Just an update
The website of this chennai programme changed the name of Newly launching organisation as "Free Software Forum, Tamil Nadu"
Anyway it is good that they changed the name. But Still a lot of questions remains The event is suppose to start at 4 pm today , The event website still list the objective of the event as follows <quote> "The objective of the event will be the launch of the project for the development of a Tamil Version of the GNU/ Linux operating system. The launch will be made by the Mayor, M.Subramanian. The project will be developed by engineering students with able technical support from the IT professionals & professors, and infrastructural support by the entrepreneurs." <quote>
Let me bring some statistics
Gnome L10n page for Tamil lists Upcoming gnome 2.24 release is 88% translated which is enough for becoming Officially Supported Language in Gnome. http://l10n.gnome.org/languages/ta/gnome-2-24
KDE l10n page says lists 41% translated string in KDE 4.2 Trunk and 49% translated strings in KDE 4.1 . In KD4.1 Tamil was an officially supported Languages ( Only 5 languages in India qualified for this)
All Available distribution including gNewSense fully supports Tamil. Even Controversial BOSS GNU/Linux http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/2008/09/03/what-a-waste-of-talent-and-money/ Supports Tamil well
Many among localisation groups are well aware of Free Software Philosophy and bringing out Tamil Translations of RMS's essays. Yesterday they launched the the book titled "kattatra Menporul" as a part of Software Freedom Day Celebrations in Jaya Engineering College, Thirunindravur, Chennai.
Some developers associated with swathanthra malayalam computing is helping Tamil Free Software Community to develop Tamil Text to speech system based on dhvani
So My question is what is so special about this custom distribution? . It becomes a trend in india top distribute Custom CD's with some re branding for wastage of public money. Making custom CD's for getting some some govt projects will duplicate a lot of development efforts and resources when new version comes. The projects like Kairai GNU/Linux (Funded by CDIT, Kerala) , Bharatheya Open Office, Indic Firefox, Indix (all 3 By CDAC) etc went obsolete because they are not integrated with upstream and no body is going to use the old version because new versions are available upstream.
Bacause of above reason I request newly forming Free Software forum Tamilnadu to drop the Objective new distro and guide associated students and developers to work with existing Localisation groups and Developers to make it it more effective
Anivar Aravind Swathanthra Malayalam computing http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc