards workstation use rather than home use, the Wizard begins with questions regarding networking, rather than storage. You can set up Ethernet networks, and share host devices from within the wizard. However, such functionality is available in both VirtualBox and Qemu, so it doesn’t really make sense why one would opt for a closed source option.

Now, let us take a look at the final option, VMware Player. Unlike its Workstation version, the free Player version does not ask us to connect to a remote or local server upon startup. Instead, the interface simply offers you a set-up wizard that lets you create virtual machines. VMware Player does offer two unique things — the guest OS runs within the console, instead of a separate instance, and the support for audio devices and video cards is terrific. For example, in this screenshot, Ubuntu is being run within VMware Console, rather than a separate window, as would have been the case with VirtualBox. This gives the product an organised appeal.

Figure 4: VMware Player running Ubuntu as guest OS

General use

Before we proceed any further to each product’s performance levels, it is worth noting that Parallels Workstation is a software meant essentially for the server environment, whereas VMware Player is meant for non-enterprise use. The other two, Qemu and VirtualBox, however, can double up for both scenarios.

Qemu, strictly speaking, does not project itself as virtualisation software. It is more of an emulation mechanism for the x86 architecture. Thus, there are certain scenarios where it does perfectly well, and beats all others. For instance, you will not need to tweak sound profiles to make them work on the guest OS. The downside, however, is that Qemu’s guest machines, even when idle, tend to consume a good deal of memory.

Figure 5: Qemu running FreeDOS on top of the Ubuntu host OS

VirtualBox, on the other hand, strikes a great balance between memory consumption and hardware detection. You will need to make a few extra tweaks at times to get the audio working, but overall, the software is wonderful. Even when running memory hogging operating systems such as Windows Vista, you will rarely see a performance lag (assuming that you have a decent RAM in place).

Parallels Workstation, since it is basically meant for workstation use, detects any Internet connection that you may have, by default (if you do not wish to share the host connection with the guest machine, you will have to disable it manually). The detection of sound devices is ordinary, and running videos is a pain. The program itself eats up a good deal of memory.

VMware Player is, by far, one of the most impressive virtualisation tools when it comes to performance. In my experience, there has rarely ever been a performance lag. It automatically detects many hardware devices, and memory management is great!

Now, going beyond features, here is a quick view on the performance levels of each option: I attempted to install Mandriva LXDE under each virtualisation tool (the host OS being Sabayon 8, the RAM available to the guest OS was 256 MB, and storage space was 6 GB). In Qemu, the entire installation process took roughly 20 minutes; VirtualBox was around 15 minutes; VMware Player, too, stayed closer to 20; whereas Parallels Workstation took a little over half an hour. Seems comparable, doesn’t it?

Appraisal

So, we began this article comparing four separate virtualisation tools. While you may have your personal preferences, in my opinion, Parallels Workstation, the costliest of the lot, fared in the most unimpressive manner (comparatively). On the other hand, VMware Player is a decent choice for virtualisation. And once you get used to using Qemu, it will serve you well. However, in terms of a combination of speed, ease of use and performance, VirtualBox ranked ahead of the lot. For all general purposes, VirtualBox will easily suffice, and just in case you need slightly advanced functionality, you should consider opting for VMware Player.

Links

• Qemu
• VirtualBox
• VMware Player
• Parallels Workstation

Certain screenshots are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Allow me to list the five things I’m looking forward to, things that make me feel Mageia is on its way to becoming the Debian of the RPM world — a true community distro that caters to all.

Five desktop environments

Many distros now only concentrate on supporting just one among the many DEs available and widely used. The most important feature of Mageia 2.0 is that it includes four different options for desktop environments officially. These include GNOME 3.4.1, KDE 4.8.2, XFCE and LXDE. What’s more? It even packs in Sugar 0.95.

All the five desktop environments render sophisticated point and click GUI, yet target varied user segments — you can’t really have a one-size-fits-all. If you can afford to invest some time, I’d recommend you to explore them one by one and enjoy uncovering mysteries hiding inside each.

Another important factor is the availability of multiple window management solutions besides what come as defaults with the above mentioned DEs. These include Window Maker, IceWM, Openbox and Enlightenment (E17). Availability of so many options in officially supported repositories of Mageia makes it sort of a geek’s paradise.

PulseAudio 2.0

The other key feature of Mageia 2.0 is the presence of the per-release version of a networked sound server PulseAudio 2.0. The basic reason of including this is to reap the benefits of kernel 3.3 support for the headphone jack detection. This helps in adjusting volumes and controlling output via correct audio path all carried out automatically as and when required by users. The inclusion of this feature has fixed the age old audio issues encountered by a number of us. We hope to see Mageia 2 including the final version of this particular software.

Six Web browsers

Another cool offering is on the Web browser front. As users, we would be able to enjoy not just a couple, but six Web browsers — Firefox, Epiphany (rebranded now as Web), Chromium, Opera, Midori, and Konqueror. It’s all about choice, as they say! No more hunting down various third-party software repos just so we could enjoy the basics.

Four mail clients

When it comes to mail clients, Mageia 2.0 is armed with four different ones for us to choose from. These include, Kmail, Evolution, Thunderbird and Claws Mail. This means that we can make our email management smart and effective with our own choice of client application.

