Author: pankaj

Partner at 500 Startups, Founder Startup Weekend India, Co-founder Headstart Network, Founder Teknatus (Semblr and Mojowiz), Director of Sales at Cymtec, Director at GlobeOp Financial Services, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Hedge fund refugee; startup junkie, failed entrepreneur.

Categories
Linux Technology

Linux at the Bank?

Click on the title above to read a case study about how Redhat is being deployed at the Central Bank of India, a bank with over 3000 branches all over India.

Over 1100 branches have already been brought online. The Central Bank of India found a total savings of $1 million over two years in licenses, training and maintenance. Over $500,000 a year in savings…can anyone really argue why NOT to use Linux anymore?

I should get our IT infrastructure folks to read this, especially after the fact that most of them were running around installing patches on those pesky Windoze machines after a Sasser worm attack…

Categories
India Linux Technology

Linux Projects in India

I was doing some poking around the web to look for Linux projects in India and came up with the links below. Some interesting stuff.

Categories
Linux Technology

Novell GPL’s Ximian Connector

Looks like Novell GPL’ed the Ximian Connector for hooking Evolution up to Exchange 2000/2003. Panu Matilainen was nice enough to start working on a spec for building RPMs from the Source. See his posting to the Fedora Test Archives Below.

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-May/msg01336.html

I’ve successfully built the RPM but unfortunately, I don’t have an Exchange 2000/2003 Server to test against yet. I’ll let you know when I can get an account on an Exchange 2003 server.

Categories
Misc.

Fedora Core 2 Test 3

I’m far from being a tech guru. I’m just a tech enthusiast who really likes the freedom, flexibility, and tinkering nature of the *NIX world. I’ve been running Fedora Core 2 Test 2 for about a month and a half on a IBM Thinkpad T40 without any problems. I kept the system updated with all the recent RPMs without any serious breakage.

When Test 3 was released on April 26th, I started my download of the DVD ISO using BitTorrent ( see an article about BitTorrent). It took a few days to get the DVD ISO but once I got it, burnt the image on to a DVD, popped it into the laptop, rebooted and did an upgrade from FCT2 to FC2T3 without any issues. Funny thing was that the upgrade took a whole 3 minutes. Probably because I had very few non-Redhat packages on the system and I had all the Redhat packages updated from the Development YUM repo.

So far, the system has been behaving quite well. SELinux is going to require quite a bit of time ( something I don’t have much of ) to understand but I was even able to have my wireless Netgear WG511 card running using the Prism54 drivers on both T2 and T3 along with the Gigabit Ethernet card.

My next step is going to be to get the Centrino driver working. Intel recently released the driver on SourceForge so I’m going to try getting it running. I’ve been looking for some good wireless tools to run my WG511 with different APs but so far, I’ve found switching APs in Fedora to be quite difficult. I’ve also found that having multiple network “Profiles” doesn’t quite work in Fedora. I haven’t yet filed a bug report b/c I’m not sure if I just have something wacky going on or it is in fact a real bug. I need to do some more testing here.

For the most part, FC2T3 looks pretty good in terms of stability. No major issues anywhere. The only thing I’m not too crazy about is that Fedora requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. Hence, it’s not something I can roll out to my dad on his old Thinkpad 600E and still allow him to use his fairly new iPAQ and hotsync. We’ll see, if he feels brave, maybe I’ll do it.

One last thing to the wonderful Linux gurus out there…to be able to get folks like my non-technical Dad on Linux, we HAVE to be able to get AOL for Linux ( or some kind of AOL clone ) out there.