We are a small group of volunteers engaged in teaching the Penguin one the oldest and perhaps the most enduring language of the planet - Tamil.  Yes, we talk about the cuddly little penguin that is the mascot of Linux OS.

We aspire to produce a stable, standard and easy to operate linux operating system in tamil. That being our long term goal, we now target a part of it; making the GUI for xwindow based desktops, GNOME and KDE.  We are proud and glad to announce that KDE 2.0 released on October 22, 2000 supports tamil as one of the languages.  With GNU General Public License this is available free (of cost and obligations) to all the uses.  See the screen shots here.

These pages will have original articles, both in english and tamil on  some trips and tricks in Linux, Connections to other Linux resources  and the best of all, the latest news from Linux development in tamil.   We expect this to serve as a good starting point to the world of linux   and one-stop resource of tamil linux. 

A total voluntary effort like this is impossible without support and encouragement's from the commercial organization.   We are thankful to Mr. Singai Maniam of iDNS.com, a singapore based internet services company.  We are also assured of additional support from Chennaionline (the providers of aaRaamthiNai, tamil e-zine) in terms of ftp and web space (these are yet be utilized fully).  Sourceforge.net - a consortium of information technology companies that support  open source initiatives has approved to host the Tamil Linux Project - we are thus assured of high quality technical support.  We are currently setting up the project there.  Watch out these spaces for the announcement.

In the absence of a unicode standard for tamil (for that matter any   indian languages), we have opted  the TSCII (Tamil Standard Code   for Information Interchange), which emerged out of a voluntary   initiative. TSCII, as of now, is the most widely used tamil encoding  scheme, with tools sucks as fonts, editors and keyboard managers   easily available for all major platforms.   In the likely event of  a  consensus towards another standard, we guarantee to make the   transition smooth and painless. 

Like any other voluntary initiative, the success of this project hinges  on your participation, yes, we mean YOUR participation.  You can  do a lot of contribution to this project, even if you are not technically  skilled.  Have a look into our Howto pages.  We look   forward to hearing from you.  A "Contributing How-to" for non technical people interested in helping will be available here soon.

And, we would like to share our experience in localization with    anyone who is engaged in localizing linux in other languages; feel  free to contact us. 

We now invite you to this exciting journey!!! 

tamillinux.org

We now have our dedicated domainname and webserver, thanks to the initiatives of Mr. Maniam, Singapore. 

Tamil become the first indic language to have an operating system user intrface. :Look for the Screenshots 

Watch out for the details of the SourceForge hosted Tamil Linux Project.  If your would like to volunteer or watch it from close, please contact us.