Babar Haq

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Cvs and gCvs on Fedora Core 5

This is to discourage Fraz from reading my blog:) Anyway recently I installed CVS server and client on a customers Fedora Core 5 system.

As for the server I followed my own quick Howto from here . The differences were that Fedora Core 5 doesent have xinetd super server by default. I installed it like this
# yum install xinetd.

Secondly the cvsadmin link in my howto is broken. So I managed to download a working rpm from here

As for the cvs client I used gCvs. Its rpm can be downloaded and installed from here. Though the installation went fine but due to some GCC compatibilty it would not run. For that I had to install some libstdc related packages. This is all you have to do for yum enabled systems:
# yum install compat-libstdc++-33 compat-libstdc++-296

Thats all :)

Friday, June 02, 2006

E government in Pakistan

Recently, I have been visiting a lot of Pakistani government web sites. Some of the sites are quite remarkable. The only problems seems to be the regular maintenance. It is not as frequent as it should be. For example Pakistan Post is comprehensive and well laid out but was last update on February 17th,2006. Also, the broken links leave a very bad impression like searching for a postal code of a specific place lands you on a "IIS error page".

On the other hand, the official government portal is pretty boring. You cannot really find much on it besides an abundance of forms. A lot of these web sites are undertaken by Electronic government directorate.

Interestingly, according to United Nation Pakistan's literacy rate is less than 50%. This ofcourse includes people who can only read and write their names in Urdu. This at the same time implies that people who can read and write English fluently in Pakistan is not greater then 20. So all these web sites in English are useless for common man. The joint efforts made by EGD and curlp can make a difference. Curlp is a research organization at my ex university NUCES, developing Urdu fonts recently released under GPL. There is a seperate page for their joint efforts but as usuall that too was last updated on 18th August 2004. :)