First Look: BOSS - The Indianized Linux


After a quick review of BOSS - Bharat Operating System Solutions - Live CD v 1.0 (Tarang), my final verdict:

Impressive, Easy to use, out-of-the-box Indic support.

BOSS is Linux operating system distribution, brought to you by CDAC to address your Indic Computing problems. It incorporates all kinds of Indic language resources. It has Pre-configured and Pre-enabled SCIM (Smart Common Input Method) for following Indic Languages :

Language Available Keyboard:

Hindi : Inscript, Phonetic, Remington

Bengali : Inscript, Probhat (phonetic)

Gujarati : Inscript, Phonetic

Kannada : Inscript, KGP

Malayalam : Inscript

Nepali : Romanized, Traditional

Punjabi : Inscript, Jhelum, Phonetic, Remington

Tamil : Inscript, Phonetic, Remington

Telugu : Inscript

Marathi : Inscript

All these keyboards are pre-installed and a particular language keyboard can be enabled with a simple mouse click.

Further, it contains special localized version of OpenOffice - called BhartiyaOO. In addition to that, you can find a nice, document format conversion tool. With this tool you can convert proprietary Microsoft documents to OpenOffice format and that too in bulk. BOSS has comprehensive user manual. It has Plug and Play USB and Blue-tooth support. However, multimedia support is lacking in many count. It has kept itself steer clear by not including proprietary media codec. But, there are methods given in the manual to how to install them.

BOSS has full NTFS read-write support, and when you boot through its live CD, all such hard disk partitions gets mounted in rw mode. It also has 3D desktop support through OpenGL, but your hardware must be advanced enough to display 3D.

Installation of additional application or up-gradation of applications are easy. You can use apt for debian packages or alien for rpm packages.

By default, BOSS boot in English environment, and you need to logout to change language the environment. It will be better if the option for language selection will be given during boot process - implemented in similar multilingual Indian Linux distribution - Rangoli.

You can download BOSS live CD v. 1.0 from Here. You can visit BOSS wiki Here

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

really a boss! but dear c-dac, would you please include full multimedia support? in india where internet connectivity is still not available at some places, how people install the proprietary stuff.

my suggestion is better use pclinuxos, till boss comes with multimedia.