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The Ongoing Saga of Linux in China

Posted by Hemos on from the reports-from-the-front dept.

Dan Gillmor, who's currently on the road in China, has sent a report about the role of Linux in China. We've talked about this before. Dan hits on some of the high points for *why* the Chinese are interested, which makes for interesting reading.

3 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Taiwan by Moridineas · · Score: 4, Interesting


    I don't know anyone from China who lived there after about age 9 or 10 (all the families of my friend moved here [the US] at about that time) but I do know a good number of Taiwanese who went through higher schooling in Taiwan.

    In Taiwan (at least from what I hear), FreeBSD seems to have become very popular, and to have a better reputation than Linux. One of my friends still connects to Taiwanese BBS type systems many of which are running FreeBSD.

    So I'm not exactly clear why Linux making in-roads (which I'm not sure is really justified in the article--it seems a lot of if's, maybes, and predictions) in China is so important. Free software is in the Chinese speaking world and has been making in-roads for years--that is what seems important to me.

    Scott

  2. Red Flag sponsorships by thorsen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In various hacker circles we have often discussed the China market for one reason: Why don't we see more stuff coming out of China?

    Red Flag Linux is one of the biggest (maybe biggest of us all) Linux distributors, but you still see nothing coming back to the society. Try to think of the last time you saw a patch from a chinese developer - it's very rare.

    I would really like to see the chinese hackers contributing to the environment in the future. Then it would be really interesting how Linux is doing in China.

    Bo Thorsen,
    SuSE Labs.

  3. Re:My chinese labmates use Windows because by mizhi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a nightmare getting linux to use chinese. But I have done it, at least partially... you can install language packs for mozilla/netscape to read websites, and also hack your .emacs file to make emacs able to handle chinese.

    Those of us for which chinese is a second language would like to see better support for multi-language platforms. That said, I have gotten java to do Chinese using unicode. The biggest weakness tho, is input. Chinese has like 2 or 3 different ways to input characters. The only method I know how to use effectively is the pinyin method, however from what I've seen, none of the methods are supported very well. It's the same old story though, software is written in english and then translated, usually through a serious of ugly hacks. :-)

    One thing I'd really like to see is something for latex that would allow me to do typesetting and printing of characters...

    I'm rambling, I'll stop.

    --
    Humorless sig goes here.