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Canonical and China Announce Ubuntu Collaboration
First time accepted submitter GovCheese writes "Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will base their national reference architecture for standard operating systems on Ubuntu, and they will call it Kylin. Arguably China is the largest desktop market and the announcement has important implications. Shuttleworth says, 'The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community.'"
Freenode, home of cyber-terrorists.
If we can learn something from the history is that any openness won't work well in China. On the positive side we may see a number of drivers for peripheral devices being developed for Ubuntu. In any case, I wish them good luck.
I've always distrusted Ubuntu. It seems their programmers are being driven by marketers now-- Unity, adware crap, and so on. Kind of reminds me of another company... Good luck to them I guess.
So the Chinese like the idea of their official Linux distro coming with a keylogger pre-installed?
Who would have guessed.
Waiting for some bright minds in Congress to start holding hearings into whether Communist OSs like Linux are responsible for cyberterrorism.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No accepting upstream patches from Kylin, got it.
In terms of counterintelligence, a smart move on China's part. Although Canonical is UK based, it's significantly easier to migrate from Ubuntu to any other distro than from Windows or OSX, should the need arise. I'm actually quite surprised that Iran isn't doing the same thing. You don't even need to have backdoors in computers of the individuals you're interested in; those of their families are already a big step ahead.
It just keeps getting more bizzare...
The Chinese government tried pushing Linux in the past, research “Red Flag” Linux. It was a failure. I only saw it once. I happened to be in a shop in Xian and I saw it on a computer. Before I could comment on it the sales man assured me that if I purchased the computer they would put a copy of Windows on it “so it could be useful.”
As others have commented, Linux is competing with free copies of Windows. Further, it lacks the games that the Chinese want (also free).
Free as in speech has no ring to the Chinese ear. The issue is broken down to choosing between two flavours of free beer.
Like whatever happened to their RedHat derivative?
Kylin it with fire!!
Anyone else remember back in the mid-to-late-1990s when China standardized on OS/2? Everyone just ignored it and installed Windows anyway. Hopefully they'll have better luck this time.
Those two go together like Hitler and Mussolini.
I was hoping they'd call it "Chindows"
Red Flag and Qomo have huge followings in China. why are they basing on Ubuntu?
This brings the perspective of a more widespread linux desktop & linux malware into a reality.
I wonder what happened to Red Flag Linux? Red Flag was China's official Linux distro and was supposed to replace Microsoft Windows. Interesting that China is partnering with a U.S. company when they are trying to be independent in all other arenas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
They have to make money somehow. I've had no issues using Ubuntu and it is one of the few distros that is easy to use and set up.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
This is actually a pretty good move for China. China can't trust all the signed binaries from Microsoft , especially after the Microsoft certificates were used to sign the flame malware. With all the cyber-saber-rattling in Washington, its possible they could do the same thing to China with a Chinese Language patch. This way at lest you can compile the source yourself and check for weird additions.
In exchange for this, Ubuntu should become a lot more popular in a country that is currently producing the most volume of Unix systems. For us Linux users, it means that more drivers will be available before release, and they will continue to manufacture motherboards that don't require us to secure boot into Windows 8. I just hope any espionage China uses on its own people doesn't get committed back into the Ubuntu repo.
After all, 60% of the name Kylin has the word Linux shining through.
For a change, I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than add a random -1 = I disagree. It's no secret that Canonical wants to make money. Unlike competing Linux distros with a commercial and a free version, Canonical refused to split their distro in two. This decision has hampered their financial growth, but helped their community growth. I applaud them for it. Canonical has some financial interest but is clearly willing to sacrifice earnings to be good world citizens. Big American companies passed up valuable opportunities to partner with Canonical. HP and Dell, screwed up, though Dell at least gave it a an incompetent effort. The Chinese and Canonical working together makes sense. The Chinese like to steal whatever they can, but Canonical has already offered everything for free. There's nothing to steal. For example, Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it. Rather than eating the lost from buying thousands of bad displays, they decided to screw over all their ThinkPad customers in America. It's the Chinese way. The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed. Most companies can't even imagine a productive relationship with the Chinese government. However, there's no downside to Canonical, and tons of upside for China. If a billion Chinese benefit, and Canonical grows from a tiny company to a medium company, everyone wins. Mr Shuttleworth has always cared more about helping a billion people than making another hundred million. The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity. I get so tired of how people prefer to tear down good work. What have you done to improve the human condition? Does it compare to Mark's work?
