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Linux for Asia: Asianux
kiwimate writes "Two Linux distributors (one each from China and Japan) are building a common Linux platform for Asian companies. Using Oracle software to create the product, which is dubbed "Asianux", they have declared they'll create a common kernel so that the two companies' offerings can interoperate with ease."
...can be found on AsiaOSC.
There's a note on the front page there about a recent Mongolian Linux release, too.
The Army reading list
Personally, I now use Mac OS X (after about 10 years of enthusiastic Linux use :-) but there are several reasons for non-U.S. companies to standardize on Linux and cooperate on region specific versions:
-Mark
Using Oracle software to create the product
More like "making use of Oracle's software development centre in Beijing"--its a kind of important distinction, otherwise I was wondering what Oracle IDE they were going to use, or database they were planning to build into the distro...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Consider this:
- Japan has two character systems
- China is using different character system
- AFAIK South-Korea is using another different character system
- Thailand is using completely different character system
So now we have at least 4-5 different character system in south-east Asia (not counting India). I seriously doubt that any wester n distribution provides excellent support to all those characters.
Why don't you RTFA?
It's not about the middle finger, or about just having 'asian character support'. They want to create a product for businesses ("server-operated environment"), and for that you need tech support.
From the article:
"The two companies also aim to set up a joint support centre at Oracle's Beijing facility to provide technical assistance to China customers using Asianux-based products"
Basically, it's a choice between having to resort to mailing lists and dealing with people who don't have a clue( 'CJK support? What does that mean? Why don't you just use UTF like everyone else???"), and tailoring the kernel to their exact needs with good tech support behind it. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Sig? What sig?
Funny you should mention that as they are about to vote on a constitutional amendment for it.
Nonetheless, they already have private property except from the government who can basically take whatever they want. For the purposes of GPL and selling software, this is probably sufficient.
An intelligent and knowledgable post, with one nit I'd like to pick:
However, it is quite difficult for someone using a phonetic system to learn an ideographic one.
Believe it or not, this is not true.
Readers of ideographic systems and readers of so-called "phonetic" systems like English actually read in the same way - first they try to match the abstract shape of a word, then they break it down into segments and try to match the sequence of segments, and they only become aware of the individual components if that fails.
For example, if you see the word "Slashdot", you probably recognise that as a single entity. If you don't know what Slashdot is, you're likely to see it as "Slash" and "dot", those being two entities you do recognise. A kid might say "Suh-ler-ah-suh-huh duh-oh-tuh" as they read it, but I doubt you do.
Likewise, a Chinese reader seeing a common ideographic compound will recognise it as a block. They will recognise a rarer compound as a sequence of familiar characters. Only when faced with a rare character will they actually notice the component parts of that character, and then they'll have to go and look it up - just like you, faced with an English word you don't know, will have to look that up.
The two systems are, in short, of comparable complexity. You only think Chinese is difficult because you think of the characters as ideographs rather than words.