Indian Government Keen on Open Source

manugarg writes "The Indian government is distributing free CDs of localized open sorce softwares like Firefox, OpenOffice.org etc. to encourage the use of computers across the country. ZDNet reports, 'The Indian government's decision to ship free software in this way likely will be a blow to Microsoft, which plans to release a low-cost version of Windows in India soon. Microsoft originally hoped to release its Windows XP Starter Edition--a low-cost, feature-restricted version of Windows XP--by the end of March, but it's now aiming for a June release.'"

Comments

Re:India likes OS software

[jpu8086]

Those 22 languages (AFAIK, there are only 18 official languages, but maybe this has changed recently) are the ones spoken by at least one million people.

There are many other "minor" languages spoken by other people.

Mind you, these are not dialects. These are full-blown unique languages with unique written scripts (however, many of them do share common traits).

It is amazing how we are able to maintain a democracy, let alone a country.

Downloadable version

[TheWingThing]

The Indian language CD (currently, Tamil only) can be downloaded from http://www.ildc.in/ - the website maintained by the government. But it's already slowed down, try after a few days. Most SW is available for both Linux and Windows.

Re:Why Linux Sucks

[ScrewMaster]

Well. And then there's Linspire.

Re:India likes OS software

[The Original Yama]

Off the top of my head, India has about 1,600 (yes, that's ONE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED) recognised languages and dialects, and probably many more.

From the CIA World Factbook:

English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India but is not an official language

Re:Windows vs Linux, my experience so far

[smash]

* search for obscure drivers hosted on sites shut-down years ago. * delve into myriads of configuration files (and or GUIs) each with its own (sometimes arbitrary) syntax, even for the most trivial app. * risk messing your OS with a recompile. * read dozens of pages worth of howto webpages that may or may not apply to your machine, man pages and non-sensical error logs among other things, none of which are sure to be worth your time (either because you are looking in the wrong place or because it's something completely arbitrary).

Please... my experience (9 years) is that Linux supports old obscure hardware *better*, in the standard kernel. The vast majority of the kernel these days is modular too, so there's no need to recompile - just load the module.

And as to hosing your machine with a bad compile - well... its far easier for your machine to be hosed by windows update.

I've had more random "not work" issues through windows update (media player in particular, that I could only fix with a complete o/s reinstall - go MS for making it not uninstallable), than i've had problems with Linux that way.

Hose the kernel? Boot from your distribution CD and copy it back over.

MOST bad compiles won't produce a kernel at all, so if the compile fails your boot kernel is unaffected.

Go download Ubuntu or Knoppix, and see what the current state of Linux is, rather than basing your assumptions on distributions from 5-6 years ago.

smash.