Linux Use in China - a View From Beijing

Xiong Jiang sent this to us from Beijing. We're running it exactly as he wrote it, without a single word changed: The curiosity from the world on Linux and China is so high these days. :) Yes, I am a Chinese and I am curious on other parts of the world, particularly, the Linux world, as you are never the less curious on China. :) These days the business of Graphon Corp. with some China companies makes a tremendous fuss on slashdot and LinuxToday." (More --->)

Warning from RM: be careful following the links in this story. They all seem valid (tested) but some of them are extremely slow and others are "China only." Netscape in Linux may either crash or hang on many of them.

Linux in China
-by Xiong Jiang

I just read the GraphOn press release on yahoo and found out it is still a very early step into China market. The "initial use of GraphOn Bridges is expected to begin in November 1999 at the Beijing Concord College of Sino-Canada, a 1500-student Beijing-based private school serving grades 10 through college". And "if successful, Chinese private enterprise and government sectors may be expected to follow..." So, it is obviously a PR from GraphOn, instead of a substantial explanation of fact. Not to mention that the China cooperators with GraphOn mentioned in the PR are even unheard to me. Maybe their English names are too different from their Chinese names ? :) OK, I just read the web of Sundiro, maybe it is a great start-up, but I really didn't hear any former success business case, and the counter on its web is 4690 this moment.

Leaving further investigation of this event to other more professional guys (I have some friends more deeply engaged in China IT industry but I am not), I would share my Linux experience as a Chinese graduate students with you, and hope you could have a better vision of Linux in China, and China itself. :)

My first touch of Linux dates back to April, 1996, when I was a graduate student in the EE department at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), one of the top five universities in China. At that time, our campus network has just been built up, and the campus network center was helping every department set up Linux email servers. I had an account on our department email server, so, I began to use it. :) Soon, there was a campus BBS. From BBS, I got to know there was already Linux on our campus network, downloaded by our network center staff through the new-born CERnet (China Education and Research network) from the Internet. Just as most of you in the beginning era of the Internet, I am very curious about Linux, and Internet, and even email. I had never heard it before. We only had Windows, 3.1 mostly, and a few very old VAX, Sun3, and Sun4, in a lab not always open to all.

So I began to look at it. From BBS, I got to know the ftp site on campus where I can get it. We have 100M FDDI campus backbone and 10M LAN for each department, so I easily download the necessary files: INSTALLATION documents and image files. After sitting in front of a 486 66 (16M RAM) for nearly a half day diving into the document, I installed my first Linux system with slackware, kernel 1.2.13.

The learning process was very pleasant. I found out that I can almost find anything I want to know about Linux, from README, man pages, and BBS. As most of the programmers of you, "Undocumented DOS Interrupts" and "Undocumented Windows" had been my top-secret reference books in DOS/Windows era. But on Linux, everything is open. Terrific! I've got to use it. :)

Few months later, I set up a Linux masquerading gateway on a 486 100 (32M RAM) for our lab colleagues, so we only need one IP to connect the lab LAN to the campus network. We have tens of PCs but my advisor didn't have so much money for so many IPs, though it was very cheap, maybe $20 per year for each IP. Linux desktop was quite ugly at that time, no KDE or GNOME still, but we saw its power ! Many campus email servers are set up with Linux on PC. In our network center, even Sun Sparc is running Linux.

I should talk about more country-wide Linux activities instead of my own experiense. Addition to our USTC BBS, we have several other hot Linux BBS or forums. The most prestigious are freesoft newsgroup (if you can't access it, here is the mirror on linux.net.cn, the SMTH BBS (domestic access only) at Tsinghua University (top 1 in China), and ihep BBS, where the main developers of TurboLinux (China) took off.

There are several GNU software archive: freesoft, wormwang's new silk road, and Tucows Linuxberg mirror at Quanzhou, Fujian Province.

There are three main Chinese Linux distributions now: TurboLinux, XteamLinux (with win98-alike GUI installation), and BluePoint Linux (with console Chinese support employing framebuffer in kernel). They are all real free software programmers that respect GPL. They are making more and more efforts to merge their work into global Linux developemnt.

