Bootable CD

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Bootable CD

OS image creation infrastructure for people wanting to create specialized indian language solutions using open-source software.

Executive Summary

Status	Source Tree	Download	Developers
In progress	Available	Not yet released	Joseph Koshy <jkoshy[@]users.sourceforge.net> (FreeBSD)

Introduction

An operating system that supports indian language processing ``out of the box'' is a useful delivery vehicle for indian language applications. This sub-project has two goals:

We intend to periodically bundle together and release Indian language capable open source applications such as KDE, GNOME, and Openoffice (among others), on bootable CD. This CD can be used as a demo and evaluation vehicle.
The infrastructure to create the bootable image itself is to be made open-source, allowing people with specialized needs to use our work to create custom indian language packages for their needs (for example, setting up a rural information kiosk based on open-source software).

Rationale

Having a CD distribution available freely will greatly help in two tasks:

Such a CD could help users painlessly evaluate the state of Indian language technology in the open-source world, and would also be useful for advocacy.
The availability of this infrastructure could help spawn open-source based Indian language solutions.

Background Information

There are a number of GNU/Linux based single CD distributions available on the Internet, for example, Knoppix. One of these could be adapted to our purposes.

The difficulty in this project is setting up infrastructure that is maintainable. The BSD projects offer excellent maintainability as they have a single source tree from which all their components can be obtained. There are a number of specialized versions of the BSD distributions that could be adapted for our use, for example, PicoBSD.

Skill Set Required

Unix development skills. Experience with release engineering.

Other Resource Requirements

This sub-project needs a machine with sufficient disk space (2GB+ to spare). A CD-RW drive is needed to burn CDs.

Time Estimate

The initial infrastructure could be developed by a competent developer in about 2 months. The full release engineering cycle per OS release could take over a month depending on the amount of testing that would be undertaken.

Status

No owner yet. Please join up.

Comment

This subproject requires commitment for a long period of time. Ideal for an organization that wants to enter the field of Indian language computing.

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