dear friends : am adding some brief info about BOSS and allied activities at CDAC. Srinivasan. NRCFOSS/BOSS CDAC. ---------------
A brief note on BOSS and related activities: As part of NRCFOSS project CDAC Chennai had brought out Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS),-- BOSS GNU/Linux -- derived from Debian with some add on packages such as Bulk Document Converter, Presentation Tool, apart from a suitable version of grub installer. EduBOSS, an educational variant (including the EduBOSS Tamil released at Semmozhi Maanadu) and a server version have also been generated. BOSS DVDs have been distributed and a Help Desk facility has been set up to respond to queries, besides access to BOSS portal : http://bosslinux.in (includes discussion forum, faq, download, etc.). We expect to release BOSS 4.0 in a couple of months. With the help of BOSS Support Team (at various CDAC Centres across the country), the interactions have been on with various agencies, primarily govt departments (as one could understand). Tieups with agencies like NIC, ELCOT have been taken up -- some of the active measures include : BOSS installations at Palakkad Dist to run land record system (supporting the NIC team); CHIPS, Chattisgarh ; installation at ISRO & NIC Bengaluru ; training & installation for some of the Navy units ; training and support for BSNL Hyderabad ; installation in various schools in Punjab under Sarva Shiksha Abhigyan program, etc. Under BOSS Vendor Certification Program, BOSS Compliance Certificates are issued to systems / devices working on BOSS platform. The initial efforts had been more on creating awareness, especially amongst govt and allied agencies as a fellow govt body, and responding to deployment related queries from agencies / users who were willing to use the BOSS platform. Some workshops have been organized and BOSS team also visits potential user institutions (e.g., govt depts, agencies, etc.) for presentations and interactions. As the acceptance of Linux and FOSS has grown considerably, now the focus should be more on applications that run on the platform, availability of device drivers, etc. -- i.e. FOSS promotion and deployment. URLs: http://nrcfoss.org.in main NRCFOSS portal and allied pages such as: http://www.nrcfoss.org.in/repository for FOSS packages (especially developed/deployed in India) http://www.nrcfoss.org.in/hrd academic initiatives ; info on FOSS resource persons (info invited from community), news, etc. http://bosslinux.in boss linux portal http://bosslinux.in/downloads image, source, manual etc. of BOSS versions http://bosslinux.in/documentation includes FAQ, Wiki, discussion forums, etc. Help Desk : 1 800 4250 455 (10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on working days, in english, hindi, tamil, malayalam, kannada and telugu) _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
