Recently we had tried out Mandriva (at Zyxware), one of the many GNU/Linux distributions out there in the market. Like Redhat, Mandriva is also promoted by a company. However the userbase had been primarily European and the acceptance by the Indian community has been meager. I was shocked to see that there was no option 'India' in the list of countries in the Mandriva Live CD.

I cannot fathom how somebody could fail to miss a country the size of India. Besides India has a very sizable Free Software User base and there is massive potential for growth. I did some basic research on the languages used in India and the comparison of these values with the populations of world countries. I do not see any logic behind the omission of India. Additionally en-GB the locale for United Kingdom will work perfectly fine for India.

I have been discussing about the omission of India from the list of countries in the Mandriva Live CD at their forums. If you are a GNU/Linux user from India please register at Mandriva Forums and voice your opinion too. The following is the URL for the discussion under way.

http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=86106

I have also reported the bug at the Mandriva Bugzilla. Please register at Mandriva Bugzilla and vote for both of these bug reports. Bug 40555 has been closed but you can still vote for it.

https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23303
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=40555

Also please blog about this issue so as to create as much awareness about the issue as possible and let Mandriva feel the pressure.

If Mandriva Linux has to be promoted in India then this issue has to be solved because any novice user from India who would be trying out the live CD would get stuck at the point of selection of countries. The user would also feel that India is being ignored by the promoters of the distro and nationalistic spirits could also play a part. It did definitely for me and I am sure lot of people would agree with me on this.