KDE is a graphical desktop environment for Unix/Linux workstations. A project was started back in February 2000 to introduce Tamil to this environment. We have achieved success. Now KDE2.0 has been released with Tamil as one of the languages supported. We are proud to announce that Tamil is the only Indian language to be part of KDE2.0.

Interested? You can contribute to this project too. No need to be a Unix geek. If you are interested please contact any member of the Team.

Siva has written a gentle HOWTO for Tamil KDE translation.

Completed Tasks

• A Mylai98 based partial keymap for tamil input has been developed for KDE. It can be used with TSCII fonts to input tamil text in X-windows based applications.
• Enough translation were done to make the cut-off requirement by the KDE I18N team. The packages completely translated were: kdebase, kdegraphics, kdeadmin. The packages partially translated are: kdeutils, kdenetwork, koffice.
• Click here for some screenshots of some KDE applications.
• A UTF8-TSCII codec (some internal stuff needed for KDE-2.0; normal users need not worry) has been written by Hans Peter Bieker

ToDo

• Identify the translation errors in Tamil.
• KDE 2.0 has branched and there will be a version called 2.0.1, which will be bugfix release for 2.0. Our aim is to complete the partial packages and fix the translation mistakes.
• Get (a new team?) ready for version 2.1 will contain new features and applications and translations has to be done for that.

Related Links

• TODO KDE Tamil translations
• KDE Internationalization site
• TSCII Home Page
• Unicode Home Page
• TSCII HOWTO for Unix/Linux
• Qt TSCII-UTF8 codec
• KDE-2.0 packages

Team