lawgon: remington keyboard

lawgon (

lawgon) wrote,
@ 2006-08-29 06:56:00

remington keyboard
Meet Mr Justice Yatinder Singh, sitting judge in the Allahabad high court and a linux geek. He has converted his fellow judges and his court to linux. And like everyone who moves to linux in the government domain, hit a hurdle with the remington keyboard. The remington keyboard is the old typewriter keyboard in the various indian languages and lakhs of government employees have been using it - and they expect to continue using it even when they shift to computers. But no linux distro has it. We faced the problem in tamil and were able to use scim to create the layout which is now working fine. And thanks to Gora and Karunakar, linux in Hindi also has it - and Justice Singh has kindly agreed to test it free of cost. Its however annoying to note that neither Redhat nor Novell who are the major suppliers of linux to the government have bothered to implement the remington keyboard. Doze has had it for years!

(Post a new comment)

Remington Keyboard Maps and their inclusion

sankarshan
2006-08-29 02:35 am UTC (link)

Thanks for pointing out that the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not have them. Yes, it does not.

The upcoming FC6 has them included and I guess Red Hat would be releasing an update for FC5. The maps are useful when SCIM is used as an input method "magic" and not for IIIMF (which was the earlier IM Framework Red Hat adopted). You might just want to check upstream and validate if more Remington maps for other languages need to be developed and pushed there.

(Reply to this)

Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards....

ramkrsna
2006-08-29 02:59 am UTC (link)

Every State board sets, its own keyboard standards...of course spending thousands just for setting up committies.....which over the years have resulted in .... Nudi, Tamil99, Anjil and the distros shipping different input mechanisms xkb, UIM and the more popular Inscript, which TDIL and CDAC tried to standardise but have failed. Now that most the distros are going towards uniformity by implementing Free Desktop standards like SCIM, keyboard layouts look relatively easier to implement in different states.

AFAIK most OS companies in India, as Governments are their biggest revenue getter. if they wanna survive they got to support all these cross cultural standards. Governments on the other hand *MUST* demand local standards conformance. I stress *MUST* coz most of the government deals, are very reluctant on the standards. Tenders they call for..end up to being, a particular spec from a popular product whitepaper from the Mega Corporations.

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Re: Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards....

lawgon
2006-08-29 03:22 am UTC (link)

it is about remington and not about govt standards - it is a moot question as to whether the govt knows what keyboard layout it's typists use. But lakhs of skilled typists are now being reduced to newbies with the lack of Remington keyboard. Not all employers are as sensitive as Justice Singh, the rest of them just force the typists to 'upgrade' themselves, thus wasting a huge resource created over years. And i would guess that every other language also needs remington, so why doesnt Redhat just go and do it for all 22 languages (now 20 as hindi and tamil are done). Last i heard, an attempt was going on for Bengali also, but I dont know what happened. Anyway, from what I hear, the govt of West Bengal is uninterested in FOSS.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards....

sankarshan
2006-08-29 03:46 am UTC (link)

"Anyway, from what I hear, the govt of West Bengal is uninterested in FOSS." - umm...wherefrom did you conclude thus ?

"so why doesnt Redhat just go and do it for all 22 languages (now 20 as hindi and tamil are done)" - Hmm...now would you file a bugzilla report for this ? Alternatively, if you do know folks who have already started work for the remaining 20 languages can you blog their contacts ?

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

Re: Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards....

lawgon
2006-08-29 03:53 am UTC (link)

i attended a lecture on FOSS given by Debashish Desh who is the minister for IT govt of West Bengal. He is all for FOSS, but not very sure what FOSS is. Generally seemed to think that it is free (in terms of INR). He was unable to shed any light on the policy of the govt of West Bengal in this matter.

As for folks to do Remington in other languages, the best people to poke are Karunakar and G0sub

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards.... sankarshan 2006-08-29 07:32 am UTC (link)
	Err who is Debashish Desh (MinIT GoWB) ? I thought DebeshD was the MinT. I wish right at this point in time I could tell you otherwise on the GoWB IT policy - but I cannot. I guess the MinIT and GoWB would be releasing a revised on soon. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards.... lawgon 2006-08-29 08:42 am UTC (link)
	dont understand a word of this comment (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	jace 2006-08-29 12:50 pm UTC (link)
	He's on some confidential contract with WB government that he can't speak about yet. ;) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lawgon 2006-08-29 12:58 pm UTC (link)
	then it cant be FOSS - foss is open. Unless he is afraid of being assassinated by $bill (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	jace 2006-08-29 01:08 pm UTC (link)
	But what is "open"? FOSS only requires sharing source with the binary. You're not required to share the binary with all, and if you're not sharing the binary, there's no need to share source. It's perfectly legal to have a confidential open source agreement. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lawgon 2006-08-29 01:18 pm UTC (link)
	not a confidential foss agreement. The govt of west bengal should be discussing this openly on a wiki or some such thing. Open Source is something else. Of course we take what we get - if they feel happy discussing in private with Redhat, that is better than nothing. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	jace 2006-08-29 01:22 pm UTC (link)
	I don't think they're required to make everything open. For example, I'm on a project where only a pre-screened list of companies were invited to bid for the tender. Besides, the way these things work, the tender is really just the formalisation of the process. It's not the beginning of a project. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lawgon 2006-08-29 02:00 pm UTC (link)
	as far as I know, where national security is not affected, the whole process of finalising requirements, calling for tenders and bidding is supposed to be open and transparent with as much public participation as possible. That it doesnt happen is another matter - but it should happen. After all, it is public money that is being spent. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	sankarshan 2006-08-31 03:46 pm UTC (link)
	You said: "if they feel happy discussing in private with Redhat, that is better than nothing." Not really - see my earlier comment. (Reply to this)(Parent)

sankarshan
2006-08-31 03:56 pm UTC (link)

At the GPLv3 meet a curious chain of questions revolved around whether organisations can fork projects for internal use, develop and apply patches and then maintain it against upstream changes. Or, in other words, if the application (binary and source) is for consumption within the organisation (strictly) then is it GPL compliant not to give the source of the patches/binary. The answer to that was "yes".

The twist comes if you consider a case where the government customises a FOSS operating system for a deployment. The consumption is strictly within government yet the development is funded by taxpayer funds - where does that leave us ?

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	Re: Its not about Remington, its about the Govt. Standards.... sankarshan 2006-08-31 03:44 pm UTC (link)
	Last I heard (and was re-iterated at the GPLv3 meet) that the GoWB is considering the revision of the IT policy. The earlier one is at the site of the MinIT so I can fairly assume that the current one would be put up there too. For what it is worth, the FSF has done a few representations at the state level already. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	link to download remington keyboard layout (Anonymous) 2008-03-19 10:55 am UTC (link)
	from where can i download the remington keyboard layout and how to use it? Amit (Reply to this)(Thread)

	Re: link to download remington keyboard layout lawgon 2008-03-20 12:31 am UTC (link)
	http://nrcfosshelpline.in/code/wiki/TamilRemingtonLayout (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: link to download remington keyboard layout (Anonymous) 2008-04-21 11:14 am UTC (link)
	I want Hindi remington keyboard. Amit (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: link to download remington keyboard layout lawgon 2008-04-21 04:25 pm UTC (link)
	contact karunakar at indlinux dot org (Reply to this)(Parent)

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