Under the hood

The base system of Mageia comes with Linux kernel 3.3.4 and glibc 2.14.1, while the boot process is powered by systemd (as a result of standardisation efforts across Linux distributions to deprecate the aging SysV init scripts). To know more about why systemd came about visit the official website hosted on freedesktop.org. However, unlike other distros, Maegia 2 offers a choice of keeping the older init system to those for whom migrating from SysV initscripts is a deal breaker for the time being.

The CUPS printing system has also been updated to 1.5.2 – and we all love an updated stack, don’t we?

Of course, these are only the stuff that have caught my attention, and there’s much more in its bag of goodies.

While many have been already been experimenting with the pre-release versions, the real picture will embark once v2.0 finally hits the Web — hopefully today? Let’s wait and see if Maegia 2 could become home to all the estranged Mandrake/Mandriva users.

What the proprietary world can do, FOSS can do better! That’s what this article hints at, as it takes you through the 11 most used open source apps.

Every day, we use a variety of applications without even wondering about their origins. Our main goal is to complete the task at hand, which could be as mundane as watching a movie clip, or doing something more complex such as editing an image. As long as these needs are satisfied, we remain loyal to particular software. But users need change over a period of time, so application developers work hard to offer the best set of features within a short time.

These applications then have to survive in the intensely competitive market. On one hand are multinational companies investing millions in designing commercial applications, and on the other are a bunch of highly motivated people working together to design open source applications. There’s often the misconception that open source applications are not as good as their commercial counterparts — but this isn’t true.

Open source applications can be even better than their commercial variants in some cases. These often begin with an individual who designs the first version and uploads it on the Web for others to test and use. As word spreads, more people from the open source community start taking part in the project — testing, reporting bugs, or even solving them. Over time, the application’s features keep improving…

Here is my list of the top open source applications that are used daily. My choices are debatable. Many distributions have these packages available in the software manager, but if not, installing them is quite simple. Usually, all it takes is double-clicking the downloaded file. Hence, I haven’t covered this aspect in detail.

VLC media player

Over the years, I have switched from one media player to another, in search of certain features. This stopped when I stumbled across VLC. It could play almost all file formats I threw at it, and even played broken files, repairing them to some extent.

The interface is clean and simple. It hardly crashes. You can add subtitles for your favourite movies and even change the video aspect ratio to fit your screen. I highly recommend it for all users who love to watch movies, and it’s even great for playing songs. Get it here.

Mozilla Firefox

Used by millions around the world, it’s simple, elegant and quite stable. The “Private Browsing” feature makes the browser forget history, searches, user accounts, etc, for that session — quite useful for those who value their privacy or who are using public computers.

Firefox has many useful add-ons for routine tasks. The very large Mozilla community conducts various activities like launch parties, adopting animals, etc. FOSS enthusiasts can join it, or even become campus representatives. Get the Fox from here.

Pidgin

I have accounts at GMail, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, etc. It gets very difficult to continuously switch between windows when I log in to all simultaneously and people start chatting with me. Well, Pidgin is the single-window solution to this, supporting many IM services, even IRC! Get it here.

VirtualBox

A lot of tech enthusiasts/software reviewers need to try out a new OS without actually installing it. VirtualBox is the solution. Downloadable at home or office without paying a cent, you can use it to safely try the new OS, and when done, simply delete the VM.

You can decide how much disk and RAM to allocate to the guest OS, and even decide on network access privileges, etc. Get it here.

LibreOffice

Need to do word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and databases, but don’t want to shell out for proprietary software? Switch to LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, which can do it all. It takes some time to get used to the interface, though. It has support for most languages, globally. It also supports .docx and .doc so you can work with those using Microsoft products. Get it here.

Mozilla Thunderbird

If you need a free alternative to Outlook, look no further. Thunderbird is easy to use, and can also work as an RSS reader. It has a lot of add-ons to simplify daily tasks. Adaptive junk mail filtering helps control spam; the export feature makes shifting mail, settings, contacts, etc, to a new computer a whole lot easier. Get it here.

Déjà Dup

Backup is usually a headache for most users, but a necessity to protect valuable data. Deja dup lets you do this without any hassles. The simple interface lets you back up data to a hard drive or to Amazon S3, and also automate it daily, weekly or monthly. Get it here.

Code Blocks

This is a very popular cross-platform C/C++ IDE, which supports plugins to extend capabilities/features. It can be used to code for ARM, Matlab, OpenGL, AVR, etc (and a few other platforms, but you need to first install the corresponding framework/SDK). Get it here.

Blender

This is an open source 3D creation software available for all major operating systems. It lets you create animated films, visual effects, video games, etc, with a lot of other advanced features. There are many tutorials on its site for a head start. Get it here.

GIMP

The free alternative to Photoshop is usable for photo retouching, image composition, authoring and much more. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert image editing workshop, and even as a batch-processing system, a mass-production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

Expandable and extensible, you can download plugins for almost any task, and use the advanced scripting interface to automate anything from the simplest tasks to the most complex image manipulation procedures. Get it here.

7-zip

This powerful open source archive management tool supports most archive formats like .tar, .rar, .zip, etc. Get here.

After using these, you will definitely feel that open source applications are on par with proprietary software, and in many cases, even better!

TutorVista, a digital tutoring website, uses open source software to mimic a classroom experience and maintain its database.

TutorVista is an online tutoring service that was founded in 2005. Its operations are entirely located in India, but most of its market is abroad. The company primarily provides academic help to students residing in the US, in subjects like English, mathematics and the sciences.

