Ankur Group

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Ektara: Ankur's logo

Ankur is working toward supporting Bengali language (Bangla) on GNU/Linux operating system. However, most of Ankur's projects are focused on XFree86.org's XServer. Some of its projects are in fact platform independent and adds supports of other operating systems.

The group also working on providing Bangla support for some major XServer applications such as office suites, database, development tools and desktop environments like GNOME, KDE. Ankur's intention is to help develop and maintain open source/free software targeted towards the Bangla speaking users.

The focus is towards providing a completely functional, user intuitive localised desktop with the aim of providing easily usable and easily deployable solutions.

1 History
2 Major achievement
3 Current projects
4 External links

[edit] History

Initially, Ankur started as the bengalinux-core mailing list. This later worked as the nucleus for forming Ankur.

Taneem Ahmed of Bangladesh, the founder of Ankur, was developing and maintaining the http://www.BengaLinux.Org website - a one stop mall for Unix based Bangla Free Software. He was also the author of the bn_BD locale for glibc ( the libc of GNU-Linux ). This established his identity as a person who lead the attempt to bring Bangla into the Free Software world. As a result, several like minded people contacted him and that inspired him to launch the bengalinux-core mailing list with just 4 subscribers on the month of October, 2002. Soon this list became a bazaar of Bangla related Free Software enthusiasts. Initially there was just discussion in the list. Then at the last week of January, 2003, Taneem Ahmed declared the birth of the GNOME Bangla Translation Project and sounded a call to join the project en mass. The call was taken seriously by a lot of people and soon the project started to roll on at a moderate pace. At this stage, a group was in the forming and hence there was the need of a name for this group. After several day of discussion, 'Ankur', proposed by Kaushik Ghosh, was accepted as the group-name. On 3 March 2003, the name Ankur was officially adopted. From then on, several other projects came under the wing of Ankur and Ankur is now boldly marching ahead with all of them.

[edit] Major achievement

Creation of the first Bangla graphical Desktop in any GNU/Linux distribution.
Design and release of the first Open Type font (Akash) which made possible the use of Unicode-based Bangla.
Organising the Bangla-speaking open-source developers (Unix-based) under a single platform.
Release of the first Bangla OS (i.e. Ankur LiveCD) in 2004.
Best .org project at LinuxAsia 2006