CHENNAI: A standard-issue government building inside the Madras Institute of Technology (MIT) college campus serves as the hub of the National Resource Centre for Free and Open-source Software (NRC-FOSS). Here, one line of software code at a time, computing is being made accessible to the non- English speaking population.
Inside the sparsely furnished computing labs that look like any Net café, where removing footwear before entering is still mandatory much like labs at the beginning of the computing era where such steps were adopted to prevent dust from affecting hardware, sits M Ramadoss, an associate at the NRC-FOSS, who is part of this slow change.
In 2006, as a private project he enrolled as an Ubuntu member and initiated the Ubuntu project’s Tamil team. Ubuntu is a fast growing free Linux distribution that has become popular for consumer computing because of its easy to use interface that parallels Windows.
“The Tamil software industry has been around for about 30 years now and for a long time Tamil software meant Tamil fonts and keyboard drivers,” says Manoj Annadurai, CEO of CK Technologies, a Tamil software company. Although a number of word processing related software applications are available in Tamil now, the basic operating system itself has not been readily available in Tamil.
The Ubuntu Tamil operating system being developed now, along with the BOSS operating system, launched last year by CDAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) and marketed by NRC-FOSS, are unique efforts in making a Tamil operating system available off the shelf.
The move to make Linux-based software available in Tamil started in 1997-98 with the ‘Tamil Linux’ yahoo group. Now there are many such local and international groups that are working on the issue.
The demand for Tamil software is restricted to the government and publishers, “The government requires automatic translation, voice recognition and defence linguistic analysis software, while the publishers require word processing and page making,” said Ramadoss.
Those who need the Tamil operating system are those who cannot afford a computer, he said.
“The real problem is this…” he says pointing to the keyboard on his desk, “The keys are all in English and its usage demands knowledge of the Roman script.” Today most of Ubuntu’s operating system has been translated into Tamil and the latest version of the system is available almost entirely in Tamil and can simply be installed from a CD much like Windows.
Much of the translation has been done by a core group of about 10 people. To popularise Ubuntu in Tamil, the Tamil Ubuntu group will publish a user manual in Tamil by September 15 this year,
What is Ubuntu?
Ubuntu is a Linux-based operating system developed on sponsorship by Canonical Ltd. a company headquartered in Europe. It is a distribution or variant of the Debian Linux operating system. There are several other distributions like Ubuntu some of which are free to download and use, while others are not. Over a period of time Ubuntu has proved to be the most popular among these. The software is free to download, use and distribute. The company makes money by providing technical support services primarily to commercial users.
Ubuntu is a philosophy and in the Zulu language it means ‘humanity to others’.
The first version of Ubuntu was released in 2004 and new versions are released every 6 months. Currently the 10th version of Ubuntu named Jaunty Jackalope is in use, the next version named Karmic Koala will be released in October this year. Currently Ubuntu claims to have over 8 million users worldwide.
Although Windows remains the dominant operating system in terms of market share, the Linux desktop market is growing steadily. According the latest data from W3Counter, an organisation that tracks global web statistics, at least 2 per cent of all desktops that access the internet have a Linux based operating system.