The a-holes above calling Mark a communist pinko can suck my ever-hard wang.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I'm a Mint user-- Mint's downstream from Ubuntu-- so I can attest to the quality & hard work that its programmers & devs have put into it. My beef is with the direction Ubuntu is taking; drinking the tablet Kool-Aid, and as I mentioned before the adware. As for their revenues, the way to do it right is to make a jim-dandy OS, and sell the support. If I want adware I can get a Windows box.
From using Chinese websites I thought their reference OS is Windows XP with MSIE 6. Try getting any Chinese banking or e-payment systems work on a non MSIE browser...good luck!
So, so much this. Install Ubuntu on your computer and notice how their installer walks you through the process. Then go install Fedora -- and you'll remember why Linux still gets a bad rap.
Even if some of Canonical's decisions have been questionable, there's no question that they've made desktop Linux a significantly more pleasant experience for people who aren't hardcore IT geeks.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I think that as a company matures it is forced to find additional sources of revenue and often this revenue comes from those that are locked in i.e. its customers. Ubuntu's granddaddy - Debian is a good way to skip all the ad-ware that Ubuntu is starting to add.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
Wow hte Day I would defend apk is a day that I would never tough of !
Congrats troll !
You make mikael christ the pet look like an huggable teddy bear
... and I'd rate every single comment higher than at the moment. Just saying.
Ok, so .... sendgrid, who fires ppl for being dumbasses, isn't cananonical. Right, carry on ...
How's it feel to have one of the few intelligent comments on this?
Take the Red Pill.
It is not the big secret people think it is. Many institutions, including research universities, have a copy. They have a program specially for governments, the Government Security Program.
I mean do you really think the NSA, one of the most institutionally paranoid places there is, would allow Windows to be used if they couldn't audit it? Not hardly.
MS's page on that kind of thing is here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx
So if China wants it, I'm sure they have it. I think this is more of a "We have to have our own thing since China Strong!" and crap like that. China seems to have ego issues about not having home grown stuff (they aren't they only country that does) and wants to have their own everything. However turns out they aren't always equipped to develop it from scratch, so they often start with something else.
Similar to their "Loongson" microprocessor. It was to be a Chinese CPU, home grown and all that. In actuality they ripped off, and then later licensed, the MIPS architecture and it is a MIPS64 based chip running at 1GHz on a 65nm process.
This sounds similar. "Hey we want an OS, but writing one from scratch is a ton of work and we don't really have enough of the skillset around to do it well. So let's get a Linux distro to start on, and then make it our 'own'."
I think all the ad-ware & other "extras" Ubuntu has, are all tied into Unity, so one could skip it by just installing Cinnamon or Gnome and using those instead.
Just hope it doesn't turn into FORKylin
Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.
If Debian stable included a recent version of KDE and the latest NVidia drivers (since I need 310.32 for my card specifically), I'd switch to it immediately. I'm using Fedora now only because a) it includes KDE 4.10 and b) it's not Ubuntu.
Like taking the red pill.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Yes I can confirm that too. As much as I love tinkering and using other sane distros like Gentoo I have much respect for canonical. They do all the hard work, I go through when installing Gentoo. Most of the times, I make the distro blotted with drivers that I may never need. There is a purpose for distros like Gentoo. Ubuntu too loads much more than needed, but at least they know what to load and what not to load. Such choices of drivers does not come from suggestions from hard core Linux user groups, but from customers who use Ubuntu daily. Still there can be times, while installing Linux things could go wrong, but the rate has gone significantly down.
You don't need to install Ubuntu, it installs itself.
I was having trouble loading network drivers while installing Arch. Neither the Ethernet driver would load nor the Wireless drivers. It shamelessly spitted out some error messages in dmesg. As a Linux vocal minority, my duty would be to troll everywhere on the internet, why I think Arch sucks, rather than try to load the appropriate drivers myself.
This has been the case for many of Ubuntu criticism too, specially from loud vocal minority. You don't like Unity, but you will not install cinnamon, because you will become a minority. You will not install Mint, because you are not on Ubuntu. You will not install SusE, because you think grass is greener on the other side.
I respect when people say adds are bad, and Ubuntu should at least ask people if they want them during the installation. Besides that, whatever they introduce in their OS, its their decision. They want to reach out to large users, who don't care what Linux is, they want to make the desktop environment adamant to customization, they want to put red, white, blue wallpaper, they want to put orange icons, its their decision.
