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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.
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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."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!
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
davejenkins.com |
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.
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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