Monthly Archives: May 2010

Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

On the road to an Indian language GNU/Linux OS

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The history of Indic localization of Linux (GNU/Linux …) may never be written down with the amount of detail that it deserves. Especially to ensure that the significant events are well recorded.

Lest we forget, with the help of sayamindu and karunakar I came across the following dates:

  • IndLinux Hindi v0.37 (Milan) released on October 2003. It was a LiveCD that allowed you to check out a localized GNU/Linux desktop environment, input and display
  • The AnkurBangla LiveCD was also released somewhat later that same year
  • From May 2004 onwards, the Utkarsh Project released and maintained Gujarati Localizations
  • In November 2004, Fedora Core 3 shipped and you could choose to boot into an Indic locale and get your work done. You can also check this page for the RHEL release that happened.
  • In 2006, the IndLinux project released Rangoli
  • In June 2007, Debian Etch was released with an installer localized in Indic languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil). As a consequence, Debian (and Ubuntu) users may experience a full Indic-localized system from scratch.

So, before you go and listen to folks talk about the “first Indian language GNU/Linux Operating System” on the media channels, keep these dates in mind.

Update: This does not in any way claim to be the only dates that are relevant. So, if you do recall the dates of releases from other groups working on Indic L10n on Linux, please feel free to leave them in comments with URLs if possible.

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Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

On the Goddard bus

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I installed Fedora 13 (Goddard) on two of my boxes. The profiles are here and here. On the X200 things worked out of the box, the only reason it took time was because I needed to back up the entire data on it before installation and then transfer it back. And, post install I’d to figure out which of the software I had in F12 before unleashing a massive yum install on the system. I wish there was a simple way to create a profile of applications and, thereon apply the profile to a freshly installed system to get the software just the way one desires.

On the HPMini210-1095TU, the wireless and the touchpad do not work yet. They aren’t much of an issue, though it would be nice to have them working and, suggestions are welcome.

The new release feels much snappier, the GNOME desktop looks good. A big thank you to all those who make it happen each time, on time.

Update: A new kernel, as indicated at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=590835 fixes the touchpad issue

 

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