There is a new Linux flavour out supported by the Government of India and it looks very inviting. The last few months have seen this type of initiatives - to ‘officially’ build/sanction a ‘flavour’ or ‘distro’ of Linux - to be used by the relevant Government officials, if not the general public.
In July, the US DOD released Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) for people on the move.
[http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/231002431]
Now, it seems to be the turn of India with BOSS - Bharat Operating Systems and Solutions.
[http://bosslinux.in/]
Being an inveterate ‘curious-cat’, I decided to have a go at BOSS. And having had a first look at it, it seems a good BOSS.
:-)
I let the download go on yesterday night and burned the .iso image file into a DVD, today. I had to keep the PC on during the night because the image is a whopping 4.22 GB. But then it was worth the effort.
To give a short perspective,
So it was with tepidity I tweaked the BIOS to boot from the BOSS DVD and it was a nice surprise to see that the BOSS doesn’t mind the limited RAM.
I’m not only a ‘curious-cat’, but also a ‘scalded-cat’ and this time chose to go with the BOSS Live CD (DVD) option. Again to my utter delight, BOSS loaded within a few minutes, even faster than what SimplyMepis 8.5 used to do.
BOSS uses the GNOME desktop and to be frank, I was more used to the KDE desktop in SimplyMepis, but it just didn’t matter. The layouts are similar and BOSS is as close to Windows as a Linux distro can be.
On a cursory exploration, BOSS presents disks, folders and files as we would see in Windows, not requiring some fancy jigging like in other Linux flavours. With a customised version of OpenOffice (OOo) called BharateeyaOO (what an effing name), it opens all the Excel, Word and Powerpoint files in the PC.
The inbuilt PDF reader is also excellent. The image viewers, media players also perform good - infact it seems that the sound quality is better than with Windows XP and K-Lite Codec packs.
The only problem is that with Live CD, I’ve not been able to connect to the net. Whenever I try to configure the ADSL connection, it asks for a password for the ‘keyring’ which I am not able to figure out.
That apart, BOSS, for a first look, seems great - fast, neat and intuitive. Further installation and fingering has to wait on time. On first look, BOSS gets an 8 out of 10.
The best thing about BOSS is that for the first time there is a very simple, basic user manual available for download [http://bosslinux.in/node/113] - this really must be a first for such a Linux distro; no need to go and hunt or beg in a support forum to find out how to do simple things like connecting to the internet.
[image courtesy Wikipedia BOSS page]
In July, the US DOD released Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) for people on the move.
[http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/231002431]
Now, it seems to be the turn of India with BOSS - Bharat Operating Systems and Solutions.
[http://bosslinux.in/]
Being an inveterate ‘curious-cat’, I decided to have a go at BOSS. And having had a first look at it, it seems a good BOSS.
:-)
I let the download go on yesterday night and burned the .iso image file into a DVD, today. I had to keep the PC on during the night because the image is a whopping 4.22 GB. But then it was worth the effort.
To give a short perspective,
- Ubuntu, ever since 10-4 LTS hasn’t liked my PC - a Celeron 1,7 GHz with 512 MB RAM on an Intel 845 GLVA Mother Board
- The fallback SimplyMepis after 8.5.01 just hangs - ever since 11-04, I’ve given up on Linux for the reason
So it was with tepidity I tweaked the BIOS to boot from the BOSS DVD and it was a nice surprise to see that the BOSS doesn’t mind the limited RAM.
I’m not only a ‘curious-cat’, but also a ‘scalded-cat’ and this time chose to go with the BOSS Live CD (DVD) option. Again to my utter delight, BOSS loaded within a few minutes, even faster than what SimplyMepis 8.5 used to do.
BOSS uses the GNOME desktop and to be frank, I was more used to the KDE desktop in SimplyMepis, but it just didn’t matter. The layouts are similar and BOSS is as close to Windows as a Linux distro can be.
On a cursory exploration, BOSS presents disks, folders and files as we would see in Windows, not requiring some fancy jigging like in other Linux flavours. With a customised version of OpenOffice (OOo) called BharateeyaOO (what an effing name), it opens all the Excel, Word and Powerpoint files in the PC.
The inbuilt PDF reader is also excellent. The image viewers, media players also perform good - infact it seems that the sound quality is better than with Windows XP and K-Lite Codec packs.
The only problem is that with Live CD, I’ve not been able to connect to the net. Whenever I try to configure the ADSL connection, it asks for a password for the ‘keyring’ which I am not able to figure out.
That apart, BOSS, for a first look, seems great - fast, neat and intuitive. Further installation and fingering has to wait on time. On first look, BOSS gets an 8 out of 10.
The best thing about BOSS is that for the first time there is a very simple, basic user manual available for download [http://bosslinux.in/node/113] - this really must be a first for such a Linux distro; no need to go and hunt or beg in a support forum to find out how to do simple things like connecting to the internet.
[image courtesy Wikipedia BOSS page]
Tried BOSS on a live CD. It is not connecting to the net.
ReplyDeleteTry Linux Mint, only 666 mB for live CD. Refreshing. It is Ubuntu based. A Deb version is also available.