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: After many failed attempts to scale Mount Desktop, Linux is gradually making its presence felt on the PC, says Srikanth R P.
It's taken a while, but Linux is finally making its presence felt in the Indian desktop PC market. Red Hat and Novell (SUSE Linux) have both reported an uptick in sales of desktop Linux software. Red Hat India says it has three lakh Linux desktop installations in India with the likes of Breach Candy Hospital (Mumbai), Central Excise (Kochi) and Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission (Madhya Pradesh) using its desktop software. Novell's SUSE Linux has found favour with the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, Geojit Securities, and Kumara Guru College of Technology (Coimbatore). ELX Linux, an Indian company, has its own Linux distribution, and its product, ELX Biz Desktop, has 60,000 installations to its credit at clients such as Andhra Pradesh Tribunal Court (Hyderabad), Axiom Energy Conversion and Nokia Enterprise Solutions (Hyderabad).
While Linux has spread its wings in the recent past, the desktop market has remained a tough nut to crack. Factors such as the lack of applications and hardware support have restricted the penguin to servers for the greater part.
In the past, Linux vendors touted a Linux desktop as a complete replacement to Windows. That strategy failed. Now these vendors are targeting specific verticals that promise volumes and are concentrating on delivering the features that are required by a regular user. As most PC users are primarily engaged in creating documents or accessing e-mail, Linux distribution vendors are hoping that a Linux desktop will be good enough. Most of these vendors bundle in applications such as the OpenOffice.org open source office productivity suite, the Evolution e-mail client, Acrobat Reader and Xpdf for reading PDFs, and the Mozilla Web browser.
Says Javed Tapia, director, Red Hat India, "The education and government sector show huge potential for Linux desktop adoption." He says that the company's Linux desktop product has been adopted in the e-governance and education segments by district courts, schools and colleges. In Madhya Pradesh, where 6,000 schools come under the government's Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission, Red Hat has the mandate to roll out Linux desktops to 2,000 schools in the first phase of an ongoing deployment. Education is a key market for vendors, as students who get acquainted with desktop Linux are more likely to use Linux in the workplace or at home when they grow...
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