So I instaled Fedora 18. Everything worked fine, plus I wasn't encumbered with Unity and Amazon spyware to boot.
Why does Linux get a bad rap again? Oh, right. Canonical and shills like yourself.
People see GNU/Linux as this thing that is available at zero dollars and will magically cut costs. That isn't how it works in the real world. The way you utilize it to cut costs is by investing in the pieces which aren't working for you and after which the software can be utilized in a more efficient manor to cut licensing/support costs/etc. Free software is important and if you just see it as a dollars issue your never going to be able to take advantage of it to its full potential.
Huge followings? Quite the opposite.
Yes, I'm a "shill" because I have better things to do than waste my time with poorly designed installers.
Good call.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Why Ubuntu would even care to target mobile phones makes a lot of sense now. This could give Ubuntu an unfair advantage over Android.
I call your yang with my yin:
Most in the Linux community offer the recipe and the candy. Shuttleworth is only offering the candy and can't make a profit. RHEL and Suse manage to profit while offering both, hence the anti-Canonical sentiment.
Judging by Canonical's CLA could Mark have something in common with the Chinese?
And spare me the sainthood anointment, that was just over the top.
Well, we have not seen Mr. APK for a while and I think he is not accepting your challenge either.
Just install Kubuntu 13.04 when it comes out.
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried? I fell for the "Ubuntu is the only user-friendly distro" FUD for my first two years as a Linux user, and when the Ubuntu releases became intolerably unstable on my computer starting in late '09, I almost gave up on Linux entirely because I was so certain all other distros were a nightmare for non-geeks & had forums full of snarky asshats.
Thankfully I had a few live CDs I'd been thinking about trying when an Ubuntu update rendered my hard drive unbootable... I tried Simply Mepis for a few months and was enchanted, then gave OpenSuSE & Fedora a few months each and tried lesser-known distros I heard about like Samity or Petite. The results: the ones I tried were uniformly more stable & easier than Ubuntu -- my mother, a barely computer-literate senior citizen, can use & even install/set up the mainstream ones without trouble -- and *all* of them had a much friendlier, more user-centric vibe at their forums. I only ran into a handful that weren't functional out of the proverbial box, and almost all of those stated openly that they're for advanced users.
I'd highly recommend that you give the other mainstream distros a try if you haven't done so at least within the past 4 years; you just might be very, very surprised... (FWIW I think the easiest/friendliest is Simply Mepis, which is my favorite, but I'm sure that fans of the others would argue!)
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Suffering?
I'm running KDE on Mint 13. Runs fine.
"The Chinese are simply smart enough to take advantage of Shuttleworth's generousity."
Mark is richer than 99% of the people here on Slashdot, but he's barely a billionaire, nowhere near the wealth of Mark Z, the Google twins, let alone Bill G. The Chinese have a cash pile that runs into the hundreds of billions. They have no need for Shuttleworth's generosity.
I second this. SUSE is a damn great distro and gives the best KDE4 experience out-of-the-box of ANY Linux. It's easy to install and detects almost everything I've thrown at it (TV cards and wireless might be a problem) and is very user firendly. It gets a bad rep here in /. culture because of the M$ deal. For that matter Fedora's getting a bad rep because of their UEFI Secure Boot deal with M$. Slashdot culture is a funny thing. Criticize Apple and it's like kicking over an anthill. Now apparently ditto Ubuntu and Unity, & Ubuntu's practices. But it's okay to bash Metro and W8, whose lead Shuttleworth seems hell bent on following. Go on, people. Criticize away.
I also started out with Ubuntu (8.04), but thankfully the first distro I tried after I got fed up with its issues in early '10 was Simply Mepis, which has to be the easiest one ever. After I'd gotten used to it, I felt comfortable enough trying out OpenSuSE, Fedora, etc. to enjoy distro-hopping and start learning the commandline for fun since it wasn't as necessary as it had been for me in Ubuntu. If I'd gone straight for Debian either before or after Ubuntu, though, I'm pretty sure I would've given up on Linux for good.
I think we really need a page or site for users like us to offer our experiences with different distros in order to help one another discover which ones to try out. It's frustrating to see how many people try a distro that's too far beyond their skill level and react by deciding that either all of Linux is far too hard, or that Ubuntu & its derivatives are the only real options.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Possibly the difference is Canonical has a superstar jetset personality in front of it who's even been to space.