There are several individual projects that cooperate tightly with the global developers, such as KDE i18n by Lark Wang, Linux Virtual Server project by Wensong Zhang(English page). There are also some GNU/Linux related web forum, such as China Linux Forum, China DigiTribe, and our LinuxNet Forum. We have a fascinating report on Richard Stallman's recent visit to China (English page) with photos taken by myself. You may have read it on LinuxToday.

Inevitably, most of the above mentioned web pages are in Chinese. As more and more Chinese now can read English on web, either via some dictionary tools or they could speak English themselves, I hope in the coming 21th century, more and more Chinese web can be read by English-speaking people, via some dictionary tools (for example, KingSoft PowerWord) or not. :)

And thanks Robin "roblimo" Miller for give me this chance of writing on Slashdot. Though he told me to write on SOFTWARE, but not politics, I still want to point out only one thing: as American people don't necessarily think in the same way with their governments, Chinese people also enjoy this freedom. Please update your vision of China from the horrible "10 Red Years", on which we have also introspected with great regret and overcome it more open-minded since the reformation brought by Mr. Xiaoping Deng. (I speak for myself, not the government, though you may feel there is some similarity. :)

Comments

Finally

[Mudhiker]

Something good about China on slashdot...
not that the guys on top have done anything wrong, quite the contrary ;-)
But the recent story that mentioned China and Linux brought a swarm of very negative anti-chinese comments. Get a clue people. Westerners (particularly us United Statesens) could learn a lot from the rest of the world. Get over the whole Communist / Government / Propoganda thing and learn about the people!!!
Sheesh.
I am disgusted sometimes by what I read on /. but, there's enough good stuff here and some honest, cool opinions, so I keep coming back, every day. This here article just made my day. Cool! A glimpse of China.

okay. nuff ranting.

And the United States doesn't?

[Wakko Warner]

We have a long, sorry history of human rights abuses; we really shouldn't be lecturing other countries until we've perfected our *own* rights issues. Stop trying to sound like some righteous sage champion of freedom and start looking around at the way peoples' rights in the U.S. are slowly being eroded.

It's fine to be concerned about China and their admittedly bad record on the matter, but please don't act like the U.S. is some sort of shining example.

Now, I believe the man was talking about Linux use in his country. Do you have anything constructive to add to the conversation with regards to that?

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

The Internationalization of Linux

[Effugas]

It's somewhat strange talking about Linux "becoming" international--we're talking about an OS with core kernel developers both coming from and living in almost every corner of the globe. (Mysteriously, although a Pengiun is our mascot, we have no Antarctic representation. ;-)

However, I still wonder if there will be a time when Linux development will be so decentralized that consensus on a development language could become difficult to achieve.

No, not C, C++, Java, Basic, Etc. I mean English.

After all, while English is rather standard as a second language throughout most of the world(for better or worse--damn picky language!), and the kernel is *now* written in the language(variable names, comments, keywords, etc.), the high density of immense programming talent in countries such as India and China that do not primarily speak English could create an altogether new kind of code fork.

Is code obfuscated if it's rewritten in an unfamiliar, maybe even two-byte language?

What if I so obfuscate some GPL code? Do I have the legal obligation to release a non-obfuscated(read: translated) version?

I actually honestly doubt anything onerous would come between the Tower of Babel.h and the GPL. But I could see some confusion sooner or later--I've gone through more than my fair share of code written in french, and it ain't too fun ;-)

Other stuff:

Only Stallman Could Go To China. (After ESR's well-intentioned but rather brutal slapdown of China's ethical policies, one actually has to pause and notice the irony--RMS The Diplomat, ESR the Firebrand?!)

as American people don't necessarily think in the same way with their governments, Chinese people also enjoy this freedom. Please update your vision of China from the horrible "10 Red Years", on which we have also introspected with great regret and overcome it more open-minded since the reformation brought by Mr. Xiaoping Deng.

