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Xiong Jiang sent this to us from Beijing. We're running it exactly as he wrote it, without a single word changed: The curiosity from the world on Linux and China is so high these days. :) Yes, I am a Chinese and I am curious on other parts of the world, particularly, the Linux world, as you are never the less curious on China. :) These days the business of Graphon Corp. with some China companies makes a tremendous fuss on slashdot and LinuxToday." (More --->)

Warning from RM: be careful following the links in this story. They all seem valid (tested) but some of them are extremely slow and others are "China only." Netscape in Linux may either crash or hang on many of them.

Linux in China
-by Xiong Jiang

I just read the GraphOn press release on yahoo and found out it is still a very early step into China market. The "initial use of GraphOn Bridges is expected to begin in November 1999 at the Beijing Concord College of Sino-Canada, a 1500-student Beijing-based private school serving grades 10 through college". And "if successful, Chinese private enterprise and government sectors may be expected to follow..." So, it is obviously a PR from GraphOn, instead of a substantial explanation of fact. Not to mention that the China cooperators with GraphOn mentioned in the PR are even unheard to me. Maybe their English names are too different from their Chinese names ? :) OK, I just read the web of Sundiro, maybe it is a great start-up, but I really didn't hear any former success business case, and the counter on its web is 4690 this moment.

Leaving further investigation of this event to other more professional guys (I have some friends more deeply engaged in China IT industry but I am not), I would share my Linux experience as a Chinese graduate students with you, and hope you could have a better vision of Linux in China, and China itself. :)

My first touch of Linux dates back to April, 1996, when I was a graduate student in the EE department at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), one of the top five universities in China. At that time, our campus network has just been built up, and the campus network center was helping every department set up Linux email servers. I had an account on our department email server, so, I began to use it. :) Soon, there was a campus BBS. From BBS, I got to know there was already Linux on our campus network, downloaded by our network center staff through the new-born CERnet (China Education and Research network) from the Internet. Just as most of you in the beginning era of the Internet, I am very curious about Linux, and Internet, and even email. I had never heard it before. We only had Windows, 3.1 mostly, and a few very old VAX, Sun3, and Sun4, in a lab not always open to all.

So I began to look at it. From BBS, I got to know the ftp site on campus where I can get it. We have 100M FDDI campus backbone and 10M LAN for each department, so I easily download the necessary files: INSTALLATION documents and image files. After sitting in front of a 486 66 (16M RAM) for nearly a half day diving into the document, I installed my first Linux system with slackware, kernel 1.2.13.

The learning process was very pleasant. I found out that I can almost find anything I want to know about Linux, from README, man pages, and BBS. As most of the programmers of you, "Undocumented DOS Interrupts" and "Undocumented Windows" had been my top-secret reference books in DOS/Windows era. But on Linux, everything is open. Terrific! I've got to use it. :)

Few months later, I set up a Linux masquerading gateway on a 486 100 (32M RAM) for our lab colleagues, so we only need one IP to connect the lab LAN to the campus network. We have tens of PCs but my advisor didn't have so much money for so many IPs, though it was very cheap, maybe $20 per year for each IP. Linux desktop was quite ugly at that time, no KDE or GNOME still, but we saw its power ! Many campus email servers are set up with Linux on PC. In our network center, even Sun Sparc is running Linux.

I should talk about more country-wide Linux activities instead of my own experiense. Addition to our USTC BBS, we have several other hot Linux BBS or forums. The most prestigious are freesoft newsgroup (if you can't access it, here is the mirror on linux.net.cn, the SMTH BBS (domestic access only) at Tsinghua University (top 1 in China), and ihep BBS, where the main developers of TurboLinux (China) took off.

There are several GNU software archive: freesoft, wormwang's new silk road, and Tucows Linuxberg mirror at Quanzhou, Fujian Province.

There are three main Chinese Linux distributions now: TurboLinux, XteamLinux (with win98-alike GUI installation), and BluePoint Linux (with console Chinese support employing framebuffer in kernel). They are all real free software programmers that respect GPL. They are making more and more efforts to merge their work into global Linux developemnt.

There are several individual projects that cooperate tightly with the global developers, such as KDE i18n by Lark Wang, Linux Virtual Server project by Wensong Zhang(English page). There are also some GNU/Linux related web forum, such as China Linux Forum, China DigiTribe, and our LinuxNet Forum. We have a fascinating report on Richard Stallman's recent visit to China (English page) with photos taken by myself. You may have read it on LinuxToday.

Inevitably, most of the above mentioned web pages are in Chinese. As more and more Chinese now can read English on web, either via some dictionary tools or they could speak English themselves, I hope in the coming 21th century, more and more Chinese web can be read by English-speaking people, via some dictionary tools (for example, KingSoft PowerWord) or not. :)

And thanks Robin "roblimo" Miller for give me this chance of writing on Slashdot. Though he told me to write on SOFTWARE, but not politics, I still want to point out only one thing: as American people don't necessarily think in the same way with their governments, Chinese people also enjoy this freedom. Please update your vision of China from the horrible "10 Red Years", on which we have also introspected with great regret and overcome it more open-minded since the reformation brought by Mr. Xiaoping Deng. (I speak for myself, not the government, though you may feel there is some similarity. :)

Xiong Jiang sent this to us from Beijing. We're running it exactly as he wrote it, without a single word changed: The curiosity from the world on Linux and China is so high these days. :) Yes, I am a Chinese and I am curious on other parts of the world, particularly, the Linux world, as you are never the less curious on China. :) These days the business of Graphon Corp. with some China companies makes a tremendous fuss on slashdot and LinuxToday." (More --->)

Warning from RM: be careful following the links in this story. They all seem valid (tested) but some of them are extremely slow and others are "China only." Netscape in Linux may either crash or hang on many of them.

