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Debian to be Marketed to Japan and China
darthcamaro writes "Thanks to Sun Wah Linux and VA Linux Systems Japan, Debian is about to get some major exposure in Asia according to a report.
Debian developer Matthew Garrett told internetnews.com that Debian has always been one of the most international Linux distributions. "It's wonderful to see initiatives that will increase our representation in countries with a growing interest in Linux," he added. "It's especially heartening to see this move coming from commercial enterprises, as it demonstrates that free software can work with business."" There's also a post on Newsforge as well.
Any comments?
Yeah. They're both great distros. One's mainly corporate; one's mainly volunteer-based. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.
About two years ago a coallition of developers tried to start a BSD movement in Japan and China.
I'm confused. From my point of view a large part of, for example NetBSD's developers are from Japan. I don't think you need to start a movement there. They are starting it already. I remember that, when googling for some IPv6 topic, I always see dozens of sites in Asian character sets.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Half the problem (here in Japan at least) is the very patchy support for i18n - not only translations, but CJK input, printing and so on reasonably well configured out of the box. Biggest Linux distro I've seen here? "Vine Linux" - Redhat with Japanese support set up right and repackaged.
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Linux server revenue last year was five thousand million dollars ($5,000,000,000).
- IBM Linux revenue was $1.5 billion
- HP Linux revenue was $1.25 billion
- Dell Linux revenue was $750 million
See the report.Wow are you off page. China more-or-less kicked Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer out of the country. The Chinese National Post office has already installed Linux for it's end-to-end operations, and 300 main universities built a high speed network around Linux. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a Linux based supercomputer (no big surprise: check out www.top500.org and try to find one of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world that *doesn't* run Linux). Also, China has officially backed RedFlag Linux as the main system for government. I don't know where you got your information from, but it's way wrong.
Debian fits in because the localization in it is already very good and tested.
If you take a look at almost any debian.org webpage there are already quite a few translations. The rest of the distro is similar in that not only does it support many different hardware platforms, it also has support for most major languages
It was Japanese language support that kept me from switching from Windows for the longest time. It was some time ago when RedHat's improved Japanese support took that reason away and I moved to RedHat. Fedora confused me a little at first but it's even better still. Since the mechanism is the same in Japanese and Chinese, I assume the quality of Chinese support is the same as Japanese and therefore I have to agree with the parent's sentiments on the matter.
But I wonder how well Debian supports the asian languages. Will they be using the same tools?
I don't think that is a problem right now; Sarge is getting a *lot* of attention because it is close to release.
Unstable is probably better than testing for a while after a new release, simply because testing gets almost no attention then, and it is very possible that something like a glibc update in unstable that doesn't propagate to testing to keep even security updates for large parts of testing from occurring.
That is not the case right now; Sarge probably has more attention now than it will when it goes stable.
"testing" gets updates only after they've been in "unstable" for some time, without showstopper bugs. True, unstable gets fixes first, but testing is less likely to break in the first place. (And if something does break badly in testing, the fix can be hurried through. This happened a year or two ago, when a bug in testing's X11 startup scripts wouldn't let the window system run. A lot of folks noticed :-)
I'd say, go for Sarge. The kind of bugs you're worried about turn up rarely in practice.
iSKUNK!
It's Hokkien, a dialect of Chinese. It's used in Singapore.
There are even jokes about it.
From Tokyo, I have the following opinion to offer:
1. Good news. The more the merrier. Debian, the distro of choice for hardcore users and developers, certainly needs a push and some TLC over here. The developer community is sorely sorely lacking in profile, heroes, and most of all corporate support.
2. Sun Wah Linux and VA Linux are known within the community, but are bit players in the market as a whole. Red Hat has majority shares in Japan, is very strong in Korea, and is the corporate default linux for China. Meanwhile, Novell is non-existant in Korea, and is making a big push in China (they are so-so in Japan). Just as in the US, Debian will be hard-pressed to go against these guys
3. The drive for this-- a purely community-driven distro-- is welcome to the ears of government buyers. The asian governments hate sending their tax yen/yuan/wan to Redmond, but they would hate it just as much to send to Raleigh or Boston. This is (was) the impetus behind Asianux. unfortunately, Asianux doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
4. Turbo seems to be making somewhat of a comeback. If Debian can make some headway, then we may have some more play over here, and that is good for everyone.
Shameless plug: you track these kinds of stories, events, and opinions at OpenAsia.org
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The two servers I admin at work have both been runnning testing for well over 100 days since I upgraded them. It might not be recommended for production use, but it works fine in this instance - just as well as stable in fact (my home server runs stable), it just takes a bit more effort to maintain.
If you're worried about security updates but still want modern stuff on top, there's always backports.org
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Yeah, decent character input is still a major issue for FOSS that most alphabetic language users just don't grasp because they've never tried it. /usr which remains read-only, it's not a quick fix yet. I have only begun to read up on the klik documentation to see how they get around installing stuff on read-only file systems, but the Klik debs browser website suggests that fonts don't work with it yet.
People see characters displayed in a browser and they assume there's no more issues left, but that's far from the case.
I think the key is definitely getting decent support in Debian and having that extended into LiveCDs like Knoppix.
I've been playing around trying to get an i18n environment set up on Knoppix 3.7 with this klik system that lets you add on the clunky but functional xcin character input system. Unfortunately, since the fonts are in
However, a decent LiveCD that did have it working would be soooo nice. That would do more to help Debian in China than anything. I am one hundred percent sure of that.
Now, I've used what does exist already in terms of Chinese LiveCDs and as far as I know that consists primarily of BV1AL and a few others. I went to go check the names and for some reason linux.nctu.edu.tw seemed to be down. But there's an assortment of them there that I have been using and distributing to people here in Taiwan for several years.
The problem is that none of them is really current. The Knoppix scene is going crazy with innovations to the point that every release brings radical new improvements and yet the Chinese enabled versions are all radically stripped down and outdated. BV1AL is the most functional in terms of the Chinese my experience, but the actual desktop is quite a throwback. I understand that there's the size of the fonts to consider, but I also understand that you can get a keychain USB drive that will add a lot of expandability space to a LiveCD distro at a price that will work in the Chinese market.
I say, this is where the attention needs to go. In fact, this is what I was up till dawn doing last night.
I'm using http://www.trustix.org/ TLS for a few different things, seems as stable as anything else around on cheap hardware. I have no idea about its 'goodness' value, but for me it is good. To my knowledge it has not been compromised.
Well, I can't speak for all of India, but I've been employed by a large Indian TV broadcaster to provide a complete suite of video editing and broadcast tools for Linux (and developed under the GPL too).
/., I feel that India is not only paying attention to Linux, they're using it and some at least are embracing the spirit of the open source movement and contributing back.
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