Russia's Operating System May Be Fedora Based

Glyn Moody writes "Last month, a story about Russia producing its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux started circulating. Now there's some confirmation, and details of how the plan might be put into practice. Red Hat had a meeting with the Russian communications ministry, which announced that the development of free software in Russia was one of its priorities. One concrete idea they talked about was using the Russian Fedora project as a step towards creating a national operating system."

Comments

RED Hat, come on ppl

[cwrinn]

Well, Duh, it's Red. :D

Re:RED Hat, come on ppl

[GreatRedShark]

Maybe they'll rename it Red Ushanka! :P

Too perfect that it's based on RED Hat.

[Nimey]

Don't know why they'd pick the unstable beta distro to do it, though. Ought to use the Russian version of CentOS or Ubuntu LTS.

Re:Too perfect that it's based on RED Hat.

[Tet]

Fedora != unstable.

You are kidding arent you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.

Re:You are kidding arent you?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Whoa whoa whoa.

Windows is still there. Linux runs on top of it.

USSR

[MazzThePianoman]

Great, Linux was doing so well until it caused the 2nd rise of the USSR.

Re:USSR

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

Ah, finally, those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh, comrades? Eh?

Fedora not a good choice

[messner_007]

I am using Fedora from the start and I like it very much, but I don't think its philosophy is suitable for a "national" distribution.

Fedora is created for testing, not for everyday usage for normal people (not neerds). I think even using Fedora qualify you as a nerd. OK, it gets even worse if you are using alpha's.

Using Fedora will cripple their productivity and they will start to hate Linux.

If they want to use Linux for serious stuff, like "national distribution", then they should chose another distro.

Re:In soviet russia...

[dotancohen]

But why Fedora?

Because only in the Russian language are there enough curse words to accurately describe yum breaking X.org, the video drivers, and itself after downloading 450 MB of updates because you didn't update in two weeks.

That was FC6, and F7 would not install on my Inspiron (driving me to Kubuntu). I love Fedora to death, but it is _not_ for your daily driver! Unless you happen to speak a language where every tangible noun can be made into a curse word. Pizdyetz!

Re:Keep your head down

[daveime]

In quantum chicken physics, the two states are :-

1) About to cross the road
2) Groaning at the awful punchline

The trick is to try and observe the former state, thus collapsing the waveform so that the latter state cannot happen.

russian point of view

[anjolio]

Hey guys, here is my point of view from Russia:

1. First of all jokes about communism and Red OS are not funny (here), we fed of them a lot, really. It was finished 18 years ago, maybe enough?
2. Really "red" meant "beautiful" about 2 centuries ago in russian. Borsch is very tasteful! (:
3. Russian linux community has a lot of discussions about this theme. A lot of people think that most effective action is spending money on current russian open source developers to improve international software. Of course we need better localizations in some cases. In my point of view it's the best way, but..
4. Government need to see a real result, such as rusisian OS, so as I think, they would not spend money on current developers and try to create new team with it's own distribution, or, maybe, to spend money on one of current russian distributions (ALT Linux is the likely one, as I see).
5. Windows is really looks like free OS now here, about 95% of home users have pirate version. I think something should be done and linux is the best way.
6. Actually nobody knows here (except government :) what this OS will look like: will it be just another linux distro, or will it be OS based on linux, but with closed sources. Everybody understand it will not be a new OS, it's really impossible.