Introduction

At the present time, almost all software and Web documents, even in India, are available only in English, thus rendering them inaccessible to the vast majority of the Indian populace. As both technology and documentation shift more and more towards being centred around software, this gap between the digital ``haves'' and ``have-nots'' is bound to widen, shutting out a large number of people from technological, and, consequently, economical advances. Also, for Indian languages and culture to continue to flourish, it is essential that they embrace the wide-ranging possibilities afforded by such new technology.

Why Linux? To date, most commercial software is written in Western countries. As a consequence, these are typically not affordable to people in developing countries, leading to widespread software piracy. Besides the immoral aspects of such unauthorized copying of software, the day is not far off when India will be forced to crack down on such practices. Further, the source code of such commercial software is unavailable to the end-user, ensuring that she remains at the mercy of the developer. Open-source operating systems and software offer an attractive alternative, as the end-user can actively participate in software development, and any kind of centralized controlling authority becomes impossible. Linguistic groups that were considered too small a market by software vendors can now control their own destiny by customizing open-source software to their needs. Also, the fact that most open-source software also comes free of charge, offers a great economic advantage, especially in a poor country like India. Linux, as compared to other open-source platforms, is seen as the best alternative, due to its popularity among developers and users. There is an existing framework for the internationalization of Linux that can be adapted to Indian languages without undue difficulty.

Here, we describe the essential first steps for using Oriya under Linux. We discuss available fonts and related software, methods for the input of Oriya characters and Oriya locales, and conclude with a brief outline of other tasks such as translations of program messages as well as documentation. Major linguistic issues such as developing a glossary and dictionary, defining a collation order for the Oriya alphabet, etc., have not been considered here, due to a lack of expertise, and space to do justice to them.

This document is intended to allow the reader to quickly get started, and does not go into a lot of depth on most issues. Also, while the steps involved should be similar, regardless of the Linux distribution in use, the exact ones described here were used under PCQLinux 2004, which is based on Redhat Fedora Core 2. Most of the instructions have also been tried out on older Redhat systems from 8.0 onwards. Other distributions might have different locations for some of the files.