The Linux TLE 5.5 Live CD is an ideal solution when working in Thai language.

My company has been using Linux for nearly five years. The reason I switched from Windows to Linux was because the computer of one of our key employees kept on getting hit by viruses.

It would take me one or two days to restore it, and so I told her that the next time I would remove Windows from her machine. In less than a week, we started our journey looking at a variety of Linux distributions.

We started out using Mandrake, then Red Hat, Lycoris and a variety of other distributions. We finally settled on Open TLE 4.5.

It wasn't that this was better than other distributions. Rather our staff needed to do work in Thai so we had to find a distribution that supported Thai fully. Open TLE is based on Red Hat Linux and Nectec added the Thai language and updated and added many packages.

Open TLE always looked better than Red Hat, and a lot of work went into the look and design.

The highlight of Open TLE is OpenOfficeTLE. OpenOfficeTLE is a Thai enhanced version of OpenOffice.

Open Office is the open source equivalent of Microsoft Office. I use it exclusively for all my work, while all of the people in my company use OpenOfficeTLE for document processing. There is no problem using or creating documents that come from or go to users of Microsoft Office.

Most of our staff is now using OpenTLE 5.0. Some users have upgraded to OpenTLE 5.5 but our technical team has not gotten around to updating everyone. OpenTLE 5.5 is much improved over OpenTLE 5.0, so when I read that a live CD version had been released, I was quite excited.

Live CDs are CDs which boot and run directly without installing any software onto the hard drive. They have been around for years but recently have become much better known because of the great work done on the Knoppix CD.

The Knoppix CD recognises just about any hardware, mounts existing drive partitions and provides a fully featured Linux distribution that runs on a single CD. As Knoppix is an open source project, a lot of the work done by the Knoppix team has found itself in other distributions.

While TLE was based on Red Hat, the latest version is a combination of Knoppix and Fedora. Fedora is the newest fork of Red Hat Linux available for download.

It took me about four hours to download LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD using a 512 Kbps ADSL connection. The download is available here.

If you plan to download using a dialup modem, you will need a download program that allows you to start and stop the download. A very good open source package that will allow you to do this on Microsoft Windows is DownloadPlus.

Most CD-ROM burning software will have the ability to create a CD from an image file. If you do not have such software, a program you can download and use for free for non-commercial applications is BurnAtOnce, which can be downloaded here.

LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD took a bit longer to boot up than other live CDs I have tried. Once loaded, it seemed to run about as fast as if it were installed on my hard drive. Programs came up quickly and looked snappy.

The default user interface is GNOME, which should be easy for anyone used to Microsoft Windows. The default boot has all the text in Thai. This is not my preference but many Thais new to computers will find it much easier to work with a pure Thai environment.

The software loaded on LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD was up-to-date. OpenOfficeTLE is now based on version 1.1.0. This version allows you to automatically create a PDF file. It even allows you to create and mail a PDF file. It also supports saving files as a FLASH document. The upgrade from 1.0 to 1.1 was a major milestone for OpenOffice and I am sure that Thai users will very much appreciate the many enhancements.

Along with the standard fare of GIMP for graphics and XMMS for MP3 playback, LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD features many development tools and several multimedia tools.

Also included is an English to Thai and Thai to English dictionary called Lexitron. Lexitron works very well and was also developed by Nectec.

I was most impressed with an OCR program for Thai called AmThai 2.0. I was quite amazed to see AmThai scan in Thai pages and convert the pages into editible Thai Text. This is a capability I know my staff will really appreciate.

I plan to burn many copies of LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD and leave them on everyone's desk.

Most exciting is that LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD has the option to do an install onto a hard drive, although I didn't test this option.

This disk should be made available to every student, teacher, and parent in Thailand. LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD is amazingly easy to use, fully featured and the ideal companion disk to send out to anyone who has to deal with Thai text in a foreign country.

Thais stationed abroad could use LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD to access Thai documents without having to install anything on their hard disks.

Nectec deserves a big hand for the LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD. It is the easiest way for a Thai to try out Linux and support the Thai language.

LinuxTLE 5.5 Live CD is an excellent Thai language distribution, but it can easily be set up to support English menus. When so configured, it is superior to Red Hat 9.0 or Fedora.