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First Look at Asianux 2.0

If you visit Asianux.com, you'll find yourself on a web site of a project with plenty of ambition. Perhaps the best indication of it is a chart on this page which attempts to define the sphere of influence of the main enterprise Linux distributions in the world, with Red Hat dominant in North America, SUSE in Europe and -- you've guessed it -- Asianux on much of the huge (and potentially very lucrative) Asian continent. Although the reality is a little more complex than the chart would like to us to believe, the Asianux project has succeeded in attracting much attention in the Linux media. With the recent release of Asianux 2.0 we decided to download the two ISO images for the i386 architecture (images for x86_64 and pSeries processors are also available) and install it on a Pentium 4 box to take it for a test drive.

Before we start, it is important to stress that Asianux is not meant to be used as a standalone product. Although this is not clearly stated on the project's web site, the lack of any security and errata pages makes it obvious; in fact, since the release of Asianux 1.0 in April 2004 the project has issued just a single service pack, rather than regular security updates to vulnerable applications, as one would expect from an enterprise Linux distribution. Instead, Asianux serves as a base for the three participating Linux vendors - China's Red Flag Software, Japan's Miracle Corporation, and Korea's Haansoft. Of the three, only Red Flag has so far released a product based on Asianux 2.0 - a development snapshot of Red Flag Linux 5.0 Desktop, which is available for free download from Red Flag's web site.

Asianux 2.0 is not an independently developed distribution, but rather obviously based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. This is also true of the Anaconda installer, which, although heavily modified and themed, offers roughly the same steps as any recent Red Hat or Fedora installation program. Nevertheless, there are some differences; for example, the partitioning stage in Asianux also offers ReiserFS and XFS formatting options, but, on the other hand, it completely omits the option to select SELinux functionality, leaving SELinux disabled instead. The package selection is also simplified with the only two options being a "minimal install" and "install everything". Also unlike the Fedora/Red Hat installation program, where some configuration takes place after the first reboot, in Asianux, the package installation step is immediately followed by monitor setup, while the first reboot triggers the good old Kudzu for further hardware configuration. The step to add non-root users has been removed from the Asianux installation program.

The system can boot into a console login prompt or KDM. The only available desktop environment in Asianux 2.0 is KDE 3.2.1 with a "start button" and window decorations and widgets strongly resembling Windows 98. The set of available applications is rather limited, but this is hardly surprising given the fact that Asianux is designed to be a base to build upon, rather than an all-encompassing Linux distribution. As such, don't expect to find much beyond the simplest of tools for common tasks. The only area that has some interesting applications is system administration, which includes several graphical front-ends for analyzing SELinux policies, a tool for authentication configuration, Guarddog firewall configuration, and the usual printer and network setup tools. Also present is a "Control Panel" with several modules that are virtual copycats of their counterparts from Microsoft Windows.

Although the name "Asianux" implies that the operating system is designed for the large Asian continent full of diverse cultures, languages and writing systems, the truth is that Asianux only supports four Asian languages, or to be more precise, four Asian character sets - simplified Chinese (used in China and Singapore), traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong), Japanese and Korean - these are often referred to as CJK languages. It also supports English. Somewhat surprisingly, the system locale defaults to the national language code set (e.g. Big5, GB2312) as selected during installation, rather than Unicode (UTF8). The input of CJK characters is offered via SCIM, an increasingly popular and intelligent utility (originally developed by Turbolinux) for typing the complex character sets of East Asian languages.

After spending an afternoon in Asianux 2.0 we found few reasons to complain about the operating system. Although the application set is a little outdated and we didn't particularly care for the Windows-like look and feel of the default theme, we found the system solid, responsive, and with trouble-free input of the four supported character sets. The extra graphical utilities included in the system provided for a pleasant surprise. A little less impressive is the Asianux web sites, which lacks documentation and any interactive community resources, such as mailing lists, user forums or Wikis. Also, the distribution is developed completely behind closed doors without any public participation and without any public development releases.

Now for the all-important question: are there any compelling reasons for an Asian company to choose Asianux over its main competitors - the enterprise offerings by Red Hat, Novell and even Turbolinux, which has been active on the Chinese and Japanese markets? After all, Red Hat, SUSE and Turbolinux have been supporting CJK languages for a long time. The latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server will also support a number of Indian languages, not to mention many other languages on the continent, including those of the Middle East and South East Asia. As such, one can argue that both Red Hat and SUSE are, in fact, more "Asian", at least in terms of language support, than Asianux itself.

If Asianux wants to become a leading Linux player on the continent, it needs to do two things. Firstly, it needs to invite other main Asian Linux players to join the development effort - Turbolinux is an obvious example of a highly experienced and relatively successful Linux vendor with good sales in China and Japan, but large Linux companies also operate in Thailand, India and other countries. Secondly, the project should open up to community participation - in a fashion similar to Fedora Foundation, OpenSUSE or OpenSolaris. This is a trend that has already started in other parts of the world and Asian Linux companies would be wise not to ignore it.

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New Releases

Ubuntu Colony CD 4

Ubuntu has released Colony CD 4, the fourth in a series of milestone CD images with a snapshot of the Breezy development cycle. This will be the last Colony CD release before the Breezy preview.

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Novell: SUSE Linux 10.0 coming

Novell announces that SUSE Linux 10.0 will come out "in early October." "SUSE Linux 10.0 is created by the openSUSE project, a recently launched community initiative sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. A first for Novell, SUSE Linux 10.0 will include code changes and bug fixes initiated with developer input from across the worldwide Linux community."

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Distribution News

Fedora.us Status, Warning to FC3 APT Users!

