Tux Watch

According to the Red Hat Website [here], the Swedish Armed Forces have made the decision to migrate their servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux thus replacing Windows NT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its core IT infrastructure. The decision by Swedish authorities is driven by security considerations.

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According to the Guardian Digital-EnGarde Secure Linux website [here], the EnGarde Secure Community is a secure distribution of Linux engineered from the ground-up to provide organizations with security required for creating a corporate Web presence and conducting e-business online. EnGarde can be used as a Web, DNS, E-mail, Database, E-commerce and general Internet Server platform with security as a primary concern. I call it “Linux Truly Secure By Design” since it complies to SELinux security audit measures as well as follows the principle of Linux application design, that is, “Secure By Design” though many may disagree.

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Part- 4. India Plays “IT” Big

Further adding to local FOSS Ecosystem development initiatives in India, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has been making headlines [here ] the world over as the state goes for FOSS due to concerns over security and the high costs that Microsoft offers for Windows. The Indian state is not new to FOSS as the local government been running Red Hat Linux on various backend servers coupled with JBoss application server and PostgreSQL databases.

Mr. C.Umashankar the Managing Director, Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot is a state-owned IT supplier) has clearly announced that

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Part- 3. India Plays “IT” Open

India has been very prominent on the FOSS world news bulletins due to the fact that with one of the largest populations in the world, the country has been on preference list for Information Technology and Software Business Process Outsourcing for the western or developed world. Adding to this, almost every major FOSS development corporation has either Research and Development center in India as well as country operations including giant brand names like Red Hat, Novell, IBM etc. In India, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) [here ] has been leading FOSS initiatives in the country.

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Part- 2. Pakistan Brings Nation Closer To Realization

To take FOSS efforts to the next level in Pakistan, the Government initiated a project worth Rs29 million titled “Open Source Resource Center” (OSRC) [here] was established at the through the Ministry of IT’s [here] implementation arm the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) [here] in January 2004 in Islamabad to facilitates stake holders and investors in the software industry, should they decide to shift their businesses from vendor-dependent proprietary software to open source software technology. It aims to create a culture of open source software use in Pakistan through media awareness and training workshops, and act as a virtual community for experts in this field.

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Part- I. Realizing True Potential

Readers on this side of the world may not be aware of some very interesting ICT and FOSS developments taking place in the various regions of Asia. First of all, there are many FOSS initiatives that are very active within the overall region adding value to the global FOSS movement. These regional or country level initiatives include organizations and groups like:

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If you have been searching for a cool and non-commercial/free Firewall tool for Linux, Shoreline Firewall also known as “Shorewall� may be a good choice. Shorewall uses iptables for configuring Netfilter in Linux and for experienced users, all that an administrator has to do is describe the firewall or gateway requirements using entries in a set of configuration files and Shorewall reads these files. Shorewall, with the help of the iptables utility, configures Netfilter to match user defined requirements. Administrators or even simple Linux users can build dedicated firewall systems, multi-function gateways, routers or servers.

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