Rachna Malayalam is considered as the first computer operating system in Malayalam language and the first such system in a regional language in India. It was launched on February 16, 2006.
The operating system, developed by four people in Kerala, is in the Linux platform and is an open software. The software will make multimedia operations and chat possible in Malayalam.
The biggest advantage of this operating system is that henceforth advanced computing in Malayalam will be possible. Among the features of this new operating system include the opening of any MS Office file, to make any file into PDF format, and for the first time sorting is possible in Malayalam.
Technical contributions of this long-term project were:
R. Chitrajakumar, senior linguist and lexicologist:
"This has come after close to nearly three years of working on the Rachna font under GPL (General Public License) for the Original Malayalam script, that was developed in the late nineties"
The team members are: R. Chitrajakumar and N. Gangadharan (linguistics) who developed and codified all language aspects of the project, K.H Hussain (information specialist) who developed the Rachana font, and Rajeev J Sebastian (software engineer) who developed and maintained the software for the OS.