BOSS: An initiative by the Govt of India

[kindofblue]

BOSS(Bharat Operating System Solutions) is a GNU/Linux distribution developed by C-DAC, Chennai for enhancing the use of Free/Open Source Software in the country. Made specifically for the Indian environment , it consists of a pleasing Desktop environment coupled with Indian language support and other packages that are most relevant for use in the government domain. Subsequent versions will support the educational domain as well.

Welcome to BOSS — Bharat Operating System Solutions

Seems to have good intentions and it's localized as well... But will it sustain?

 

[vishalrao]

Nice work but IMHO instead of launching yet another distro from scratch CDAC should partner with Fedora and/or Ubuntu and just "localise" their distros for India. Fedora/Ubuntu have already done a lot of excellent work making Linux stable and user friendly...For example Fedora now offers easy "re-spin" functionality which CDAC can use to "re-brand" it with "BOSS" logos/naming etc or so I believe.From the BOSS release notes it looks like the software versions (kernel, GNOME, xorg etc) are not very up-to-date...

 

[Sushubh]

right we can have a version named IndiBuntu...

 

[vishalrao]

Even that may be redundant work since there is already "ubuntu-in"

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IndianTeam

Main Page - Ubuntu India

 

[kindofblue]

Spot on! In fact pungi, the re-spin facility is intended exactly for this purpose... They could go a step further and contribute to existing projects by maintaining mirrors/repos for yum or apt-get; yet another thing that would help is a facility like ship-it. Create a custom spin; and ship it for free to whoever wants it. On another note, the distro does seem to be forked off debian, so it is IndiBuntu in all probability :thumbsup:

 

[Sushubh]

i still do not get much response from the indian servers of ubuntu. pings are bad so i end up using servers in the europe.they would do much better by providing free cds of well supported linux distros. it take ubuntu shipit service more than a month to deliver cds for free in india.

 

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[kindofblue]

I use the IIT madras mirrors. Have you ever tried them? (or maybe IIT D if you live in Gurgaon) They mirror most major distros...

Index of /ubuntu

 

[Sushubh]

i used them for a while. basically i use the ping feature which access all the servers and picks the one with the lowest pings.

 

[vishalrao]

you don't want to select a mirror on the basis of ping... you'd want to pick the one which provides you the highest download speed...but for me too, the europe mirrors work well anyways

 

[Sushubh]

its hard to choose one from the list. so i pick the one the one it chooses.