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The State of Regional Linux Distributions

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

Many people assume that since China produces a Linux distribution called Red Flag Linux, it must be the most widely used distribution in China. By the same extension, Conectiva Linux is surely the most popular distribution in Brazil and Gelecek Linux is the biggest in Turkey. Right? This assumption couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, the most popular distributions in China, Brazil, Turkey and everywhere else are much the same as in Europe or North America - Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian.

"Which upcoming distribution release do you most look forward to?" asked a recent poll on linuxfans.org, a popular Chinese Linux community web site. Red Hat and Mandrake were the top choices, together generating nearly 70% of all votes. Of course, a poll like this can hardly be considered statistically correct and yes, not everybody has a choice over the matter. Some would even argue that regional distributions make a lot of sense. They usually offer expert support for the local language(s) and writing system as well as email and telephone technical support in the country's language(s). Still, there are indications that they are unable to compete with the big internationally recognized distributions and some of them might not even be around for much longer.

Let's take a look at some reasons supporting the above statements.

1. Business considerations. Many of the regional distributions were created during the "dotcom" boom, when a new company with the word "Linux" in its name seemed like an easy road to instant riches. The task at hand wasn't difficult either. All that these companies needed to do was download the latest Red Hat, modify the installer, set a different default language and put it into a box to be sold by software stores. Unfortunately for them, the anticipated mass conversion to Linux did not materialize and some of these companies have either refocused their efforts or closed down completely. Many of those that are still around have neglected web sites, don't bother with providing post-release security updates (now you know why Red Flag's web site is hosted on Red Hat's distribution) and, with Conectiva being one major exception, don't contribute much back to the community.

2. Community support. As we all know, the commercial support that comes with the purchased box is rather limited so many people turn to community resources. As an example, a Mandrake user will find the vanilla installation lacking many useful applications - due to their questionable legal status in certain countries. That's where a community web site, such plf.zarb.org comes in handy. The applications found on the site can be easily added to the urpmi utility which makes installing all the great multimedia application a single-click breeze. Similar web sites exist for Red Hat (freshrpms.net) or Debian (apt-get.org). Regional distributions often lack such excellent community resources.

3. Download options. Many regional distributions are only able to offer their slow, low-bandwidth servers and very few mirrors (if any) for users to download their products. This is in sharp contrast with fast FTP servers, often found at universities, providing complete and up-to-date mirrors for the major distributions.

4. Language support. The argument that regional distributions provide better language support is fading fast. Debian's language support has always been exceptional, thanks largely to the fact that their developers can be found in all corners of the world. Mandrake has made a lot of effort to support even some obscure languages. Starting with version 8.0, Red Hat has moved to Unicode, a text encoding standard that enables intermixing different writing systems in documents (even at the expense of making a few applications unusable).

5. Availability of learning material. What are the choices for those wishing to learn about Linux? Japan has produced more local distributions than most other countries; yet if you walk into a Tokyo bookstore and look at the shelves displaying Linux books, you'll find rows and rows of Red Hat publications, but only one or two books dealing with the local products, such as Turbolinux. This situation is certainly not unique to Japan.

People new to Linux are frequently astonished to learn that there are possibly two or three hundred Linux distributions, yet they might not realize that less than a dozen of them have any measurable market share. Those created to exist within the realms of national boundaries are increasingly marginalized by the fearless expansion of the "brand name" product. The fact that the Internet lacks borders is even more against them.

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

Bdale Garbee has sent out a final "Bits from the DPL" posting on his last day as Debian Project Leader. "Debian is perhaps the finest example in the world today of the community development model at work. It has been a great privilege to serve for the last year as your elected Project Leader, and your continuing enthusiasm for our vision of Debian as a Universal Operating System is very gratifying!"

Martin Michlmayr provides his first message as Debian Project Leader. "This is my first message as DPL. My term has officially started today and I look forward to acting as your DPL for the next 12 months. The leader@debian.org alias now points to my address and I encourage you to contact me there with your ideas or concerns. As I have stated in my platform, I think that communication is very important. I will try to keep you up to date with what's going on in the community so expect more messages from me in the future. I will also encourage other people to make announcements or give status reports when appropriate."

This Debian Planet article steps through the process of installing Debian remotely, over an existing Linux install. "The situation I found myself in a few weeks ago was with the purchase of a hosted system running another popular flavor of Linux. Unfortunately, they did not offer manual assistance, so I had to find my own way to get my server of choice installed."

Raphael Hertzog reports on changes to the Package Tracking System.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 16

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for April 21, 2003 is out. This week's topics include Portage security features detailed; Open positions with the Gentoo Linux project; Gentoo Linux is seeking additional source mirrors and colocation space; Gentoo Linux now available on the HPPA Platform; and more.

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Mandrake Linux Corporate Server 2.1 for the AMD Opteron

MandrakeSoft announced the immediate availability of Mandrake Linux Corporate Server 2.1 for the newly released AMD Opteron processor.