How it works

TutorVista has provided over 6,500,000 live tutoring sessions over the past six years. The website provides one-on-one training to students through the Internet. Its goal is to make the entire online tutoring experience seem as if the students are in the session, physically, while taking advantage of tutoring skills from all over the world, especially India.

Students in the US sign up for a minimum number of hours, log in to the website, and choose a subject they want to get tutored in. The tutors, primarily from India, log in to a different portal when they are ready to start taking tutoring sessions.

“We check the availability of the tutor for the requested subject in real-time, and make sure they are both connected together,” explains G Ramasubramani, CTO, TutorVista. If the tutor is not available, students are given options from available time slots. Once the student and tutor are connected, they use a white-board technology on their screen as the main medium of communication, along with chat and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

The students put forward their queries, and the tutors respond with explanations that use the white-board as a teaching aid. “We try to mimic a classroom experience as much as we can, by using the white-board we developed and enhanced. Its design is based on feedback we received from our tutors and students over the past few years,” Ramasubramani reveals.

Screenshot of TutorVista's white-board tool

This allows the tutor and student to exchange information as if they are writing on the same piece of paper. He illustrates this aspect with an example, “If a student cannot solve a math problem, he shows the tutor how he answered the question by either uploading the answer paper or writing it on the white-board. The tutor takes a look at the steps and checks where the student went wrong. He then uses the white-board to show the student how to solve the problem, and in the process he helps the student understand some of the concepts. It is more about using questions as a trigger to get where you want to go.” 

Ramasubramani observes that tutors are often more comfortable offering explanations by writing things down and drawing symbols or diagrams, and a regular text tool falls short here. The white-board developed at TutorVista has tools for drawing symbols for equations, lines, graphs, etc, which permit the tutor to explain in detail, with figures and diagrams.

Open source in digital education

Predominantly, TutorVista has always been a LAMP shop. The data centre and backup data centre are in the US, where all the hosting is done. There are servers for content, database and database slaves, load balancing, and the ejabberd server. At present, there are about 50 servers — all Linux-based, while all the Web servers are Apache-based.

“Our programs were mainly developed using PHP, but of late, we have been trying to use Java and Tomcat to build some additional tools, especially one of the new technologies coming up in Java called Wicket. This is under the open source Web framework. It is component-based and takes care of all the plumbing work that you need to do when you are developing a website. Wicket helps you keep your focus  on your business problems. We are checking if we can use it to become more productive,” Ramasubramani states.

Choosing the right technology

At TutorVista, the use of open source is not so much about a single platform as it is about the environment. Ramasubramani believes that the key in using open source is to know when and where to use which tool. He shares, “We have to deal with areas like sales, marketing, tutoring, operations and customer care, and all these have been built around open source. There may be some areas where PHP is right, and other areas where Java fits the bill. Now, we are in the process of evaluating areas where Java may be the right tool rather than PHP, which has been used extensively. Depending on the area of work, we have to use the right technology for the right job.” 

If the wrong technology is used, a firm can end up incurring additional expenses — in terms of developer bandwidth, and the effort that goes into the technology. Ramasubramani explains with an example, “If you want to write a client program that does some queries and executes some logic, it does not have to be driven off PHP. It may be great for running programs from within an Apache container, but using the PHP command-line does have its challenges. In such cases, I would rather use a language like Java. PHP’s benefit is that it is not strongly typed, while Java’s strength lies in being strongly typed. If you are working on prototypes and rapidly changing applications, PHP may help you. In other cases, when you want to make sure that everything is strongly typed, Java is a better option. There is no exact science behind this, but it is more about figuring out areas in which the right technology can be used.”

Open source in mission-critical operations

TutorVista handles a little over one TB of data, which includes content developed in-house, sales processes, reports about visitors who got converted into customers, schedules, tutor and student details, customer care records and transaction data. Some of the tutoring sessions that students have replayed at any point of time have also been stored in the database. The main concern of TutorVista is to make sure the website is accessible 24/7.

“We have to ensure that there is zero downtime when we deploy new releases. We have no offline component. The day our system goes down, it is immediately a big deal, because customers cannot access the site or get tutoring services. They will lose confidence in us and this will cost us. I do not recollect any time in the recent past when the platform was unavailable. I am sure there have been times in the past when we have had downtime, but I will not attribute it to the use of open source. I have worked on closed source software as well, and if something goes wrong with the platform, I know it is because the developer or deployer has made a mistake.”

Moreover, the two white-boards that appear at both ends — the tutor’s and the student’s — communicate with each other via ejabberd. “It is an open source server that essentially implements the Jabber protocol and is often praised for its scalability and clustering features. It is the same protocol used by GTalk. Currently, the white-board uses a Flash-based component. Although we do not call it open source, once you observe the way Flash has evolved in the past few years, you will see that the significant number of people who use it, effectively provide support for it. However, we are trying to figure out how to convert this into an HTML 5 component. The only areas where we are not using open source is the white-board, which has used a Flash-based component, and audio, for which we use another Adobe product,” shares Ramasubramani.

Why open source

Going the open source way has been an inevitable decision at TutorVista. For startups, one of the most important factors is keeping costs down. Web development is one area where it really helps not to have an additional cost for hardware or software maintenance. Even the other options TutorVista considered were open source — Python’s Django, Ruby or Java.

