Hanthana Linux-Sinhala Edition

I have some good news to report.

Finally I managed to download Hanthana Linux Version11.1 from iBiblio.

It was 2009 December edition probably comes from Fedora 11.

It took almost the weekend to download and it finished before mid night and I am writing this well past midnight.

Before writing this I did another search to see from where it can be downloaded.

Three sites.

1. Ibiblio has  old and latest versions.

2. Sourceforge has up to 14.2 version

3. Sri-Lankan LEARN.net for latest version

Both Sourceforge and iBiblio have torrent downloads too.

I have to thank, those who were involved in doing the hard work.

I have been downloading various Linux distributions and once after about 40 attempts I managed to download SwiftLinux (Point to point download breaks without any warning).

Their web site could not handle the downloads and decided to place a limited number of iso images at sourceforge and now even the point to point download is OK.

All these problems I have highlighted here in my blogspot.

I had a particular liking for Taylor Swift (Taylor is a singer) and somehow managed to download it after many tries before they shifted to Sourceforge.

SwiftLinux is a derivative of AntiX which is a Mini version of Mepis which I  am fond of, coming from Debian base.

SwiftLinux comes form America and their vision is to produce a light weight distribution for old machines with low RAM.
It's philosophy is to even beat Puppy Linux (latest Puppy cannot be run on old machines but Puppy 4.1 can) in the light weight Linux game.

AntiX of course is a good distribution and SwiftLinux still has teething problems.

What I said is relevant to Hanthana Linux too.

We have lot of old computers and many buy secondhand ones because they cannot afford expensive dual core machines.

Light weight version is easy to download and easy on old computers with low RAM.

The simple fact is that I could not download the Hanthana Linux in spite of trying on torrent download.

I hope new torrents would be better.

In the mean time, I have downloaded gorilla sized PCLINuxFullMonty (many seeders) and Knoppix 4.7.1 without a problem.

Even downloaded Ultimate Linux (point to point) with some difficulty.

It took me 10 days to download Absolute Linux (Slackware derivative) CD which is very good and one is not fixed to one desktop (KDE or Gnome).

It took 14 days for me to download Fedora 13 (from Fedora 13 there is Sinhala Unicode Support) and when I finally tested it there was no Sinhala in it.

Debian started supporting Sinhala Linux from version 6.0.0 (current version).

It is also merging with LinuxMint and making Debian Mint version. 

This is due to Ubuntu becoming Unity and Ubuntu does not support Sinhala.

I am currently downloading them and testing to see where Sinhala script is there. In the live session or when attempting to install (I have not installed) Sinhala can be selected but font does not appear.

So Fedora is still ahead because of Hanthana Linux and I hope a Light Weight version will seal it's position well ahead of others.

This is specially so because Redhat is moving fast to Btrs file system and it does not bother about desktops (that was a terrible mistake in the past and Redhat still continue to follow that policy).

What happened to Linux Mint is a case in point and they realized the folly  of piggybacking on one distribution and quickly went back to Debian base.

Once, one is with the Debian fold, there is no update cycle (at least for Debian Mint for the time being) and this leaves Developers free to address new frontiers.

With cloud computing on the horizon (general and global picture  changing) there going to be lot of changes including hardware.

O.E.M guys will stop supporting Linux and get a big thumb up from windows 8. In that scenario, the ability to support old computers is mandatory.

Linux can continue to do that for another 10 years.

Unfortunately Linux developers are also changing the course anticipating changes and Ubuntu and Linux distributions (CloudUSB, JoliCloud) that support cloud computing (Redhat included) are taking a calculated risk.

I hope these changes might not affect Hanthana Linux in the long run.

It is better to be ready with the challenge and the changes. 

By the way the CD is pretty impressive.