Ankur is working toward supporting Bengali language (Bangla) on GNU/Linux operating system. Most of Ankur's projects are focused on XFree86.org's XServer. Some of its projects are in fact platform independent and add language support to other operating systems.

The group is also working on providing Bangla support for some major XServer applications such as office suites, databases, development tools and desktop environments such as GNOMEand KDE. Ankur's intention is to help develop and maintain open source/free software targeted towards the Bangla speaking user and to provide a completely functional, user intuitive localised desktop that is easily usable and easily deployable.

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 the GNU C library. This established his identity as major figure in the Bangla open source community. In October 2002, he launched the bengalinux-core mailing list.

This list became a focus of Bangla related Open Source enthusiasts. In January, 2003, Taneem Ahmed announced the GNOME Bangla Translation Project and began recruiting for the project. The recruitment call was taken seriously and the project began to expand. After some discussion on a group name of discussion, 'Ankur', proposed by Kaushik Ghosh. On 3 March, 2003, the name Ankur was officially adopted.

Major achievement

• Creation of the first Bangla graphical Desktop in any 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 Live CD) in 2004.
• Best .org project at LinuxAsia 2006

Current projects

• GUI (Graphical User Interface) translation (or localization in short L10n),
• Font designing/maintenance,
• Archiving copyright-expired literature,
• Maintaining a Linux Live CD with Bangla-specific add-ons,
• Developing various Bangla-language-processing software,
• English-to-Bangla translator Anubadok,
• Bangla OCR,
• Bengali Dictionary

External links

• Ankur Bangla
• Bengalinux