PRAGOTI

Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) Linux – a review

Boss Linux – Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS), developed by C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing), has released Version 3.0 of the Debian GNU/Linux based operating system recently. Bosslinux Desktop, also nick named Tejas has support for Indian languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bodo, Urdu, Kashmiri, Maithili, Konkani and Manipuri. This is the singlemost striking and the positive feature about this operating system. C-DAC has shown keen interest in free/open source software with its various initiatives over a period of time but one can easily say that this step of releasing a complete operating system with support for 18 Indian languages is a remarkable one.

Bosslinux is based on the famous Debian linux which is considered to be one of the stable distributions among the numerous linux distritbutions available today. Bosslinux provides both Gnome and KDE desktop environment and even offers some advanced graphical effects like 3D environment. Even if it is at the expense of the hardware resources, it is nice to see some “glitter” happening in linux, which has been considered only for geeks playing around in terminals. It has the standard set of applications for everyday usage like,

* a localised version of Openoffice called Bharateeya Openoffice
* Firefox 3.0 for web browsing
* Thunderbird for email
* Pidgin for instand messaging
* a PDF viewer
* SCIM for typing in various languages
* GIMP for graphics
* Camorama webcam viewer
* Bluetooth support
* Xsane for scanning documents
* Good printers support etc

For a lay user, Bosslinux has everything in it to get them to work right away. For those familiar with any popular distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu, you have no surprises in terms of available packages and features. That brings up the question of difference between the existing versions of linux and Bosslinux. One very significant difference of course, is the support for Indian languages. Tested with Tamil language, one can easily navigate around the computer and perform most of the tasks with the availability of tamil terms in the interface. But there are also applications where some of the terms still appearing in English, probably waiting to be translated. This issue of a mixture of tamil and english in the interfaces is common to other distributions like Ubuntu too.

So why would one switch to Bosslinux, either from Windows or Ubuntu? Well, the reasons to switch from windows desktop to a linux desktop are well established now compared to say, five years ago. The linux desktop has established itself as a viable, attractive, easy to use, good hardware support (do we still remember the old days of having to compile drivers for a network card), availability of a wide range of applications, safe and secure, crash free and yes, all free! One would rather buy a decent 3D graphics card for all those games instead of having to buy a license for the basic operating system.

C-DAC being a government agency, it is quite possible that it can try and convince Government institutions to switch over from MS Windows to Bosslinux. The availability of a whole, free operating system with a suite of common applications makes it certainly attractive for the Government institutions and C-DAC might well succeed in this front. In this direction, it has already signed an MoU with ELCOT (Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd.), a state government institution which promotes and supports IT industries and e-governance initiatives in Tamilnadu. There are other extraneous limitations to the level of adoption of a free operating system in the Government at various levels like a proper support mechanism, availability of specific applications, a conducive IT ecosystem at the institutional level and also the pressure from software commercial giants. One has to wait and see how C-DAC manages to convince the Central and State Governments in adopting this “Indian” operating system.

As for switching from Ubuntu to Bosslinux, I am not really sure I would do that unless I get “nationalistic” about using an Indian operating system. Being an ubuntu user for the past few years, there are hardly any reasons that would convince me towards a switch to Bosslinux. Both are derived from Debian, both have unfinished Indian languages support, same interfaces and lots of other similarities. That infact raises an interesting question of why this massive effort of developing a whole new operating system at all instead of pooling resources towards localising an existing standard linux distribution like Ubuntu, for example? I don't see any reason other than that it might help convince government institutions if there is an indigenously developed Indian distro, giving a sense of local ownership (nationalistic again?). But, would that alone justify such a resource intensive effort?

The success of the Bosslinux depends largely on the community it would build around it in terms of users, developers, translators, testers and integrators. Also the relationship of Bosslinux community to already existing vast communities involved in localisation (like Indlinux www.indlinux.org) and development would matter a lot. Indlinux community had at one point expressed concerns about the agreed standards on translation terms and their quality, computing language usage issues, unicode implementation for certain languages apart from the colloborative nature of C-DAC's work in the FOSS realm. Though such fears were allayed by assurances from C-DAC, it would be important for C-DAC to be pro-active in engaging, sharing and contributing, in essence keep with the FOSS spirit, to sustain this initiative. It needs to identify itself with and organically participate in the FOSS community by ensuring the upstream integration of the localisation efforts of indian languauges in popular linux distributions like Fedora and Debian. Unless it does make such conscious effort to be part of the larger FOSS community, Bosslinux would get restricted within the Government domain, becoming an operating system developed for the Government sector by a Government agency.