Pakistan offers open source training toolkit

Article from www.linux.com

Tuesday March 20, 2007 (08:01 PM GMT)

By: Fouad Riaz Bajwa

Pakistan is the third largest low-cost IT-enabled and offshore business processes outsourcing services provider in Asia after India and China. The country's Open Source Resource Center (OSRC), a project of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology, has developed and released a FOSS resource kit entitled "OSS Training Toolkit," originally put together in order to facilitate OSRC's own training workshops in Pakistan. The toolkit contains step-by-step manuals in six modules covering various Free and Open Source Software applications. All the content is available in printed manual form and as OpenDocument (.odt), Portable Document Format (.pdf), and Microsoft Word (.doc) files for download.


The toolkit covers databases, application servers, desktop applications, office productivity suites, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) software, as well as open source desktop applications for both Linux and Microsoft Windows. Along with the manuals, the toolkit provides a set of CDs that includes two Linux distributions, Ubuntu Linux Desktop and Fedora Server, as well as the other applications.

The toolkit's curriculum has been planned and laid out in such a manner that anyone from a basic to novice user can learn and benefit from it. It has been released under open source licenses through the OSRC Web site so that individuals and organizations interested in migrating from proprietary to open source networks can freely download, distribute, use, and modify the toolkit and its related CDs.