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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."

7 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. common kernel? by brondsem · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All linux distros have the same kernel: linux. You need more than a common kernel to get a high degree of interoperability.

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    "a quote" -me
  2. GPL! Ha! by Gothmolly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let's just see how well the GPL does in these countries, especially in China where piracy is rampant, and there is no such thing as private property (it's the definition of Communism, get over it flamers). Human (property) rights have never been terribly important in Asia, maybe we'll have to send in Stallman and Theo to get pissy at them when they uber-up the Linux kernel and don't publish their changes.

    -1 Flamebat, +1 Cynical, or +1 Prophetic? You decide.

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  3. Rinux: Ready for the desktop? by teamhasnoi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can't even imagine what a nightmare the command line would look like. I'm still figuring out the switches for fsck. Hard enough to do without contructing commands out of little pictures of houses, dancing guys and trees with lines through them.

  4. Re:Maybe I'm just ignorant but... by Echnin · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Right about South Korea (and North for that matter).

    I'm curious as to whether this will include support for both Traditional (DPRC)and Simplified (HK & Taiwan) characters. The DPRC were, I read somewhere about a year ago, outraged that the RC (Taiwan) flag was included somewhere in some Linux distrubution.

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  5. Re:Maybe I'm just ignorant but... by sloptaco · · Score: 2, Interesting

    - Japan has two character systems Errr!!
    Actually Japanese uses 4 character systems:
    * Kanji (Chinese Characters)
    * Hiragana
    * Katakana
    * Romaji (Roman alphabet)

    Korean also uses Chinese characters to some extent (historically, Korean was similar to Japanese using Hangul alongside Hanzi - but now they primarily use Hangul. Hanzi is still used often for names, etc.)

    -sloppy

  6. Re:Asia is pretty damn big by Aardpig · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From Womens Studies class back in college, I'm pretty sure that Oriental is not a desired term by Chinese Americans. We read several stories by Asian American women, who all objected to use of the word. I however am not one such person, so I can't state if it truley has negative conotations. I assume it would be like calling an African American a "colored person"

    In the UK, "Asian" refers to ethnic groups from India, Pakistan, and the surrounding countries. People whose ethnic ancestry is from the Pacific rim countries, in particular those whose eyelids are characterized by an epicanthic fold, are termed "Oriential". The English-Chinese population doesn't appear to take offence at this terminology.

    Likewise, "mixed race" (argh, hate that term) people in South Africa prefer to refer to themselves as "coloured" rather than "black". So let's remember that much of the terminology used to describe ethnicity or indeed skin pigmentation is very dependent on its cultural context.

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  7. Re:but what's so bad... by nicophonica · · Score: 2, Interesting

    about literally seeing the roots of a language in the language I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Written Chinese (and therefore written Japanese) originated as a pictographic language, as did the Greek character set. (The letter 'A' for instance, used to be an ox, which you can still see if you rotate the character counter clockwise and think of the two little legs as horns.) Both languages abstracted out the literal meaning of the pictures that they represented, but Chinese became ideographic (not pictographic) while the ancestor of the Greek character set ultimately became phonetic. Nothing is 'wrong' with either system they are equally expressive and cultures using both systems can attain high levels of literacy. However, it is quite difficult for someone using a phonetic system to learn an ideographic one.