TutorVista had to develop a white-board as there was no alternative. Ramasubramani reports, “We use tools that are highly specific to our area of work — and back then, there were no tools that we could have just purchased and used. We had to develop the white-board ourselves. When you build a tool from scratch, you can customise it exactly to your needs. Another option is to pick an already available tool, but it might not serve your purpose completely. In such circumstances, our team does a gap analysis, and we either change our scope and requirements so that they are met by the tool, or we change the tool itself to close the gap in features, or even request the developer community to build on it.

“At the end of the day, the business requirements should be met. It does not matter if you are using open source or proprietary tools, so long as you ensure your business need is satisfied. With proprietary solutions, it would not be as customisable, or we would have to pay a large sum of money to the implementation team. They would build it for you, and in all likelihood, they will hold the copyright. Total cost of ownership is not spoken about a lot, and is underestimated. When you’re not paying maintenance fees year after year, and when you get what you want, it effectively translates to zero cost.”

Apart from total ownership, the fact that there are tools already available in the open source domain, keeps TutorVista on the open source track. Ramasubramani feels this is one of the main reasons for the increase in the use of open source at an enterprise level.

He illustrates his point, “If an educational company is setting up a learning environment system, it can buy proprietary tools like Blackboard, or it can use Moodle, which is open source. Moodle does not have all the features that Blackboard has, but open source developers are constantly adding more features to it. So overall, OSS is a win-win situation for all.”

Similarly, in the case of TutorVista, Jasper reports — an open source reporting engine — is being tested for reporting. “Rather than building reporting entirely from scratch, we are trying to see if we can use Jasper reports to help us create reports easily, without making the effort to build every report to the last level of details. We have a team that is analysing how we can make the best use of these reports in our day-to-day operations,” Ramasubramani reveals.

He also feels that the organisation has saved a significant amount on costs by using open source software. Considering that the use of OSS means that there are no costs incurred for the software, for licenses, maintenance fees, appropriate plugins to run the platform, etc, the savings would add up to thousands of dollars.

The availability of tools and a sense of community are also some of the attractions of open source. Ramasubramani states, “We have not approached the community members for help yet, but we know that by going down this path, we can easily modify and reuse an open source tool with their help. That knowledge gives us the confidence that we do not have to build everything from scratch, but we can depend on the community for available open source tools and to develop or modify new ones.”

The challenges down the road

Though it has been a smooth journey so far, Ramasubramani does admit that TutorVista still faces problems in sourcing personnel in certain key areas. “In terms of resources, we have a good team of people who know open source technologies. For instance, we always have had people who know how to set up a Linux server, handle Apache servers, and how to secure them. The only area where we have faced challenges is with regard to the MySQL database. MySQL is a great open source database in terms of what it can provide. The challenge, however, is in finding the right DBAs for it. If you consider databases like Oracle or SQL Server, they are supported by people who have been through well-established full-fledged training programmes. Since MySQL is more of a do-it-on-your-own mechanism, you will not find many DBAs lining up for certification in MySQL, unlike Oracle and MySQL.”

Is open source for everyone?

Ramasubramani feels that it is not necessary that organisations will always save money by going the open source way.

“It entirely depends upon the kind of business you are in. Startups would want to minimise costs in the right places. There are tools to do a cost-benefit analysis to check how you will benefit from a particular choice of software. When it comes to big enterprises — they are more monolithic, top-heavy, and not as agile as smaller companies. In such cases, proprietary tools and solutions may help. In cases where something goes wrong, you will have guaranteed support. Open source companies like Red Hat are also benefiting from this model. There are organisations that use Linux and sign up with Red Hat for support — they get the best of both worlds,” Ramasubramani concludes.

Please define what the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Engineering Group does?

The team consists of open source developers, quality engineers, a documentation team and a translation group. The community develops the program upstream, jboss.org.

Later, we do a process called hardening, and the Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) comes into place here. The team also performs quality analysis, quality engineering, localisation, and documentation for the open source component. The hardening process continues if the certification is on different operating systems, hardware, and Java Virtual Machines (JVM).

Could you elaborate on the recently introduced JBoss AS 7?

JBoss AS 7 was launched in July 2011. Hence, 2012 is about making life easier for developers, and also for those in operations. Since operations require more manageable and scalable solutions, we have introduced some concepts and features into the new platforms. Some of the core features that stand out in the AS 7 version are its high speed, light weight, fast deployment, management operation-friendliness, and its productivity.

Why would a customer prefer JBoss 7 over other open source alternatives?

Red Hat has made a large investment to empower developers with everything they need to develop, deploy and deliver applications. JBoss AS 7 addresses developers’ concerns from tuning to projection — whether they want to deploy on the mobile, or on the cloud. That is why a developer would choose our platform. We also have an EE6 profile certification.

What led JBoss to the idea of AS 7?

In early 2009, we started discussing the future of JBoss 6 and JBoss AS. Since more buyers had been showing an interest in mobile and cloud computing, we wanted to change some aspects of JBoss AS to hit a different market. Towards the end of 2009, we started the first iteration of AS7, and started to work towards EE6 profile certifications. The first profile certified AS7.0 EE6 came out last year in July. The new AS 7, which was presented at the conference, focuses on developer productivity. Here, the developers did not just develop it, but deployed it towards the cloud and mobile applications. We aim to make such activities easier. We are currently working on the AS 7.1 release, which will be fully EE6 certified. It will be out in February, according to our schedule.

Do you provide JBoss 7 training in India?

