As mentioned by SM and IDG, yesterday Kolkata had the honour to host the first Annual Indic Towel Conference (picture below).



We had detailed discussions on quite a few issues - one of which was our dream of a Grand Unified Indic Distro plan. Making a distro from scratch is definitely out of the question right now (we have a lot of better things to do), and so basically we would have to modify a *.deb based distro (Debian/UserLinux/Componentised Linux) or *.rpm based distro (Fedora/Mandrake/SuSE) or maybe Slack (apologies to Gentoo fans). Of these, Slack and Debian have ncurses based installers, which won’t do for Indic text rendering (Debian has a gtk2 installer frontend in the pipeline, but that seems to be quite far away right now). UserLinux also has plans about gtk2 (or rather, a GPE) based installer, but nothing substantial has emerged yet. So in the *.deb front, we are left with Componentised Linux, which uses Anaconda as the installer. Among the RPM based distros, Fedora seems to be the most well supported one in the Indic community, especially when we look at the translation angle, though Mandrake seems to be a really close contender. Can some one point me towards the l10n stats page of SuSE ??

So at the end, we are left with Componentised Linux, Fedora and Mandrake. I am not very sure with respect to Componentised Linux’s stability (since it is a comparatively new thing in the game), while between Fedora and Mandrake, I would choose the former, since I think it has better customisation related documentation. So when it comes to my choice, I am left with Fedora.

…but then, there’s another way (isn’t there one always ??)

How about not going the distro way ?? How about creating a generic “Indic Desktop” meta package which would be supported on most of the major distros around ?? But wouldn’t maintaining and creating package sets for multiple distros be a major pain in the behind??

Yes….. that is, unless you get some help from a certain buddy, who can help you “build and package software natively for a variety of platforms and packaging systems, including RPM (Red Hat, etc.), Deb (Debian), and SD (HP-UX), all from a single XML metadata file”. Doesn’t that sound really cool?

And combine this with Ximian Red Carpet, and you’ll be able to deliver the Indic Desktop to most GNU/Linux users, irrespective of whether they use Fedora, or Debian, or SuSE, or Mandrake. Sounds difficult? Not at all! Of course, you’ll need a few really powerful machines to do the packaging on, and someone would have to be kind enough to host a centralised repository of all the packages (and maybe allow us to run the Red Carpet management system on it). Moreover. though I am not very sure, but I think with some hacks the packages can also be distributed on a CD - which should take care of users on dial up connections. For the next few days, I am going to do some reading up and experimenting on build buddy and Red Carpet, and if I find it suitable enough, I would definitely recommend this. Rolling out a distro ISO set (even if it is a customised version of a well known thing) means a lot of extra bugs to handle which are not related to l10n at all (LILO troubles, network configurations issue, hardware issues and what not). With a Ximian Desktop like thing, we should have to handle a lot less of “non Indic” bugs, enabling us to concentrate on more relevant stuff. What’s more, we would be able to inherit the Ximian polish for our install and software management system, and the “channel subscription” system would be really handy for handling KDE and GNOME at the same time. Comments are solicited. Mail me at sayamindu randomink org.