GSoC/GCI Archive
GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2009

Pardus

Web Page: http://en.pardus-wiki.org/SummerOfCode2009Ideas

Mailing List: gsoc@pardus.org.tr

The participating organization is Pardus (http://www.pardus.org.tr). Pardus is a Linux distribution development project under the auspices of TUBITAK UEKAE. TUBITAK (The National Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) UEKAE (National Research Institute for Electronic and Cryptography) is a government-run research institute in Turkey. TUBITAK (http://www.tubitak.gov.tr) is the scientific research funding organization of Turkey - a la NSF, and UEKAE is one of the research institutes of TUBITAK - a la Max Planck. TUBITAK UEKAE is located in Gebze, ca. 50 km from Istanbul, and has offices in Ankara as well. TUBITAK UEKAE has more than 500 researchers working in the fields of information security and cryptography. Pardus project has a triad of goals: Developing Linux distribution for widespread use in Turkey and elsewhere, to have some sound financial sustainability even though the mother organization is a not-for-profit, and finally to develop a FOSS ecosystem in Turkey and elsewhere to innovate in Linux and related technologies. Pardus, the distribution, is the main tool to achieve these goals, and has, in turn, three fundamental requirements: Having full Turkish (i.e. mostly UTF-8) support, ease of use and installation, and a human-centric and task-based design approach (instead of a technology-centric and tool-based one). Pardus project has been launched in Fall 2003 and the technical roadmap has been laid of in Fall 2004. The Pardus developers consist of 15 TUBITAK UEKAE employed core developers (10 full-time, 2 part-time) and more than 30 community developers. The product of the project, Pardus, is a free operating system, main pieces of which (and all the code developed within the Pardus project) are distributed under GPL license.

Projects

  • Bug Reporting Tool for KDE4 A KDE 4 application to help non-technical users diagnose and report bugs and issues. This application will provide the following: a Bug Report assistant with automatic inclusion of command dumps and configuration files and a GUI front-end for crash reporting on Bugzilla. There are two notable projects that strive this functionality: Apport and abrt. This project's goal is to improve on the usability and portability of either and further extend it to fill Pardus's view of the issue.
  • Fingerprint Authentication Support Add fingerprint authentication support to Pardus. Integrate fingerprint scanning into KDM through PAM, utilizing libfprint. Write plugins for both KDM and PAM to ensure complete interoperability. On top of that, make a GUI system that would be integrated into the existing TASMA user-manager app. Ensure that all of these work seamlessly through the existing COMAR backend.
  • OpenOffice.org Turkish Grammar Support The aim of this project to add grammar support for Turkish language, and write an Office Suite for Open Office. The suggested language checker, Language Tool is a corpus level rule-based language checker that will find errors for which a rule is defined in its XML configuration files. Rules for more complicated errors will be written in Java.
  • PAM Face Authentication Face Authentication is an alternative to the commonly used password authentication scheme. The only open source alternative for Linux Desktops was developed during last year summer of code http://code.google.com/p/pam-face-authentication/ , A KDE4 Port , and integration with KDM and some more features are needed , to enlarge the user base.
  • Web based image creation tool for Pardus The aim of this project is to create a web based application for building customized CDs and ready-to-run images for VMs. Web based UI and services can be built with Python. For image building backend, Pardusman - Pardus' own CD image creator which uses PiSi and COMAR frameworks - can be used as a starting point. Virtual machine (may be Parallels, VMware, Xen, Microsoft Virtual PC, QEMU, Usermode Linux, CoLinux, Virtual Iron, VirtualBox or other virtualization technology) image building parts are to be developed from scratch, while most of the installation or live media creation features are complete in Pardusman.