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SuSE Linux for the AMD Opteron Processor

SuSE Linux announced the availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64, Powered by UnitedLinux.

UnitedLinux announced support for AMD64 (Opteron) in a separate press release.

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Guardian Digital Plans Upgrade To Secure Linux Distribution (TechWeb)

Tech Web covers the release of EnGarde Secure Linux Community Edition. "EnGarde Secure Linux Community Edition is designed as a platform for secure Internet applications. It includes integrated intrusion detection, cryptography, improved authentication and access control, and protection from buffer overruns, denial of service attacks and other intrusion techniques."

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Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux has Slackware 9.0 updates available, fixing security problems in KDE 3.1.1a and openssl.

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New Distributions

Boten GNU/Linux

Boten GNU/Linux is intended for home users and provides a fully-localized GNU/Linux environment in Hebrew. It's especially made for those new to Linux, though aimed to please all users, experts and newbies alike. It's currently based around the 2.4 Linux kernel series (USB supported) and the GNU C Library version 2.2.5 (libc6 ELF). Boten GNU/Linux could be installed in a UMSDOS partition as well and can run on 386 systems all the way up to the latest x86 machines. Version 9.5 h1/i1 was released April 21, 2003.

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Eshida Instant Embedded Linux

Eshida Instant Embedded Linux is an embedded Linux distribution for people who want to deploy embedded Linux technology immediately. Because the system runs directly on CD-ROM users spend zero effort to explore embedded systems. Version 1.0 was released April 18, 2003.

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Minor distribution updates

BBIagent

BBIagent has released v1.8.0 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Bandwidth control with HTB is now supported, and it is easy to define traffic classes and filters to shape traffic for computers on the internal network. The bandwidth control modules are loaded on demand from the server."

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Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux has released 0.3.6. "Changes: This release adds PPP and WvDial, some scripts that simplify modem setup, and a script that will save your modem configuration to a floppy disk."

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Eagle Linux

Eagle Linux has released v2.1.1. Version 2.1.1 is based on Debian and contains full DHCP network functionality. It uses no compression loop devices, allows network device module loading, and provides DHCP or static network configuration - all within a 4MB CD iso image! Capability to include additional software is also discussed in the Eagle Linux 2.10 how-to, making it easy to create your own standard and 'business card' bootable CDs.

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IPCop Firewall

IPCop Firewall has released v1.3.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The Linux 2.4 kernel and iptables are now used. All ECI ADSL supported modems and the Alcatel Speedtouch 330 modem are now supported. The port forwarding interface was improved with support for port ranges and PPTP (GRE). Danish, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages are now available and can be selected from the Web interface. Improvements were made to log reporting, the open connections display, dial-on-demand traffic selection, and traffic graphing (which now uses MRTG)."

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KNOPPIX

KNOPPIX has released v3.2-2003-04-15 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: This version cleans up the menu entries, fixes bugs, and updates OpenOffice and ALSA."

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LinuxInstall.org Project

LinuxInstall.org has released v3.0. "Changes: New features include Mozilla 1.3, Evolution 1.2.4, and OpenOffice.org 1.1Beta. It also includes Blackdown Java Plugin 1.4.1 and Korean, Japanese, Chinese TrueType fonts for Mozilla. OpenOffice.org 1.1Beta is very stable and comes with many new features including PDF (Portable Document Format) export and SWF (Macromedia Flash file format) export."

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MURIX Linux

MURIX Linux has released v2003-04-22 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: CPUs better than i486 are now supported. Versions of packages in ramdisk.gz were updated. SCSI drivers are not included except for IDE-SCSI emulation, and some PCI ethernet adapters are supported."

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rpm-livelinuxcd

rpm-livelinuxcd has released v0.9-98 with major bugfixes. "Changes: The system was switched to a loopback image. tmpfs support was added. Tools to find local Windows and Linux partitions were added. Many bugs in buildroot toolkit were fixed. /usr/share/doc and man-pages are now included. The RPM database is included. The CDROM will now boot from any IDE CD drive if there is more than one. Non-interactive hardware detection now works. The system now works fine in a machine with 64MB of RAM."

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Trusted Debian

Trusted Debian has announced the release of v1.0. The announcement is also available in Dutch. There is also a demonstration available. "The main focus of this release has been on fixing many (but not all) buffer overflow problems. Buffer overflows have been a popular way to break system security for years. A large portion of the Linux exploits found on the Internet today involve buffer overflows."

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UHU-Linux

UHU-Linux has released v1.0. "Changes: This stable release includes the 2.4.20 Linux kernel with ALSA, supermount, and devfs. It also features glibc 2.3.2, GCC 3.2.2, and XFree86 4.3. GNOME 2.2.1 is installed by default, but KDE 3.1.1a, IceWM, Window Maker, and BlackBox are included. A Hungarian spell checker is included and integrated with OpenOffice.org and AbiWord. The installer and control center are currently only available in Hungarian."

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