An interesting way to look at things. However, Americans are pretty used to hearing stories about people getting jailed for being in the kind of small, powerless political parties that Americans have a long history of mocking without mercy for being ineffectual and unprofessional.

The thought of people going to jail we prefer to laugh at is rather alien to Americans ;-)

Of course, your point is extremely well taken--You Are Not Your Government. It's stupid thinking like that which gets civilians killed in wars for no other reason but that they obviously support The Enemy. (Then again, it's relatively easy for citizens to unify under their government in times like, say, when an embassy or a federal building gets bombed.)

Keep us posted--political issues aside, I'm extremely interested in those small, university level projects to add genuinely new and cool stuff to Linux.

Thanks for the update!

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so tired of people ranting about the human rights abuses of the chinese. Have any of you ever even opened a history book? Your high and mighty stand on human rights can't be supported no matter from what country you hail. Embrace the attempts of the oppressed people of the world to better their condition. Linux represents the freedom to innovate, to think, to take responsibility - in short, to live! Anyone who fails to support the efforts of any group of people to improve their lot is nothing more than a bigot and a hippocrit. May you drown in the freedom you deny to others.

Re:China doesn't have the worst track record

[w3woody]

I hate to pop the tiny little bubble you're living in, but Shell Oil (refered to in the article you provided a pointer to) is Dutch, not American. It's clear the writer of that little piece of propaganda was trying to target the "big bad" Americans in that article by focusing on Cheveron--because of all the oil companies in Nigeria, only Cheveron is American.

Or did you think that all Multinationals are American?

If you start digging into international affairs and all the "America-bashing" that goes on at that level, you'll find three things. (1) Most people criticize the United States for things that are also being done to a greater extent by multinationals owned and operated out of other countries. (I'll note that US law is more strict on the behavior of multinationals operating out of the US than other countries are.) (2) People do this because they are either ignorant of things like the fact that the Royal Dutch Shell Company is called that because it's Dutch, not because of some anacronistic Madison Avenue type deciding that the name was cool. (3) People tend to target the United States because as we have the largest economy in the world, we're more likely to simply step in and write a large check. (The amount of money the US gives out in foreign aid grants is larger tha many countries's total GNP.)

Best to dig into the propaganda and find out what's really going on, rather than speak out of ignorance and contribute to the problem.

Ask yourself, had oil not been found in Nigeria, do you think the Nigerian Dictatorships that have repressed its people would have never formed, or would have turned power over to a Democracy? Absolutely not. Further, before criticising the Dutch for their "evil company" (oh, excuse me, that should be "American," as we are the root of all evil in the world today), note that multinationals are generally operated locally by local citizens--in fact, most multinationals simply act as holding companies for companies incorporated in the nation where they do business. So when the Nigerian dictator put to death a half-dozen folks for criticizing Shell, was it an American who was responsible for ordering their deaths? No; it was a Nigerian. That is, it was Nigerians killing Nigerians over money. The fact that the money came from a Dutch company doesn't make it the fault of the Americans. (Oh, excuse me, Dutch--but it can't be the Dutch because it's the Americans who are evil; the Dutch only make good chocolate and dance around in funny wooden shoes. Oh, hey; it's all confusing--let's just pretend Shell is an American company. No, wait--let's blaim Cheveron! That's a good answer: we'll blaim Cheveron even though Ken Saro-wiwa was criticizing Shell; Ken Saro-wiwa must have made a typo and must have really been criticizing Cheveron, not Shell, as Cheveron is American and Shell is Dutch. That's it!)

Does it bother you how stupid all of this "Evil American multinational corporations" bullshit is?

What's the point? I'm evil, because I'm a native american--no, wait, I'm one of the "repressed people" so I mustn't be evil--in fact, why I'm not out on the front lines picketing Cheveron because some activists were put to death for the actions of Shell in Nigeria is beyond me.

I'm confused. Am I a good guy or a bad guy? And am I supposed to be friendly to Dutch people, or should I be throwing my Dutch chocolate out the window in protest? And should I be...

Ah, the hell with it. I'm going to read some cartoons at http://www.userfriendly.org instead.