A few enterprising Indian groups have decided to make Linux easily accessible to non-English speaking public by creating distributions for them. IndLinux is one of the more prominent Linux distributions I came across, which supports Indian languages like Hindi, Oriya, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. It’s a Live CD based on Morphix, which in turn is a derivative of Debian.
When you first boot from the CD, you can choose from different languages. You can also choose to use KDE or GNOME if you select Hindi. The other languages boot up into the GNOME desktop environment. Not all menus and programs are translated into the regional languages, though, and this differs from language to language.
You can switch between languages for typing using a menu in the KDE taskbar, though you can’t do so in GNOME.This is no scaled-down operating system, a large number of programs are included. There’s everything from browsers and text editors to games and even videoconferencing tools.
A couple of very important programs are missing, though like there’s no Firefox, but you will find the Mozilla Web browser. The KDE documentation, for those who need it, has topic names in Hindi, but the text is all in English. Translating it all would be a mammoth task, I’d imagine.
People who are used to English versions of Linux as their Desktops might find using the regional languages a little confusing, but newcomers to computers and to Linux might find this a lot easier. IndLinux sets out in the right direction. It’s really good for people who want to use computers but don’t have good command over the English language. It doesn’t have support for all the regional languages in our country, but the IndLinux site links to teams developing and translating programs to other languages. Perhaps future releases will implement more languages.
Download and Try IndLinux Rangoli