Sinhala Linux

2004 Sept 8 at 01:45 » Tagged as :

Today I picked up a Sinhala Linux CD at the Colombo Internation book fair. The book fair itself is an event worth talking about but more on that later. The CD is a modified version of the knoppix worked on by a bunch of Sri Lankan geeks.

These geeks belong to two non profit organizations, one being the MettaNet Foundation Tux Group and the other being the Lanka LUG. Neither organization has money to spare so the stall wasn't eye catching but according to what I gathered a steady stream of customers have been visiting to buy the cd priced at Less than US$ 0.50

Apprently the demand was so high that they later had to double the price. In my opinion they should have priced it much higher so that some funds could have been generated for the LUG's activity the $0.50 barely covers the cost of the media.

Unfortunately for me knoppix has never worked on my computer because the MSI VGA card on it doesn't get detected, the same fate befell the sinhala version but I did have success running it on another computer with a ATI card.

The demo at the book fair even had the menu in Sinhala but unfortunately the CD that has been sold does not have a sinhala menu but still it is indeed a comendable effort.

Getting on to the book fair it looked as if all of colombo's 1 million population was crammed into the exibition venue. No doubt by the time the exibition ends a good percentage of the country's population would have seen it.