Dear friends,
I am pretty new to Linux. I have been using it for last three months. I started with Red-Hat, then Mandriva and ultimately Ubuntu (Hoary). I am tremendously impressed with Ubuntu, Canonical and your philosophy.
As you know in India Linux has a tremendous scope. Three-fourth of our people live in rural areas. Affordability is a big constraint for them. But computer literacy is essential for rural students and our govt is cash starved.
Therefore, the utility of Linux in general is obvious for rural students. Keeping this in mind I had been searching for a linux distro which would be 1)free 2)easy to install, 3)easy to learn and 4) has good support.
Without any hesitation I would say that Ubuntu is perhaps the only OS which meets all the above necessities.
However, there are some hitches. The most important one is the usual installation and update mechanism. One needs an internet connection for using apt-get. But for rural India, internet connection is a distant reality.
Nevertheless, I realised that we can still go without an internet connection. As Ubuntu installation CD comes with all necessary packages. Therefore, I beleive that Ubuntu is going to be our future. And I have decided to take a role in making it a success.
I actually run an NGO (www.krittibas.org) which works in the rural education sector. We are just at the nascent stage, but we have great plans. This October we are going to have our first set-up of five ubuntu-boxes to be used by rural school-goers free of cost.
Shortly a stable version of Edubuntu is going to be installed and I think some good KDE educational applications have already been included in the pre-stable version.
My sincere gratitude and good wishes to all the people involved in Ubuntu. Lets make it happen: Humanity to others.
Thank you very much.
Regards,
Raj Kumar Sarkar
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