I'm not kidding. That'll help getting the crucial first few seconds of foot-in-door attention with mainstream people outside and inside government.
Also it's (sorta) South African. China is investing massively in Africa, and Africa has never been an Enemy. Together these are good hooks and waay better than from America/Finland and Stallman/Torvalis. Those are no hook at all.
This is enough, though flame me to a crisp for suggesting that Ubuntu may be better, too. _I_ don't like where they're heading these days, but their aggressive pursuit of future-leaning touchscreen masses may well be a really good plan for greater adoption.
Mr Shuttleworth who's funding the entire Ubuntu project with £20 million of his own money...?
Where's the announcement from China? Canonical has a long history of bullshit announcements that some big vendor is going to use their product. They've made that claim in the past for both Asus and Dell. In both cases, the Canonical product never appeared on those platforms, or was a very minor niche announcement.
I'm not finding any announcement about this on China government sites. However, the Ministry of Information Industry Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion Center is listed by Microsoft as an Microsoft Embedded Partner.
Here's a recent policy announcement on open source from CSIP. They encourage using Linux, but Canonical is not mentioned. The action agency on this is the "China Innovative Strategic Alliance for Open Source", but I'm not seeing them associated with Canonical.
The poor IBM employees supporting the ThinkPad line are screwed.
As a general rule, IBM offers no support for ThinkPads (and for all intents and purposes are no longer affiliated in any way with the ThinkPad brand) unless some specific company has decided to purchase Lenovo ThinkPads but would prefer to have them serviced by IBM.
Basically, IBM does not actively sell or service the ThinkPad in any capacity.
Occasionally ThinkPad deals are tossed into large package deals with other IBM products and services, but IBM does not maintain any preference in this respect. IBM will gladly sell you an HP computer as long as you are buying it from IBM.
There are more easy distros now but that is largely due to Ubuntu.
is this just another type of first post? Who cares, how often the guy submitted something ...
Because "communism" is what people commonly associate with "enemy" in much of the Western world.
...in much of the United States of America.
FTFY
Sorry for you if you don't get much political choice due to a bipartisan system, split between right-wing and far-right-wing, with more or less similar corporate backing behind both.
In western Europe, Communists are one of the several available party to vote for, although not the most active one. (Socialists are usually the most active on the left wing)
In eastern Europe, Communists are a bunch of politicians who try to ride the nostalgia wave with a doubtful program.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
and chinese support, will run away..
So it's done its job and can be consigned to history? Huzzah!
If Debian stable included a recent version of KDE and the latest NVidia drivers (since I need 310.32 for my card specifically), I'd switch to it immediately. I'm using Fedora now only because a) it includes KDE 4.10 and b) it's not Ubuntu.
You do realise there are other choices of distro, don't you? Your nvidia drivers should install on any system so long as you have the kernel headers. (I haven't needed them for a few years, since the free driver works for me.) I'm running KDE 4.10 on Slackware 14.0 and it's as sweet as I could ask for. Slack is what I started with back in '94, and despite having spent extended periods working with other just about all of the major distros (and even rolled my own LFS for a while), I keep coming back to it.
... As there will be a lot of virus being made for Ubuntu now... ;-)
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried?
Agreed. Although I'm pretty comfortable with basic installers (or none at all for that matter), I remember being quite impressed with RedHat and Mandrake back in the late '90s, and I'm certain it hasn't got any harder in the years since. Mandrake (7.0?) in particular was probably intuitive and bombproof enough for just about any non-geek to install. I would have thought most of the more popular modern distros would well and truly have it together by now. (Though I read recently that Fedora's has taken a turn for the worse, but I hope that might be an exception.)
He isn't as rich as others because he blows it all on expensive holidays. I probably would too if I had the cash.
There was a time when Everard was not an uncommon first name in the English-speaking world. But I never met anyone called Everard Wang.
Suffering?
The condition is called priapism. I've heard it's pretty uncomfortable.
That'd be pretty cool... a place to offer up our experiences for those just about to dive into the same problems.
Looks like the foundation for the future of Canonical has been laid. They can partner w/ Beijing, have the government sell Ubuntu in China and give them a few cents of all copies, in return for Beijing outlawing all other OSs. That will make Canonical financially stable, and then they can get into other things as well.
The installer's only one side of things though. There are still lots of annoying bugs and edge cases that simply don't get any attention by anyone apart from the occasional bug report that's never acknowledged. Don't get me wrong I appreciate a good installer - make it easy and it's easier for a novice user to start experimenting with Linux. Just don't expect them to remain when they start to compare the levels of polish to the proprietary systems with far more support.
and here I was thinking that the Chinese were smart....
Well, we have not seen Mr. APK for a while and I think he is not accepting your challenge either.
I just saw APK a couple days ago. He surfaced, blew once, and submerged...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How do you think they pay devs? Not everyone can live under a bridge, like St iGNUcius.
Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.
FreeBSD now has a desktop distro called PC-BSD, that is aimed solely at the desktop, which supports several DEs and which has a far improved way of updating packages that rivals even Debian. It's no longer just command line, unless you are administering a server. If you don't need a server, than on the BSD side, PC-BSD is right for you. Ubuntu is okay if you like Unity, and if you prefer one of the other DEs, you could try out Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu or Mint/Cinnamon or Mint/KDE or Mint/LDXE or Mint/XFCE. There are plenty of choices.
Ohh! A Matrix reference. You're so cool!
With Cannocal's latest move to intergrating online shopping into Unity, it just makes sense to partner with the government of the country who makes all this stuff in the first place.
In other news, new installs of pirate copies of windows have fallen 50% worldwide.
Lenovo just sold me a $1900 ThinkPad Carbon X1 Touch with a bad display, and they knew it.
Could you tell me more about this?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Actually, from the days of Caldera, most Linux distros were fine in terms of the installation. Problems came if X11 didn't have support for that video card driver (rare) or the network card wasn't supported. In fact, I ran into the latter problem most of the time, and that alone aborted my attempts to install Linux. It wasn't until Ubuntu was out that the Linux distros by & large had their act together on network cards, but this time, they were missing on Wi-Fi, just when most of the market had transitioned to laptops and wireless. Actually, some of what gets blamed on the installation really belongs to the drivers of certain essential parts not being there, and if that happens to be the case, one is hosed.
For the record, at that time, I had tried Caldera, Corel Linux, StormLinux, TurboLinux (which then wasn't a Japanese only distro), Mandrake and a few others that I forget. None were difficult to install - it's just that none supported networking. When one could get on the Network using Windows 98 but not using Linux, that pretty much defeated the idea.
The other upside to this is that in China, Canonical can port Ubuntu to non-x86 CPUs such as the Loongson and Allwinner. They can make their distro available on the Lemote laptops - similar to gNewSense. In China, while sticking to the GPL, they can sell Ubuntu on such computers and have a captive market, since even Windows 8 won't run on those. They could spawn a big developer community in China to help them at least gain marketshare in that market, if not anywhere else. Unlike in the West, where we freely complain about Metro, Unity, GNOME3, KDE4 and what have you, in countries like China, they'll simply learn and use what is given. So Mark can push Unity there, get it capture mindshare there and then try and use that market leadership in China to drive Canonical activities elsewhere in the world.
Not a bad strategy
beats the hell out of "ubuntu". jus' sayin'
Oh? I didn't know about this. I think I may have to try this out soon. Thanks!
While the 'free world' gets ever increasingly dumbed down OS choices, the BTIC nations seem to be embracing Linux and FOSS. This is not just a transfer of economics, it's a transfer of knowledge.
Wireless does tend to be an important thing now, though.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Ubuntu is actually one of the more difficult to set up. It is not Gentoo or Slackware but it is certainly not as easy as opensuse, mageia, or fedora.
Ubuntu is one of the shittier distros, always has been. It survived on hype alone.
Canonical pays devs?
They produce very little useful code.
Other than RedHat, who has a commercial and free version?
Don't say Suse because opensuse is not to SLED/SLES like Fedora is to RedHat.
Besides putting out a third rate distro, they added the laughably stupid Unity and threw in some spyware. Canonical is the MS of the Linux world.
Fuck Ubuntu. Fuck Canonical and Fuck Shuttlesworth.
Yet another reason to switch to OpenSUSE.
There is no reason for the Chinese to deploy Shuttlecocks bloated Ubuntu crapware since China already has a multitude of home-grown Linux and BSD distros.
FreeBSD is superior to Linux in almost every way. It's rock solid stable, very secure and delivers big performance gains under heavy load.
There is also the beauty of ports, jails and ZFS. FreeBSD is a quality OS - Linux is a hackjob with broken pieces.
So is being a hooker.
What's wrong with being a "hooker"? This is just one of the many service jobs.