Hanthana is a distro from Ceylon that has been around for three years. It supports English, Sinhalese, and Tamil. Locally, they do a great deal to encourage its use in schools, but it’s actually suitable for any English-speaking user. It’s based on Fedora, adding all the things that Fedora can’t or won’t supply, like media codecs and non-free software, some from the RPMfusion repository and some from its own. The desktop is Gnome 3.

It’s similar to Kororaa, but it differs in the huge amount of software on the DVD. As well as the usual items you also get things like Gnucash, MySQL workbench, Openshot, Qcad, Skype, Wine, children’s programs like Gcompris, and even a thing to get contact data off a mobile phone! It’s difficult to think of anything you can’t do from the basic installation. Naturally, you also get the Fedora bugs: of 5 video players on the disk, only Gxine worked. But you also get all those security features and configuration tools which are the trademarks of the Red Hat family.

The installer is the version of Anaconda that Fedora uses on its CDs. This installs from a disk image, so the root partition must be ext4. If you use a home partition, that can be encrypted. I couldn’t actually install, because my guest partition is only 8MB and Hanthana needs 15MB: did I say it’s big?

The only problem, apart from the bad video players, was that, like Kororaa, they replace Gnash with Flash: the latest version that won’t work with 32-bit AMD CPUs.

If you like Fedora, Gnome 3, and Gxine, this is a good way to get everything you’re ever likely to want installed in one quick session. And if you do install it, how about a donation to help them get more computers into the local schools?