Yes, in fact, India has the largest concentration of certifications that happen in the world. Certification is considered very important in the Indian market. We give direct training from JBoss, and the link redhat.com/training will have all the details. We also train through partners, and run certification courses from here. JetKing and IIHT are some of our largest partners.

What can users do if they do not want the bundled version of JBoss Operation Network (JON), but want to use the previous version?

JBoss with Management (JBoss Operation Network — JON and JBoss) is the ideal combination for any user. Of course, JBoss is available with and without management.

JBoss ON has been built on the upstream RHQ Project, and it came from the community. The project had many contributors from India. JBossON is the productised version that is bundled before the platform — like the solar platform, the enterprise application platform, etc. JBossON is the umbrella management for advanced management platforms for inventorying, administering, monitoring, and updating JBoss Enterprise Platform deployments. The RHQ is its open source version, which is available for free.

Please elaborate on the role of Red Hat’s presence in India.

Red Hat is present across major cities in India. We started engineering services in Pune in 2004, which focus on development, translation, software certification and localisation. In addition to this, we have a very strong investment in India for quality engineering, which also includes a team for JBoss Operations Network (JON), a quality engineering team across various cloud products.

We are growing beyond Pune now. We have acquired Gluster, a storage company in Bangalore. So we will now have a strong presence in this city, too, in terms of research and development at Gluster’s development centre here.

According to you, how active is the Indian open source community?

There is a strong sense of community that is catching up gradually among Indians. JUDCon had over 825 participants this year, and we saw a considerable number of comments coming from the Indian community. They have been exposed to many kinds of open source technology, and are aware of the choices they have. Considering that JUDCon and FUDCon were conducted in India for two consecutive years, it says a lot about how active the community is.

What are your expectations from the Indian open source community?

Any contribution in terms of development — as a user, for testing, or even identifying bugs — is valuable to us. The Indian community has often been the user community so far, but we see it slowly moving towards development and testing. For instance, two people I met at the conference today are interested in becoming contributors. They not only download and give feedback, but also contribute around translation, localisation, evangelisation and even by promoting, through different means, our project to build their own solutions.

The community is also growing in numbers. In fact, we had close to a million unique visitors to our website coming from India last year. This is an enormous number, and is second only to the US. The number of visitors has been increasing each year at a very rapid pace.

What are your suggestions to the Indian community?

Forums like JUDCon act as a catalyst in building a stronger community. We made ourselves available, and people came to us. This shows that the Indian community is interested in approaching the industry. We have explained how the process works, and people have actually been demanding longer and lot more interactive sessions.

We would like to encourage more conferences like JUDCon, where the community can interact directly, and get their queries answered. Conferences like these open up the forum for long-term contributors to interact with new contributors. People from the community who have worked together on features, but have not met directly, find an opportunity to connect. At the end of the conference, they have a face to relate to the names they are working with in the open source community.

How do you see India as a market?

India has a huge pool of intellectual talent that can use our technology, contribute to it, deliver new solutions to the market, and become competitive. The country is the hotbed of new technology — and so, this is where we are investing. We are also educating the market on how to work the open source way. There are developers and visitors who give us great feedback, and this makes us realise there are opportunities to do even better.

India is a growing area for ISVs. We have been working for long with local partners like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL. We have been working with HP and IBM with a global perspective. Among ISVs, we have also been working with Polaris and Newgen.

This article is aimed at language computing enthusiasts interested in using computing devices in their native language, developers interested in supporting localisation, linguists interested in understanding translation issues, and business managers exploring the potential of localisation.

If you have ever tried to install an operating system, you will be greeted with several questions concerning the configuration of the system. It could be the location, which determines properties like the time zone, date format and the type of keyboard, and the support for additional languages. These settings also aid in the setting-up of software servers for updates. The technology behind this is called Localisation. It is also referred to as l10n, as there are ten letters between ‘l’ and ‘n’. For example, Ubuntu 11.04 was released with support for 60 languages.

The configuration of a computing device to enable usage in a language chosen by users, and in an environment familiar to them, is called Localisation. When computers were originally developed in the West, they only had support for English-speaking countries. As the use of computers increased worldwide, the need to operate the computer in a language of the user’s choice grew in importance. Suppliers had to adapt to this need by developing different versions of software and hardware. Even when hardware cannot be customised, software can be modified to support localisation needs.

The importance of localisation

While English has become the lingua franca of the international business world, there are over 6,909 languages used in the world, as per Lewis, M Paul (ed.), 2009, Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition, Dallas, Texas. Huge populations are deprived of the full benefit of computing if the devices do not support their preferred languages. Without technology’s help, there is a danger that these languages could become extinct. When a language dies, the rich cultural heritage of a segment of the world population disappears. Hence, localisation is important.

More and more operating systems and application software are being localised. This is opening up employment opportunities too, for people skilled in languages and computers.

The history of localisation

The origins of localisation can be traced to translation, where a speech or written document is translated from one language to another. Once computing devices became common, there was need to organise and customise the translation for software environments. That’s how localisation was born. You can understand the growth of localisation with the example of the Debian distribution. The following table shows the Debian versions and their language support, with a steady increase in the number of languages.

While early localisers had to struggle with simple editors, specialised tools and platforms were later developed to support localisation.

