Its not the first Linux distro to bring Indian Languages support. The first succsssfull distro was Indlinux. However, BOSS Linux (Bharat Operating System Solutions) is the first integrated and extremly usable Indian language distribution.

BOSS is a GNU/Linux distribution developed by C-DAC. BOSS 1.1 “Tarang”, which was released last month by the Indian government-sponsored National Resource Center for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS), includes several utilities and desktop enhancements, such as a document converter and the 3-D desktop Beryl, which make it a very usable distro, despite a few rough edges.

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To assist Indian language users, BOSS, or Bharat Operating System Solutions, includes BharateeyaOO, a localized version of OpenOffice.org in Hindi and Tamil. The distro also bundles the Smart Common Input Method (SCIM) which allows Indian-language users to input text in Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Bengali, Tamil, and Telgu.

In addition to the hard drive installation

version, the distro also has a live CD version. You can either download the distro or use the customized Debian Windows installer to install BOSS from within Windows over the Internet in a dual-boot configuration.

As it is supposed to be used in government offices, it packages almost all the essential softwares required for normal office and home usage. To list a few

• Firefox with Indic language printing support
• Thunderbird
• NTFS Read/Write
• Gnome 2.14
• BharatheeyaaOO (Localised OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 )
• Input Method - SCIM with Remington Keyboard Layout for Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi,and Marati
• Liferea – RSS/RDF Reader
• Migration Tool - Bulk Document converter and most important
• Netinstall usng windows boot loader, no need to burn CD.

BOSS offers three different CD’s to download.

1. Install CD,
2. Live CD
3. Utility CD.

Tarang impresses from the word go. First this appears a very well designed website offering easy and intutive navigation. BOSS is “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”.

BOSS Tarang Server Edition v1.0 will be released shortly.