Pardus
businessWeb Page: http://en.pardus-wiki.org/SummerOfCode2010Ideas
Mailing List: http://lists.pardus.org.tr/mailman/listinfo/gsoc
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 20 TUBITAK UEKAE employed core developers (18 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
- Application for WUBI-like Installer for Pardus This project will make users able to install Pardus directly from Windows(tm) without partitioning and coping with bootloaders etc. by creating a virtual disk image on Windows file system. My aim is to create a user-friendly installation wizard and prepare a stable release which is compatible with different Windows releases, different hardware and architectures.
- Implementing a Testing Framework for Pardus The aim of this project is to provide a common testing framework for Pardus to run all types of tests – hardware, unit or desktop and then being able to send the results back to the testing team. Under this project I would be developing a framework that would allow the creation, interpretation and execution of XML-based test-case files. This framework would be invaluable for the testing team, developers as well as Pardus users and the reports generated could be analyzed to fix bugs effectively
- Installation Support for Pardus Live CD Pardus Live CD currently doesn't have an installation option.Most of the new distros come with Installation option embedded with Live CD. The purpose of this project is to create such a Live CD that can also install Pardus on a hard drive on demand. Modifications on YALI and Pardusman are required mostly. It can greatly benefit to the users of Pardus by saving their Internet bandwidth and effort to download a separate installation CD each time when a new version of Pardus is released.
- Snapshot and Monitoring Tool for KDE4 Settings A Graphical User Interface in which users can simply backup and restore KDE applications' configuration files. This will help users who accidentally lose or corrupt their configuration files which cause several native KDE technologies and applications to fail like a disappearing panel or loss of accounts informations in KMail/Kopete, etc. Also, this user interface will show which setting(s) of the KDE applications change which options when, like a source control system.