Baishampayan Ghose is one of the founders of the Ubuntu India. He has been an active user & developer of Free & Open Source Software for as long as he can remember. He is currently very busy bootstrapping his startup oCricket.com.

In this conversation we talk about Ubuntu India and the latest features in the shiny new Ubuntu 8.10, released earlier this month.

Ujj: To start with, tell us something about Ubuntu, which is being talked about as *the* most popular distros in the open source world. How different is it from its counterparts?

GOSUB: Indeed, Ubuntu is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in the world right now. I think the most amazing thing about Ubuntu is the community. Right from the very beginning the Ubuntu community was welcoming towards new adopters of Ubuntu; people who have switched from Microsoft Windows, people with absolutely no idea about the very basic concepts of an UNIX-like operating system. While other communities would shoo them away or discourage them in many ways, the Ubuntu community would  painstakingly explain all the intricacies of the system and help them solve their problem. This was, in my  opinion something that set Ubuntu apart even from its very early days and it prevails now even today.

Of course the popularity of Ubuntu has a lot to do with the underlying technology and I think we need to thank the Debian project for that. Ubuntu is deeply intertwined with the Debian project and the relationship exists even today. The whole project management tool-chain of Ubuntu, Launchpad (http://launchpad.net) which was developed from scratch by Canonical also plays a major part in this. Launchpad is an excellent set of tools which comprises a BugTracker, a Localisation manager, a community Q&A system, a specifications management system, code hosting system and a lot more. It has tight integration with all the Ubuntu desktop applications and make the job of a bug reporter or translator easy. Lastly, Ubuntu’s various mailing lists, IRC channels provide an awesome mechanism for users to ask for help or coordinate projects in more or less real time. They are great. Ubuntu also has Local Community teams which coordinate projects, provide support, etc. in a region-specific way. So if you have problems in typing in Malayalam in Ubuntu, you might want to hop into the IRC channel of Ubuntu India (#ubuntu-in) and get help there, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, projects like Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, etc. are excellent too but Ubuntu kind of like caters to the `common-man’ among all computer users and that’s what really sets it apart.

Ujj:How is the response of people to Ubuntu in India? There is a Ubuntu India website that lists some projects but not much information is available there.

GOSUB: The response is impressive. A majority of GNU/Linux users in India use Ubuntu. But I must say that the rate adoption of GNU/Linux per se in India is still pretty low right now compared to countries like Brazil etc. This has probably something to do with our culture, but Indians are mostly happy in maintaining status quo and they usually don’t care about things like freedom, flexibility, technology, etc. Most of us are just happy with our (illegal?) copy of Windows and the gamut of proprietary software (almost all of them illegally acquired). Ubuntu India is the Local Community team here. We initially wanted to do some ambitious projects and progressed quite a bit too. But coordinating and maintaining critical-mass has been a problem here and that’s why a few of them are stalled even today. Having said that, there are quite a few Indians who contribute to Ubuntu on a daily basis; they either write code, or package software or report/fix bugs or translate applications or just go around helping others. They are really doing a great job on a personal level. We also try to create  awareness by conducting workshops, talks, etc. Those too are mostly done at the personal level but are great anyway. In all, the Ubuntu India community has been quite active ever since its inception around 3 and a half years back.

Ujj: Can you tell us more about, the working groups in India for Ubuntu, some projects they are under  taking, contributions to the main Ubuntu project etc? How can one start contributing to the project?

GOSUB:The oldest is the Ubuntu India Local Community (http://ubuntu-in.org).There are other language specific ones like the Ubuntu-IN Andhra Pradesh team and so on who mostly look into region/language specific issues. The Ubuntu-IN team initially was very active in fixing the support of Indic languages in Ubuntu. We played in pivotal role in improving the level of Indic language support in the 6.06 release. We coordinated with upstream project maintainers and made sure the state-of-the-art in terms of Indian language support was incorporated into the Ubuntu release. Since then it has been a continuous effort to polish the support. As I said above, a lot of people from Ubuntu-IN are contributing on a personal level and are doing a great job.
There is a detailed guide on how to contribute to Ubuntu and it’s here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu

Ujj: There are various flavors of Ubuntu right that focus on specific areas like eduUbuntu for education. Has someone tried to convince Schools or universities to start using them?

GOSUB: There have been sporadic efforts by independent groups in places like Kerala, West Bengal University of Technology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, etc. and they have been very successful. As far as I know there is no nationwide or organised movement to do this on a larger scale, but I guess it’s only a matter of time. The Free Software Foundation did a lot in Kerala to introduce the use of Free & Open Source Software in schools. They have been largely successful in this. I think at the moment it’s more pertinent to talk to the Govts of the states about this and convince them about the benefits of Free & Open Source Software.

Ujj: So what’s the latest in Ubuntu 8.10, anything specific to look out for?

GOSUB: Oh, there are a lot of new features apart from an upgrade to all the software packages. Here are some off the top of my head:
* Better WiFi, support for GPRS, 3G connections through the Network Manager
* Easy encrypted private directories - Lets you keep confidential data easy
* Play BBC content through Totem - Canonical worked with Collabora & BBC to get this working
* Support for Dell’s “Dynamic Kernel Module Support” - Automatically rebuild kernel modules when you install a new version so you won’t need to re-compile that custom kernel module the next time you upgrade your kernel
* Tabs in the Nautilus File manager
* Easily create a Guest Session to let your friend use your computer for checking email, etc. - The guest user is completely sandboxed and can not read documents from other users or store any data on disk.
* An very fresh new theme & lots more!

Ujj: OK just one last question :), I guess some of you will be there at FOSS later this year, anything specific to look out for there from our Ubuntu workgroups/developers.

GOSUB: I am assuming that you are talking about FOSS.in (the event is not called FOSS, but it’s FOSS.in). Yeah, a lot of us would be there like last year (I am not sure of attending myself). This year it’s going to be more contribution oriented than the past years, so they are going to have less talks and more “FOSS Workouts” where you fix a specific problem or write a specific feature for an application. I don’t see any Ubuntu specific ones right now, but hey, the final list is not out yet. Also, I believe the opportunity to meet the people from the community is not something to be missed.

Ujj: It was a very insightful conversation for me. Thanks a lot for your time!