Thursday, October 11, 2007

BOSS GNU/Linux Distribution

My friend, Peri, pointed out the BOSS GNU/Linux distribution to me. When I visited the link I was glad to see that the distribution is developed by Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which comes under the Department of Information Technology. So this can be considered as an official distribution of the Government of India!

Two days back I downloaded the live CD of this distribution. It booted up without any problems. And the default desktop was GNOME. This is what they say in their first page,
Made specifically for the Indian environment , it consists of a pleasing Desktop environment coupled with Indian language support and other packages that are most relevant for use in the government domain.
After reading this, my expectation was that, it would be easy to change the language settings of the desktop. I wanted to see the desktop in Hindi and Tamil languages. But even after one hour of trying I couldn't figure it out. Obviously I am not looking at the right places. Anyway, I will be trying this distribution many more times in the future and provide feedback so that they can improve it further.

If you haven't tried it, do give it a try.

2 comments:

Gulshan said...

Something like the BOSS was needed, in fact,we should have had this quite sometime back. I hope it has good language support for Indian languages, many people can be benefited by this.

anna said...

Hi Gulshan, That was my initial thought. During my short exposure of BOSS I found that it is in the initial stages and has a long way to go. I hope they will keep working on it till it is stable and usable by the general public. -anna