Localisation vs internationalisation

Internationalisation is usually abbreviated to i18n (as there are 18 letters between the letters ‘i’ and ‘n’). It denotes the packaging of the strings used in software so that the corresponding strings from a user’s language can be deployed without impacting the functionality of the application. Apart from that, internationalisation is a set of practices followed by developers so that the application presents information and/or processes as per the expectations of the target users.

Localisation, for most common usage, is concerned with translating the menu strings and application messages to the users’ desired language. This requires a good knowledge of the target language, and a style guide for translation. For documentation localisation, a good command of the language and translation skills will also be needed.

As can be seen from the following chart (credit: laT_vicky CC-BY 3.0 Unported), localisation and internationalisation are closely interlinked, so work on both never ends. As long as software or the software environment changes, localisation work continues. This also explains why, while there are so many languages spoken in the world, localisation is limited to a smaller subset of them.

Internationalisation and localisation

Localisation initiatives in Indian languages

IndLinux: The earliest localisation initiatives in India were from IndLinux, a Free Software group. IndLinux was started by Prakash Advani and Venkatesh Hariharan in December 1999 as a portal. Linux Bangalore/2001 was the first event when Indian Free Software groups got together to share developments on localisation. At Linux/Bangalore 2002, GNOME in Hindi was demonstrated. Various teams working with other Indian languages contributed to other language versions of GNOME, which resulted in the release of Rangoli 1.0 beta in 2005, supporting several languages. Other teams brought out language-specific Linux distributions around the same time. The language support became part of mainstream distributions like Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu over the years. When Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28, 2011, it included boot-time local support for the following Indian languages apart from English: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil and Telugu.

FUEL: Frequently Used Entries for Localisation (FUEL) was initiated by Rajesh Ranjan to improve the quality of localisation, by standardising the translations for most common words or phrases. Twelve languages have been part of the initiative.

Microsoft’s initiative: Windows 7 has been released with support for 95 languages. For Indian languages, Microsoft has a language portal called BhashaIndia, through which it enables users of its products to participate in localisation.

What’s next?

Through this series of articles, I aim to provide information on various localisation platforms and tools, which can help readers to become active contributors in improving the language support for their preferred languages. I would appreciate your feedback at arjunaraoc_at_ieee.org.

For more information, visit:

• IndLinux
• FUEL
• http://bhashaindia.com/

To all the Net savvy social animals out there with a Twitter, Facebook, G+ and a whole lot of StumbleUpon accounts, here is a more exciting way to get going with your latest project.

Last month, I was stuck with a problem. I am part of a team of FOSS enthusiasts, who all work on various projects, and we are spread across different time-zones and locations. We usually have meetups every week and are in constant discussions online, which is via a mailing list or Skype. All of us know each other. Each of us mentors some new students on our campus, too. And the newbies start off contributing to FOSS, discussing on mailing lists… and so the story has been going on for some time. But then we discovered that there was a huge lack of communication between the people inside our group itself. We created a Facebook group, but that became too social, and less developer-oriented.

After trying out many other alternatives, we stumbled upon a similar problem faced by Automattic — the team behind WordPress. And they had come up with their own solution for this problem — P2.

P2 is a group micro-blogging theme introduced by WordPress. To quote the theme page, “…P2 transforms a mild-mannered blog into a super-blog with features like in-line comments on the homepage, a posting form right on the homepage, in-line editing of posts and comments, real-time updates so new posts and comments come in without reloading, and much more.”

What does p2 do best?

This is for teams, an organisation, an interest group or a club. P2 packs in features reminiscent of Twitter and Facebook, but with a much more inherently blogging environment. The WordPress development team uses P2 for its discussions too.

What are the features?

To start with, once you activate the P2 theme, you are faced with a Twitter-like interface. Make a post right from the front page (Figure 1) — be it a link, status update, a blog post, a video…almost anything that you would like to share with the group. Comments can be made inline, and it will be shown to users with an AJAX-style pop-up, instantly. One feature that stands out when you compare this to other WP themes is the real-time updates. It reminds me of Facebook!

Figure 1: P2 home

Figure 2: P2 comments

The default setting can come in handy for beginners, but after some tweaking, P2 can be made into a full-fledged group discussion channel, just like IRC and mailing lists. I found P2 comparable to a hybrid between mailing lists and Facebook.

Customising

P2′s Recent comments: Widgets are handy when you are going to customise the P2 theme. You would want to show all the latest comments made by your team in a neat Facebook-like update on the right sidebar. So go ahead and add the P2 Recent comments widget. It has a nice on-hover description, so you get to know what others have commented by hovering over the comments.

Figure 3: Comment widget

RSS feed: A feed of recent posts would be a great addition to your P2 theme blog. It will give a broad idea about what’s happening in case the discussion goes beyond a few dozen posts.

Announcements: Insert a text box or milestone onto the right-side bar, to announce to the group what’s coming up. This comes in handy to remind everyone of the targets and deadlines to be met.

Figure 4: Announcements

P2 options

A very good way to tweak your custom P2 blog is to work with the P2 theme options (Figure 5). You can use it to do the following tasks:

• You could set the comments thread to be either hidden by default, or not.
• The sidebar can be hidden, to give a full-width display to your blog. This is useful for a smaller number of people discussing some specific topic.

Figure 5: P2 options

Apart from this, you get all the other default options that come from most of the WP themes, including a custom header, background and so on.

You can add more authoring members to your blog, and change P2 into a full-blown group discussion portal.

Is it for me?