The mirrors for download.fedora.us mirrors will completely remove FC3 and FE3 from the apt-only fedora.us mirror network on September 10th. "The Fedora Project recommends that users migrate away from apt to newer tools like yum or smartpm. Even upstream Conectiva has given up on apt, instead worked on their new client smartpm rewritten from scratch. Apt-rpm has bugs (virtual provides bugs like #164601) and missing functionality (like multilib) that may never be fixed, making it impossible to support for the Fedora Project." Also fedora.us will no longer make security updates for RH8 Extras.

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MadTux/eLucis fund drive for Debian

MadTux/eLucis is organizing a drive to raise funds for the Debian Project. They will donate 40% of their gross proceeds for the week of Sept 19-Sept 24, 2005 to support Debian development.

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Debian: New experimental "shadow" package 4.0.12-1, synced with upstream

The shadow package maintenance team has announced the release of version 4.0.12-1 of the shadow package, in experimental. "Please test it as much as possible by installing the new passwd and login packages. Package maintainers who use "su" in their maintainer scripts should test them with the new su as much as possible."

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Debian bugs.d.o: usertags and user categories

Anthony Towns reports on changes to the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS). Click below to find out about the latest features that have been added to the BTS.

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Announcing the release of the Ubuntu Documentation Style Guide

The Ubuntu Documentation Project (UDP) has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Ubuntu Documentation Style Guide. The Style Guide is a reference tool used by the Ubuntu Documentation Project members and contributors.

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Linspire giving away desktop Linux OS (News.com)

Two weeks ago we introduced Freespire, a distribution made from the freely available sources used by Linspire. Unfortunately Freespire was not ready to be outed. News.com reports on Linspire's response, which included giving away free copies of Linspire Five-O. Freespire will be renamed Squiggle to avoid further confusion with Linspire.

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New Distributions

Elive

Elive is a live CD with the Enlightenment 17 and 16 desktop environments. It features hardware autodetection and self-configuration, as well as wide support for different kinds of monitors. Hard disk install is also supported. It has also the capability of writing in a virtual system (in the live CD mode), which allows the user to install any program through apt-get or compile it. Here is the list of packages included in the new 0.3 release.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

The Debian Weekly News for September 6, 2005 covers a quiz to test your knowledge of Debian, the KDE transition status, a discussion on the license for wiki content, run levels and the Linux Standards Base, and several other topics.

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Fedora Weekly News #12

The 12th issue of the Fedora Weekly News covers the upcoming FUDCon London, meeting minutes for the Fedora Documentation and Fedora Marketing meetings, a Fedora Glossary, and more.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for September 5 is out. Topics this week include the election of a new Gentoo developer council, the simultaneous support of PHP4 and PHP5, and the question of whether Tor users should be allowed into the Gentoo forums.

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MOTU report - Issue 7

Here's the latest report from the Masters of the Ubuntu Universe, with an introduction to the newest MOTUs and look at what's new in the Universe.

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DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 116

The DistroWatch Weekly for September 5, 2005 is out. "The first full week in September should be an exciting one for users and fans of Free Software - GNOME 2.12, Ubuntu 5.10 Preview, and SUSE Linux 10.0 RC1 are all expected to hit the download mirrors later this week. But before that happens we will take a brief look at the "smart" package manager in Mandriva, check out "SUPER", a performance-enhancing subproject of SUSE Linux, and revisit the Linspire versus Freespire controversy. Our featured distribution of the week is Elive, a great live CD featuring the Enlightenment window manager - a project that is also the recipient of our US$250 August 2005 donation."

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Package updates

Fedora updates

Updates for Fedora Core 4: xorg-x11 (lots of bug fixes), evince (add evince-0.4.0-dbus-fix.patch), openmotif (fix mrm initialization error), cman-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), gnbd-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), dlm-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), GFS-kernel (rebuilt for kernel 2.6.12-1.1447_FC4), lockdev (bug fix), perl-Compress-Zlib (update to 1.37), termcap (rebuild), ckermit (use baudboy.h to create per-device lock(s) in /var/lock), kdegraphics (backport CVS patches), pam (fix potential auditing problems), util-linux (bug fix), tar (provide man page), tzdata (updates for time zone changes).

Updates for Fedora Core 3: perl-Compress-Zlib (update to 1.37), perl-DBI (old and low priority security update), tzdata (updates for time zone changes).

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Trustix updates

Updates for Trustix Secure Linux 2.2 & 3.0 fix various bugs: 4suite, aspell, bind, cpplus-trustix, dmapi, kernel, lftp, logwatch, mc, mrtg, nano, openssh, php4, php, sqlite2, sqlite3, tsl-utils, xfsdump and a2ps, amanda, apache-ant, autofs, dev, gcc4, gpm, iptables, kernel, lrzsz, mc, module-init-tools, mrtg, newt, openswan, setup, slang, sysstat, tsl-utils.

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Distribution reviews

Linux From Scratch 6.1 - Part 2 - BLFS (TuxMachines)

TuxMachines takes a look at Beyond Linux From Scratch. "I had the basic LFS 6.1 install in place and I was hoping I only needed to pick up from there. The BLFS docbook lists such topics as security, filesystems, shells, editors, differing networking configurations, and my main goal here: X and window managers."

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Discovering Ubuntu Linux (Flexbeta)

A Windows zealot discovers Ubuntu, on Flexbeta. "Ubuntu has what is, quite possibly, the friendliest Linux user community of any distribution I've ever tried. Their forums are home to thousands of users, many of them completely new to Linux. Any question you could possibly have has probably already been asked and answered there, but if you can't find your answer you can post about it in one of their many forums. It is very rare someone won't have an answer to your question, and if you can't find an answer you can always ask them on IRC."

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