First Look at Turbolinux 11 "Fuji"

There aren't many Linux companies that were established in 1992 and are still going strongly today. With the exception of Slackware, Turbolinux is probably the only one, its beginnings dating back to that year when it was established in Tokyo under the name of Pacific HiTech. The company later moved its headquarters to the United States, but returned to Japan shortly after the dot-com bust where it changed hands several times. Currently concentrating on markets in Japan and China, it recently recorded a profit for the first time and, according to an analyst firm, it consistently beats all other Linux suppliers, including Red Flag, in terms of new server shipments in China.

In November, a new version of Turbolinux was released. Version 11, better known as "Fuji", was the company's first major product in over two years and, similar to its previous version, it is primarily intended as a desktop operating environment designed to simplify migration from Windows to Linux. Besides the standard base system with Linux kernel 2.6.13, X.Org 6.8.2, KDE 3.4.2 and GNOME 2.10, the product bundles a large number of third-party applications, which makes Turbolinux a heavily customized proprietary Linux distribution. It is currently available in Japan only where it retails for a hefty $143, although a low-end edition without some of the proprietary components is available for about $49. An international edition is planned for release in early 2006. All products are supported with security updates for 5 years.

Turbolinux was kind enough to send me a review copy of the product and I installed it on my test system - a 1.4GHz Pentium 4 machine with an ASUS P4T mainboard, 384 MB of RAM, Matrox Millennium G450 graphics card, and Realtek 8139too network card. The Turbolinux installer, called "Mongoose", provides little to write about other than to say that it is a nicely-designed and intuitive graphical installer with support for English (en_US), Japanese (EUC) and Chinese (GB18030 and Big5). After copying the base system from the first two CDs, the installer gives an option to install the proprietary applications (both commercial and some gratis ones, such as Flash Player) from the third CD. I chose to install all that was available - partly to see what Turbolinux ships with and partly to evaluate the usefulness of these applications, especially in the light of the high price tag.

After the trouble-free installation of the system and spotless hardware auto-configuration, I rebooted and was pleased to see that the Turbolinux GRUB menu listed not only Turbolinux, but also all other Linux distributions on the two hard disks. By default, the system boots straight into a good-looking KDE desktop, automatically logging in the first user created during system install. The boot process was remarkably fast and KDE was ready for use in as little as 45 seconds after boot (for comparison, SUSE Linux 10.0 takes 117 seconds to boot into KDE on the same system). The company's way of preventing illegal copying of its products is to supply a serial number which the user needs to transmit to Turbolinux to obtain a license file. Without it, some of the included custom utilities, such as "TurboPlus" for product updates, will not work.

Now it was time to investigate the proprietary components of the distribution. After all, Turbolinux's marketing strategy clearly revolves along the lines of providing enough added value to justify the product's high price. The first utility that hit my eyes after browsing through the KDE menu was TurboPlus. Designed to provide a convenient way to keep the product up-to-date with security and bug fixes, this custom application is pre-configured to connect to the Turbolinux server (once a day by default) to check for package updates and optionally update the system. Roughly one month after the release, TurboPlus listed 6 packages that needed security updates and 42 packages were lined up to receive bug fixes. Besides software updates, the application also serves to install and uninstall software and plugins, and to create desktop and menu shortcuts.

The next on test was "DAVID". Spotting its icon in the system tray and not being able to make out the purpose of the application from its name, I clicked on the icon to launch what looked like a file manager, with the right pane containing unusual icons labeled as "a:", "c:", "d:", "f:", "z:". Upon some investigation it turned out that DAVID Explorer, as is the application's full name, is indeed a file manager - but with a difference. Here, "c:" represents a Windows directory as created by the WINE emulator and pre-configured with many common file extensions, while "f:" is the user's home directory and "z:" is the root directory. Very unusual if you are a seasoned Linux user, but perhaps a more familiar directory layout for those just moving over from Windows. The application's interface is in Japanese only.

Another unique piece of software shipping with Fuji is "Turbo Media Player". This time there was no need to guess what the application was for, although a closer examination after its launch revealed that it is nothing more than a revamped Kaffeine 0.7.1. Turbolinux previously released a multimedia edition which featured a licensed DVD player (a Linux edition of PowerDVD) to play encrypted videos on Linux, but I was disappointed to see that Fuji does not include it. The only difference between standard Kaffeine and Turbo Media Player is the latter's ability to play Windows Media files out of the box (Turbolinux has licensed the codecs from Microsoft). But it certainly doesn't play encrypted DVDs and there is no easy way to install the required plugin.

One of the most important value-added applications in Fuji is a Linux edition of ATOK, a proprietary input method for the Japanese language, together with 5 Japanese TrueType fonts. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to change the language and, being unfamiliar with ATOK, I couldn't figure out whether it was possible to use it while the language was set to English. At that point I decided to re-install the system, choosing Japanese this time. After this, ATOK was available by default - by the way of a floating toolbar in the bottom right corner of the screen. Trying to type Japanese, ATOK indeed turned out to be a much more intelligent and intuitive input method than any of the free ones, offering choice in case of ambiguous input and automatically inserting correct characters wherever possible.

Fuji also comes with the new StarOffice 8 (or StarSuite, as it is called in Japan), RealPlayer, Java, Acrobat Reader, and Flash plugin. There is TurboSearch, a desktop search engine, similar to Beagle or Kat and nicely integrated into the KDE panel. I was unable to check the GNOME implementation of Turbolinux because the KDE's "End Session" button would simply re-start KDE without taking a breather at the login screen - this was one of the few bugs I noticed during the day of examining the distribution.

So how does Turbolinux's new product rate in the grand scheme of things? As proprietary distributions go by, Fuji certainly offers a fair share of extra bells and whistles, all pre-configured and ready to use. The company has obviously gone to great length to make the product acceptable to new converts from Windows and to minimize the stress associated with learning a new operating system. Users already familiar with Linux might prefer to save their money by choosing a free distribution, then do a bit of work to install plugins, OpenOffice.org, and one of the freely available software for Japanese input. But it is easy to see how Turbolinux can be a viable choice for medium-size companies which might prefer a pre-configured product with long-term support. Given the company's good financial results in recent years, it seems that many of their customers in Japan do indeed see good value in the product - despite its relatively high price tag and other negatives of a proprietary operating system, such as vendor lock-in.

---

(Log in to post comments)