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IBM's Interest in Red Flag Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the blue-and-red-is-purple dept.

eldavojohn writes "For those of you unfamiliar with Red Flag Linux, it's an OS for the growing Chinese community of Linux users. Interestingly enough, IBM is looking to support Red Flag Linux as the next distribution of Linux that its more than 300 applications will run on. Support from a huge vendor like IBM certainly raises the rate of adoption of a distribution of Linux so this is certainly good news for Red Flag Linux and also the Chinese open source users. IBM currently supports Red Hat and SUSE Linux, which creates twice as much testing for each of their applications. Will Red Flag Linux cause them to require three times the amount of normal testing?"

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. This is a good thing. by miffo.swe · · Score: 4, Informative

    If IBM is smart they will target LSB (Linux Standard Base). Then they will ask the distributions to please conform to that standard. If anything this is the kind of thing that could work on unify Linux even better if done right. Ofcourse testing will have to be done anyway but the likelyhood of problems will be very small for every new distribution supported.

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  2. Asianux by raffe · · Score: 4, Informative

    Red flag is based of Asianux which is based on red hat.The current release version of Asianux is 2.0 , which is based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Asianux 1.0 was based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. The first releases of red flag was very poor quality. Asianux is a joint development between Linux vendors Red Flag , Miracle Linux Corporation and Haansoft .

  3. I havn't seen any Linux in China by RobertinXinyang · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I am in China and I havn't seen any Linux at all. All I have seen is Windows, and most of it is XP.

    In the markets I have seen the entire office suite going for 10 Yuan (1 US dollar = 8 Yuan). This was not one of the little markets that we hear of being raided, this was at one of the largest chains in the country.

    As far as Apples, I have the only one that I have seen here. In a stor with, literaly, hundreds of MP3 players, I saw one iPod. It was priced out of line with the local economy.

    With this being the situation, I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will fail to dominate this market. There may be a small market for Red Flag, much like there is stil a market for SCO Unix; However, look in the stores, it is al Microsoft.