Japanese PC Manufacturers Preinstalling Linux

cshirky writes "There's an article in AsiaBizTech about Japanese PC manufacturers bundling Linux. The article concludes that 'Because Japan's main vendors are starting to offer Linux products and services, the Linux OS is likely to become a viable alternative for corporate customers.'" They're talking about big companies, too, like Compaq, IBM Japan, Hitachi, and Fujitsu. Sweet!

Comments

Re:Korea thinks Linux is better?

[SurfsUp]

Linux Today has this story - part 2- about Linux and Korea.

Thankyou - that's the most useful Korea link I've ever seen. Following a lead to the korean internet faq I found the following interesting statement:

Microsoft Korea came up with its own Hangul encoding, UHC(Unified Hangul Code: MS Code Page 949, Windows-949) stripping Hangul of its unique merit as 'phonetically-combined-writing' system and treating it just like Chinese letters, use it in Hangul Windows 95 and Windows NT (in case of Korean Windows NT 4.0, all internal processings are done in Unicode, but on the surface, it used UHC) despite repeated advices by Korean government to adopt ISO-10646.

Hmm. Talk about de-comoditizing standards. Well I guess if you can take control of an entire country's language encoding standard you've got a real kick-ass lock-in happening. BTW, thanks to your link I've now got hangul up and running in hanterm and Netscape - maybe that missing hangul howto just just say one thing: "get hanterm".

:-)

Korea thinks Linux is better?

[SurfsUp]

Korea seems to have decided that Microsoft is strategicly bad to deal with and that Linux is a better choice.

When did they decide that? I was there for some time last year and the impression I got is that Microsoft is rather dominant to say the least. In Korea the economic imperative is stronger than in many of the leading industrial countries with higher per capita GNP, making it harder to justify spending a lot of one's time doing something that doesn't produce an immediate paycheck. Translation: working as an MSCE pays the bills - being a Linux guru doesn't.

At least, that seems to have been the case till now. What may change that is the obvious utility of Linux on a departmental mail server, or proxy server, or VPN gateway, or odbc database server, etc. etc. The software cost of each of these applications being $0.0 (even less when converted to won :-) This will help breed a new class of Linux gurus in Korea that pull their own weight, income-wise.

Linux is far from entering the mainstream as a desktop system in Korea. There are a number or reasons for this but one of the big ones is the spotty internationalization support. It's certainly not a "sit in it and drive away" situation. Turbo Linux is jumping in to help fill this void, but tell me - why is there no hangul-howto (IOW how to install hangul) in the standard howto collections? So that you can easily work in hangul even in Redhat, Debian, or whatever?

In my opinion, we haven't done enough to support Linux take-up in one of the world's most populous and industrially advanced countries. Whoever is in Korea and is reading this, please correct me if I've said anything inaccurate.

Internationalization efforts

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

On a related note, I've noticed that there has been a LOT of progress in internationalization in Linux, particularly for Oriental languages (Japanese in particular). Over the last few days, Debian has suddenly gained several dozen packages specifically for Japanese language support, and many other programs have been retrofit for various internationalized functionalization. Definitely a Good Thing(tm). No reason to exclude most of the civilized world just because they don't use 8-bit Roman characters.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Not just a Japanese thing.

[mrsam]

There's definitely a growing dissatisfaction in the enterprise with MS software and services. Just yesterday I was sitting in the meeting, and people were talking about how to move some files from PeeCees to our big dumb UNIX boxes, where all the company jewels are.

Someone said something to the effect "let's use our Samba boxes". I asked him to repeat what he just said, to make sure that I heard him right.

I do consulting, and my current contract is with the traditional suit-n-tie multinational financial corp. This is the last place you'd expect to find a bunch of Samba boxes running somewhere. I was in a state of shock for the rest of the day. It turned out that they have Samba running on Solaris, but that's a start, I suppose.

So it doesn't surprise me what the Japanese are doing. It's probably going to happen here too, within the next couple of years. Unless W2K is a smashing success, you'll start to see many places begin to decomission their NT servers when they reach the end of their lifecycle, and recycling the boxes to run something else. Maybe Linux, maybe Solaris, maybe Monterey.
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Software economy?

[proberts]

I wonder if this is the end of the US-based domination of the World's software? Korea seems to have decided that Microsoft is strategicly bad to deal with and that Linux is a better choice. I'm pretty sure I've read that Mexico's school system is going to Linux.

The big question is "Unless the Linux-on-the-desktop crowd are significantly successful soon, will it mean that the clue-per-person index will go up in 'developing countries' while it's declining in 'developed countries?'"

The US Government's policies and strategies seem to be tilted towards commercial entities, not the efforts of the population at large (e.g. crypto binaries ok, crypto source bad) - countries with less disposable income in their populations are taking national strategic advantage of free (as in beer), and that could have serious long-term impact on the global computing environment.

More clue is good. I'm just worried that a lot of US and European policy-makers are buying into the less-skilled workplace being good and long term it seems to be a less-than-ideal solution.

Paul

Re:Software economy?

[Black Parrot]

> I wonder if this is the end of the US-based domination of the World's software?

With nations being sensitive to things like trade deficit, it is going to be very tempting to jump on the chance to quit shipping [bm]illions of dollar-equivalents of the local currency off to Redmond, Washington, USA. Even technically clueless politicians will "get it" when it's put into that perspective.

> The US Government's policies and strategies seem to be tilted towards commercial entities, not the efforts of the population at large...

Or replace "efforts" with "interests".

Your posts mirrors my sentiments exactly.

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It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?

Re:Turbolinux

[the eric conspiracy]

There was a press release from Turbolinux claiming this. On closer examination it was over a brief period of time immediately following a major new release of Turbolinux. Even then there was some doubt as to the validity of the claims.