Fedora to support five Indian languages

Red Hat has announced the third release of Fedora, Fedora Core 3, which
supports five Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and
Tamil. Fedora Core 3, the open source Linux operating system, includes fully
functional desk-top with productivity applica-tions such as an office suite with
a word processor, spread-sheet and presentation tool as well as a Web browser
and an e-mail client. With the availa-bility of these applications users can
share the digitalized text in all five languages, across the platforms, which
support Unicode.

Fedora is a Red Hat spon-sored and community-suppor-ted open source project.
Red Hat recently announced the release of Lohit fonts in five Indian language
fonts as open source, licensed under the General Public License. "Lohit"
which means "Red" in Sanskrit, are now available in five Indian
languages including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil. These fonts are
now available with Fedora Core 3.

Javed Tapia, India Director, Red Hat said, "India's domestic software
industry resembles the TV industry around six years ago when the progra-mming
was only in Hindi or English. Similarly, today computers are predominantly used
only in English."

According to the latest census available about 525 million Indians speak
these five languages". He further added, "Availability of Linux
operating system in the form of Fedora Core 3 in five Indian languages will play
a significant role in bringing out a localized Linux desktop to the vast
majority of Indians. This will in turn go a long way in bridging the digital
divide in India." Fedora Core 3 incorporates the 2.6 Linux kernel, SELinux,
a security-specific addition created with the assistance of the National
Security Agency (US) and latest iterations of popular packages like GNOME and
KDE.

CyberMedia News

Mumbai