Linux in China
-by Xiong Jiang

I just read the GraphOn press release on yahoo and found out it is still a very early step into China market. The "initial use of GraphOn Bridges is expected to begin in November 1999 at the Beijing Concord College of Sino-Canada, a 1500-student Beijing-based private school serving grades 10 through college". And "if successful, Chinese private enterprise and government sectors may be expected to follow..." So, it is obviously a PR from GraphOn, instead of a substantial explanation of fact. Not to mention that the China cooperators with GraphOn mentioned in the PR are even unheard to me. Maybe their English names are too different from their Chinese names ? :) OK, I just read the web of Sundiro, maybe it is a great start-up, but I really didn't hear any former success business case, and the counter on its web is 4690 this moment.

Leaving further investigation of this event to other more professional guys (I have some friends more deeply engaged in China IT industry but I am not), I would share my Linux experience as a Chinese graduate students with you, and hope you could have a better vision of Linux in China, and China itself. :)

My first touch of Linux dates back to April, 1996, when I was a graduate student in the EE department at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), one of the top five universities in China. At that time, our campus network has just been built up, and the campus network center was helping every department set up Linux email servers. I had an account on our department email server, so, I began to use it. :) Soon, there was a campus BBS. From BBS, I got to know there was already Linux on our campus network, downloaded by our network center staff through the new-born CERnet (China Education and Research network) from the Internet. Just as most of you in the beginning era of the Internet, I am very curious about Linux, and Internet, and even email. I had never heard it before. We only had Windows, 3.1 mostly, and a few very old VAX, Sun3, and Sun4, in a lab not always open to all.

So I began to look at it. From BBS, I got to know the ftp site on campus where I can get it. We have 100M FDDI campus backbone and 10M LAN for each department, so I easily download the necessary files: INSTALLATION documents and image files. After sitting in front of a 486 66 (16M RAM) for nearly a half day diving into the document, I installed my first Linux system with slackware, kernel 1.2.13.

The learning process was very pleasant. I found out that I can almost find anything I want to know about Linux, from README, man pages, and BBS. As most of the programmers of you, "Undocumented DOS Interrupts" and "Undocumented Windows" had been my top-secret reference books in DOS/Windows era. But on Linux, everything is open. Terrific! I've got to use it. :)

Few months later, I set up a Linux masquerading gateway on a 486 100 (32M RAM) for our lab colleagues, so we only need one IP to connect the lab LAN to the campus network. We have tens of PCs but my advisor didn't have so much money for so many IPs, though it was very cheap, maybe $20 per year for each IP. Linux desktop was quite ugly at that time, no KDE or GNOME still, but we saw its power ! Many campus email servers are set up with Linux on PC. In our network center, even Sun Sparc is running Linux.

I should talk about more country-wide Linux activities instead of my own experiense. Addition to our USTC BBS, we have several other hot Linux BBS or forums. The most prestigious are freesoft newsgroup (if you can't access it, here is the mirror on linux.net.cn, the SMTH BBS (domestic access only) at Tsinghua University (top 1 in China), and ihep BBS, where the main developers of TurboLinux (China) took off.

There are several GNU software archive: freesoft, wormwang's new silk road, and Tucows Linuxberg mirror at Quanzhou, Fujian Province.

There are three main Chinese Linux distributions now: TurboLinux, XteamLinux (with win98-alike GUI installation), and BluePoint Linux (with console Chinese support employing framebuffer in kernel). They are all real free software programmers that respect GPL. They are making more and more efforts to merge their work into global Linux developemnt.

There are several individual projects that cooperate tightly with the global developers, such as KDE i18n by Lark Wang, Linux Virtual Server project by Wensong Zhang(English page). There are also some GNU/Linux related web forum, such as China Linux Forum, China DigiTribe, and our LinuxNet Forum. We have a fascinating report on Richard Stallman's recent visit to China (English page) with photos taken by myself. You may have read it on LinuxToday.

Inevitably, most of the above mentioned web pages are in Chinese. As more and more Chinese now can read English on web, either via some dictionary tools or they could speak English themselves, I hope in the coming 21th century, more and more Chinese web can be read by English-speaking people, via some dictionary tools (for example, KingSoft PowerWord) or not. :)

And thanks Robin "roblimo" Miller for give me this chance of writing on Slashdot. Though he told me to write on SOFTWARE, but not politics, I still want to point out only one thing: as American people don't necessarily think in the same way with their governments, Chinese people also enjoy this freedom. Please update your vision of China from the horrible "10 Red Years", on which we have also introspected with great regret and overcome it more open-minded since the reformation brought by Mr. Xiaoping Deng. (I speak for myself, not the government, though you may feel there is some similarity. :)

An Anonymous Coward wrote to inform us of a new Chinese Linux distro, Blue Point Linux 1.0RC, which includes support for Chinese characters. The bad news is the developers, who have based their effort on Red Hat's are alleged to have forgotten to include the modified kernel source. Coward asks: "Don't they violate the GPL?". Some people over at the BP Forum apparently have some thoughts. What do you think: is this against the terms of the GPL? (Can someone translate this?)