I just heard from my father that his department (at least) is going to use Kairali GNU/Linux. It seems to be a Fedora Core 1 (*enfegh*) with a bunch of localizations - like malayalam fonts and input support for malayalam. The back of the CD even contains information about GPL - "This program is Free Software. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License".
Better than just the two CDs being distributed bu it.kerala.gov, they have a huge training manual full of screenshots. I had my sister read some random pages in the manual (180-odd pages) - it had random things from how to play an mp3 using xmms, vidoes using xine and a lot about how to use OpenOffice.org. As much as I hate distro proliferation - a standard, cheap and locally supported distro for government departments in Kerala might actually make a significant impact on the expenditure on IT. I have a strange feeling that the recent budget crunch might mean a good thing for FOSS in Kerala - not to mention the left pressure to avoid paying MNCs.
By the way, if you are Foss in Education person, you might want to look at Kerala 9th and 10th standard syllabus (and question bank) - SSLC IT question paper [HTML]. Kerala always leads the way, but sort of loses it half-way through (see keltron, technopark...). Let's hope this is not one of those cases :)
--If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches, they will take sandwiches.
-- Lord Boyd-orr
Yesterday night, I sat down at my box and decided to hack a bit of DBUS. My aim was to send a string across, do something and send something back. More correctly, RPC over D-BUS. Here's the code in python (server and client).
def helloworld(msg): return "Hello World";
obj = dbus.Object("/t3/s1", dbus.Service("t3.s1"),[helloworld])
gtk.main() # mainloop
bus = dbus.Bus(dbus.Bus.TYPE_SESSION)
obj = bus.get_service('t3.s1').get_object('/t3/s1', 't3.s1')
print obj.helloworld()
Pretty simple, huh ? Here's a link to a more functional version - with things like passing data structures via the RPC api. D-BUS looks a lot more promising than using Orbit2 brokers. I have to see how functional this is for multi-user systems, where ICE made sense (and DCOP).
And for those six lines - I'd have used lamda: "Hello World"; in place of the method and cut down a line. But the remote method name is picked up from the __name__ of the method (for lambda it turns out to be '<lambda>'). Python really rocks if you want method meta-data.