Inside this issue. Letter from the editors 3. Featuring. Open source-perceptions and philosophy The IPad world. Mind bogglers

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2 Inside this issue Letter from the editors 3 Featuring Open source-perceptions and philosophy The IPad world Mind bogglers 4 6 Let us C! Bet you didn t know 7 8 TechStuff Drop box X-Windows system 9 10 MCUG on the run 11

3 Letter from the editors Dear readers, We are delighted to bring to you Newsletter! We would like to begin by extending our immense gratitude to our HoD Prof. Paygude Ma am for her guidance and support in making the newsletter. Also kudos to the newsletter team for their hardwork and dedication. The work wouldn t have been so great without your inputs! Our aim is to bring forth such marvelous initiatives and innovations and thereby provide our fellow students with food for thought about not only cutting edge technologies, but out of the box thinking too! Here s hoping this issue lives up to the MCUG tagline Sharing knowledge, Bridging gaps Let s come together and make this newsletter an iconic platform for revolutionary ideas and IT breakthroughs! Thanks and Regards, Aniket Zodpey and Vidhita Kher. Editors, MCUG Newsletter.

4 Innovations Featuring Open source-perceptions and philosophy Although pioneered around the 1980s, the concept of Open Source has taken its time to gain popularity over the years and is today the buzzword in every circle of software development and computer geekdom. But what exactly is Open Source? Wikipedia defines it as a philosophy, or pragmatic methodology that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product s design and implementation details, while the Open Source Initiative has laid down ten criteria that the distri-bution terms of an open source software must comply with, such as free redistri-bution, source code, derived works, integrity of source code, no discrimination and various license related constraints. But these accurate, technical definitions can easily be looked up. What is really interesting is how people perceive the concept. To those who want to learn, Open Source is candy land, while creative minds see it as freedom to modify. To the freeloading Indian in all of us, it means just one thing: no charge. To the innovators, the Open Source Community is a platform to share ideas and work with similar minds for the pure joy of creating some-thing amazing, while to those super-passionate ones it is a place to boast of their intellectual prowess. Of course, poster boys of proprietary software are begin-ning to see it as a serious threat! Despite concerns such as - why would anyone in their right mind put so much effort into a job and then give it off for free, when it can easily make them a for-tune? Or suppose I do share my source code in the community, how can I be sure that some free-raider won t just swoop in, change a bit or two and sell it as his own proprietary software? the Open Source Community continues to flourish. Of the possible explanations for the former, the one most commonly offered is charity, a sense of giving back to the community. And then there s also the Communist belief. But what really drives this movement is that there exist software writers who enjoy the creation of programs (as opposed to being motivated by profes-sional duty or economic rewards) and who have a strong respect for the values of craftsmanship. So can writers of open source software no longer make money out of it? Hardly so. There is always the option of selling services related to that software. And do note that Open Source is not synonymous with free software. Best example? Red Hat!

5 Page 5 synonymous with free software. Best example? Red Hat! Now to prevent the free-loaders from making an easy buck, a man named Richard Stallman created the General Public License (GPL). The terms of the license agreement are cleverly designed to exclude free-raiders, by forcing everyone who uses previously open-source code into opening whatever contribu-tions he or she makes. Each contributor owns the copyrights of whatever piece of code he or she has de-veloped, but by altering the way in which the rights of exclusion are deployed. So the license becomes a legal instrument for community-building, in addition to its more immediate goals of keeping the soft-ware open and of serving as a means to allocate credit for particular contributions. The GPL also man-dates that the names of the creators of specific pieces do not be removed from any future release. Since it is not paid, is it unprofessional? Contrary to the anarchical idea of hundreds of people dispersed around the world working on incrementally improving a program, each project has a committee of leaders who have a final say on what improvements get included in the "official" version of the pro-gram. This unquestioned authority of project leaders is sometimes expressed by saying that they are "benevolent dictators, while a more appropriate description of the task of project leaders (other than their contributions as writers of code) is that their role is the creation of a community supporting a pro-ject. Examples Ubuntu, Firefox, Apache! So what exactly makes Open Source better? The ability of freely changing and adapting a given piece of software, particularly production-level software, allows the formation of development communities within which many of the bugs that are part and parcel of any complex program can be rapidly discov-ered and fixed! This communitybased debugging results in software that can be conclusively shown to be more resilient against malfunction than commercially available programs. In addition to this, it gives enthusiasts total freedom to carry a project forward, even when the founder may have given up on it. Finally, distributing software in the form of source code allows users to stop being passive consumers and get actively involved in the evolution of a given product. Ending on a note of clichéd philosophy, all I can say is: keep an open mind and you will understand open source.