This is a tricky question. After going through what P2 is all about, it’s for you to decide if you want to make the switch or not. If you have a small team, a club, an interest group… and would want to connect and discuss everything online, P2 is the best choice. There’s no need to follow the mailing-list guidelines. Moreover, you can insert all the interactive content on the go with P2.

It would be best to first decide if Google Groups or a Facebook group work for you — if you can get everyone connected through either of these options, your organisational communication works fine. Otherwise, it is worth trying out P2!

How does the gaming hemisphere fare when it comes to the open source world? Read on to find out!

All of us have played games on the computer at some time or the other. In fact, estimates claim that the gaming industry sells games worth more than $25 billion per year! Obviously, gaming is a considerable segment of the technology market.

As users of Linux, most of us are generally left bereft when it comes to games — many major game-makers release games only for Windows platforms, and those who do consider Linux tend to keep their offerings closed-source or proprietary. However, in spite of such commercially viable (though non-FOSS friendly) policies of game manufacturers, Linux still has its own share of wonderful games, with the likes of Battle for Wesnoth topping the list.

Overview

To begin with, let us be honest. Linux in gaming is still in its infancy, and though the pace of new game development is commendable, the options that you have are just not at par with their proprietary counterparts. Again, this can be attributed to the fact that FOSS has a reputation (which is rather incorrect) among game makers for being commercially unviable, and thus, there are not many developers who create games for Linux.

Yet, in the past one year, there has been a change and game manufacturers are taking an interest in Linux too. This shift in thought is partly due to the fact that the ports of major Windows games to Linux have enjoyed tremendous success, and partly because video drivers for Linux are now more easily available.

Games are almost always classified on the basis of their genre, such as strategy, arcade, campaign, etc. However, tastes differ and while I prefer strategy games, you may not, and vice versa. Thus, in this article, let’s look at the FOSS gaming diaspora on the basis of development/deployment. Broadly speaking, the gaming options currently available for FOSS users can be clubbed into three sections.

Games developed natively for Linux

As with any other platform, gaming on Linux, too, thrives mainly on the basis of the games that are built to run natively on Linux. Such native games tend to be totally “free”, though a few of them may be ad-supported. We did a story about major Linux games in the December 2010 issue. However, times have changed since then, and there have been several new releases in the latter part of 2011. Some of the big names include:

• Kelgar Alpha: A first-person RPG (role-playing game).
• The Legend of Edgar: A 2D platform game.
• Tome of Mephistopheles Alpha: Name sounds good, right? It is a dungeon-based FPS (first person shooter) RPG.
• Skulltag: A massively multi-player online variant of Doom.
• Oil Rush: This is a naval theme-based real-time strategy game. Apart from Linux, the game is available for Windows, Mac and PS3.

Some of the above titles are pretty interesting. However, the sad part here is that most game developers for Linux are not “innovating” — the RPGs on Linux seem to be clones of the well-known RPGs for Windows, and so on. Sure, such games are awesome to play, and very well maintained, but a tinge of innovation in terms of thinking will definitely be better than simply cloning the existing games in the same genre.

Games that can be run via compatibility layers

Arguably, the majority of gamers on Linux run games via compatibility layers (which means launching games that are not exactly built for Linux, using a compatibility application). The most well-known application for this is Wine.

Many games tend to run perfectly well under Wine, and the Wine creators themselves are well aware of the fact that the package is used by gamers. The list of games that run well on Wine is constantly updated on the website, with ratings from the community. This list is huge, but for the record, let me name a few:

• Final Fantasy XI: A well-known MMORPG (massively multiplayer online RPG)
• StarCraft I Retail: A sci-fi action and adventure game.
• Counter-Strike: A squad-based tactical FPS.
• Left 4 Dead: A multi-player horror survival FPS.
• Guild Wars: An episodic multi-player RPG.

Obviously, all these are big names. Quite frankly, if you intend to play games on Linux, you should install Wine.
All the above-mentioned games are clubbed under the Platinum list — that is, the games that install and run flawlessly under Wine. There are other lists too, each showing the level of performance of the given application, under Wine.

Interestingly, many proprietary firms have been porting their games to Linux, of late — a trend that has gained great momentum since the second half of 2011. As of now, Codeweavers has set up a separate section for porting its games to Linux and other UNIX platforms, namely, Crossover Games.

Others, such as PlayOnLinux and Steamgames on Linux, have come up simply due to the success of Wine. Steamgames, for instance, tests games specifically meant to run under Wine, not native Linux. PlayOnLinux is also based on Wine. It lets you install and run many Windows games and apps — all for free.

And lastly, as with any open source project, you can also contribute towards tweaking and optimising your favourite games’ performance under Wine or PlayOnLinux.

Games that can be played/streamed online

The Internet has been expanding at a great pace. With the advent of modern browsers, Internet gaming has also acquired a new shape and form, and is no longer restricted to mere Flash games. Until now, Internet gaming had been viewed as mere casual stuff, but of late, the trend is changing. Of course, the multi-player games are also played online, but the rise in popularity that we are talking about right now is that of browser-based gaming.

Have you heard of the service Onlive? If not, well, it lets you run games. Nothing new there, right? Actually, Onlive can let you run games on its own server, rather than on your computer. Imagine that you like a particular game, which is not yet supported on Linux. Simple! Head on to Onlive, and play your game using their servers. The audio/video and other data is streamed live to your browser! On the downside, this requires a wonderful Internet connection!

There isn’t any official client for Onlive on Linux devices, but you can attempt to run the non-Linux clients under Wine.

