1. Linux For Linguists
Rakesh 'arky' Ambati
www.braillewithoutborders.org
SCL 2009
Hyderabad

2. Who's Talking
● Works for Braille Without Borders to develop
accessible technologies for blind
● Using and contributing to Free software since
college days
● Founder of FSUG­Bangalore
● Member of Ubuntu Bug Squad Team
● Learning Computational Linguistics by doing it

3. What is Linux ?
● Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)
Operating System
● Developed by worldwide hacker community
● Efficient use of resources
● Runs on every kind of hardware, even outdated
hardware
● Software for every purpose
● Secure, No Virus No Malware

4. Linux in Research
● UNIX spawned the Internet. Linux runs the
internet now.
● Linux is extendable to your needs
● Rich Toolset
● Collaborative development
● Powerful data processing capabilities

5. The Toolbox
● Standard UNIX commands
● Shell Scripting with Bash, csh, ksh
● Regular Expressions (regex)
● Programming Languages
Perl, Python, Lisp (Ruby, Java ...)
● NLP Modules
CPAN (NLP::*), Python Modules, NLTK

6. The Toolbox continued
● Unicode standards support
● Power text editors
Vi, Emacs and lot more
● Typesetting Programs
TeX, LaTeX (LyX editor)
● Version Control
cvs, svn, git

7. How to get Linux
● Download from Internet
● Ubuntu can send you one
http://shipit.ubuntu.com
● Ask your local Linux User Group(LUG)
● Take your copy here before you leave
● And don't forget to share it

8. How to Contribute
● Report Bugs
● Submit patches
● Translate the software
● Write documentation
● Be a Linux advocate
● Be a local Linux guru

9. Thank You
Any Questions?