6 The IPad world

7 Page 7 Mind Bogglers Let us C! How good are you at C? Predict the right output of this program and you ll know!

8 Page 8 Bet you didn t know! A modern high power Computer graphic card contains more than 2500 cores with an architecture of 28 nm There are 323 official releases of Linux distros till now. Though un-officially, a linux distro is made every 3 days! What exactly is 404?? The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. The web site hosting server will typically generate a "404 Not Found" web page when a user attempts to follow a broken or dead link; hence the 404 error is one of the most recognizable errors users can find on the web. What is the difference between UNIX and Linux? 1. Linux is an open source, free to use Kernel widely used for computer hardware and software, game development, tablet PCS, mainframes etc. Unix is an operating system commonly used in internet servers, work-stations and PCs by Solaris, Intel, HP etc. 2. Linux is a Unix clone written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely -knit team of hackers across the Net. 3. It aims towards POSIX compliance. The first mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963; it consisted of a hard wooden shell and two clunky metal wheels.

9 Page 9 TechStuff Dropbox Making Pen drives obsolete since 2008 The habit of forgetting the USB Flash Drive at home brought us the idea of what we know today as DROPBOX service which offers cloud storage and file synchronization. Dropbox allows users to create a special folder on each of their computers, which it then synchronizes so that it appears to be the same folder (with the same contents) regard-less of which computer is used to view it. Files placed in this folder are also accessible through a website and mobile phone applications. Speaking about its business model, it uses a freemium model where users are offered a free account with a set storage size and paid subscriptions for accounts with more capacity. Pondering over the technology used by Dropbox, one comes to know that both its server and desktop client soft-ware are primarily written in Python. Dropbox client sup-ports synchronization and sharing along with personal stor-age. It supports multiuser version control, enabling several users to edit and re-post files without overwriting versions. This version history is paired with the use of Delta encod-ing technology. When a file in a user's Dropbox folder is changed, it only uploads the pieces of the file that are changed when synchronising. It uses Amazon's S3 storage system to store the files. It also uses SSL transfers for syn-chronization and stores the data via AES-256 encryption. There are official and unofficial Dropbox add-ons, mostly created by the Dropbox community. These add-ons are both in the form of web services such as SendToDropbox (which allows users to files to their Dropboxes), Backup Box (which facilitates online backup of FTP, Git, MySQL, and other services to Dropbox accounts) and desktop applica-tions such as MacDropAny (which allows users to sync any folder on their computer with Dropbox). There is also a web service and browser extension called cloudhq for Dropbox which allows its users to synchronize Google Docs with files in Dropbox storage and also to edit Drop-box documents in the browser.

10 Page 10 X WINDOWS SYSTEM (X11) It is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and rich input device capability for networked computers. It creates a hardware abstraction layer where software is written to use a generalized set of commands, allowing for device independence and reuse of programs on any computer that implements X. The 'X' was developed in MIT (Boston) in It s the whole new GUI for the seven shells of Linux kernel. Also, Mac has found support for X Windows system, as it also contains Ubiquity. Ubiquity is an application through which you can install Linux based OS in your system. When we think of a Linux based OS, we either hear terms like "Unity" or "Gnome" or "KDE". These words represent nothing but different GUIs for Linux based Operating systems. All developer com-munities have adopted a specific routine for development of operating systems. For example, Ubuntu follows "Unity" desktop as a standard for their versions of Linux environment. Fedora follows KDE desk-top as standard, Linux Mint 14 follows "Cinnamon" desktop. All the working of the operating system de-pends on the Kernel rather than the GUI package.the GUI layer above the CLI layer handles the hardware level of the GUI, managing the input from the keyboard, mouse, and output to monitors, etc. Basically, it handles how things are drawn to the screen, what is drawn on the screen is controlled by a windows man-ager. Ultimately, it's a matter of choice which platform you would want to use. Each provides a large number of applications that run under them, using their framework. Also important to know is that multiple windows managers can be running at the same time (Enlightenment and be used under Gnome, etc), but that's typi-cally outside the need of normal users. Attempts have been made to regularize the programming in all of these GUI. For instance, Freedesktop.org is a software project aimed at developing shared technology standards for the X Window System. They provide common protocols like System Tray Protocol Specification, standard that allows developers to write a program that will work in KDE, GNOME, Fluxbox and other desktops who follow the Freedesktop recommendations. Finally, the best option to follow is to take a stable Linux kernel, customize it according to your GUI requirements and construct the OS. System requirements for various X Windows systems:

11 Page 11 MCUG on the run!! MCUG Activities conducted so far: Tech Debates on Linux vs Wndows vs Mac IE10 vs Chrome vs Firefox Sessions on Assembly Programming Web Designing Events held Linuxication