Final words

To begin with, native game developers for Linux are working at a great pace, and while there is still a lot to be done, we have seen a flood of amazing outputs in the past one year, and the second quarter of 2012 surely looks to be even more promising. Furthermore, Wine lets you run many non-Linux games with negligible tweaking, and is definitely a good option to consider. So, the bottom-line is that though we still lag behind the proprietary gaming world, our options are increasing fast. It will be safe to expect a flood of games as 2012 comes to a close.

References

• WSJ.com — When Gaming is Good For You
• Gaming on Linux
• Happy Penguin
• Codeweavers Crossover Games
• Linux Games
• PlayOnLinux
• SteamGames on Linux
• Wine Applications Database
• Onlive

In the earlier parts of this series, we looked at using Open Flash Charts (OFC) to create great-looking bar charts and pie charts. In this part, let us look at how to create line charts and draw multiple line charts in the same graph, which shows even more data in a very effective manner.

As always, let us first define our data for the graph. For our line chart, let us take a classroom scenario. For each subject, we have the total number of students that appeared, and the number of students that get a first class, as shown in the table below. Let us plot this data as multiple line charts — one line showing the total number of students and the second the number of students getting a first class.

Get going

I assume that the data is already stored in a MySQL database, and will proceed straight to the data file (with the SQL query to fetch data to be plotted, you can proceed to format it and pass it on to OFC to render the graph). The data file to draw the line chart for our example is as follows:

<?php
$die = false;
$link = @mysql_connect('localhost','test_user', 'test_pwd') or ($die = true);
if($die)
{
    echo '<h3>Database connection error!!!</h3>';
    echo 'A connection to the Database could not be established.<br />';
    echo 'Please check your username, password,database name and host.<br />';
    echo 'Also make sure <i>mysql.class.php</i> is rightly configured!<br /><br />';
}
mysql_select_db('test_database');
include_once 'php-ofc-library/open-flash-chart.php';
$query = mysql_query('SELECT DISTINCT Subject, Total_Students, Total_First_Class Number FROM  test_linechart');
While($queryRow = mysql_fetch_array($query,MYSQL_ASSOC))
{
    $labels[] = $queryRow['Subject'];
    $data_1[] = intval($queryRow['Total_Students']);
    $data_2[] = intval($queryRow['Number']);  
}

$default_dot = new dot();
$default_dot->size(5)->colour('#DFC329');

$line_dot = new line();
$line_dot->set_default_dot_style($default_dot);
$line_dot->set_width( 4 );
$line_dot->set_colour( '#DFC329' );
$line_dot->set_values( $data_1 );
$line_dot->set_key( "Students Appearing", 10 );

$default_hollow_dot = new hollow_dot();
$default_hollow_dot->size(5)->colour('#6363AC');

$line_hollow = new line();
$line_hollow->set_default_dot_style($default_hollow_dot);
$line_hollow->set_width( 1 );
$line_hollow->set_colour( '#6363AC' );
$line_hollow->set_values( $data_2 );
$line_hollow->set_key( "Students Getting First Class", 10 );

$y = new y_axis();
$y->set_range( 0, 100, 10 ); 

$x_label = new x_axis_labels();
$x_label->set_labels($labels);

$x = new x_axis();
$x->set_labels($x_label); 

$chart = new open_flash_chart();
$chart->set_title( new title( 'Line Charts Example' ) );
$chart->set_y_axis( $y );
$chart->set_x_axis( $x );
//
// here we add our data sets to the chart:
//
$chart->add_element( $line_dot );
$chart->add_element( $line_hollow );

echo $chart->toPrettyString();
?>

In the above code, first connect to the database, and fire the query to fetch all rows in the table. The result set is saved in three different arrays; the first array has the ‘Subjects’, which is used to create the x axis label. The second and the third arrays save the data to be plotted.

Then get down to plot the data. First a dot object is created, and the size and colour defined. Then a new line object is created; the dot object is passed as dot style to the line. Then the width and colour of the line are set. Finally, set the data to be plotted, by passing the array containing the data to the set_values method. The key is set using the set_key method. Similarly, the next line object is created and the data to be plotted is passed to it.

Then the x axis and y axis objects are created. For y axis, the range is set as 0-100, with an interval of 10. For x axis, the labels are created by passing the labels array we have already saved.

Finally, the chart object is created, and the x and y axes are set, and the line objects are passed as elements to the chart. This completes the data file. Save the above code as data_file.php in the Web server root folder. Next, start with the HTML file to be used, which is as follows:

<html>
<head>
    <title></title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">

swfobject.embedSWF(
  "open-flash-chart.swf", "line_chart",
  "500", "500", "9.0.0", "expressInstall.swf",
  {"data-file":" data_file.php "} );
</script>
</head>

<body>
 <div id=line_chart">
</div>
</body>
</html>

In this HTML file, include the data file, data_file.php. The size of the graph to be plotted can be passed as arguments; here, 500×500 pixels. Next, add the div ‘line_chart’, which is specified in the header as where to embed the Flash object. Save this file as line_display.html in the Web server root folder.

That’s it!

Figure 1: Our graph plot

When accessed through the browser, you can see the graph in action, as in Figure 1, which is a screenshot of the created graph. I hope you liked the article, and that it helps you in your work. Any queries or suggestions are most welcome.

Useful links

• OFC official site
• Line Charts methods reference