Debian to be Marketed to Japan and China

darthcamaro writes "Thanks to Sun Wah Linux and VA Linux Systems Japan, Debian is about to get some major exposure in Asia according to a report. Debian developer Matthew Garrett told internetnews.com that Debian has always been one of the most international Linux distributions. "It's wonderful to see initiatives that will increase our representation in countries with a growing interest in Linux," he added. "It's especially heartening to see this move coming from commercial enterprises, as it demonstrates that free software can work with business."" There's also a post on Newsforge as well.

Maybe they'll start moving a bit now?

[LiNKz]

Maybe Debian will finally start moving again. I understand there have been problems, but I really wish something would happen.. and as much as I love it as a server OS, I dislike spending my time updating every package or recompiling half of the software when I do a clean install to a server.. then I'm stuck with some very old packages that, though I don't use, I fear may be dangerous. Maybe I should use Sarge?

Off topic a bit, but what is a good distro for servers in general? I've always picked Debian due to the fact it feels Unixish to me, and can be very cleanly installed. Local Community College uses Red Hat, and the SysAdmin swares by it. Any comments?

Re:Tried already with BSD

[Frankie70]

That, and the fact that piracy is so rampant here that practically everything is "free", makes it hard for OSS to compete.


Does that mean that one of the big reasons why Linux
is a strong competitor in the west is because it's
free & the competitors aren't?

Hardly seems community based

[assassinator42]

"The Tokyo-based VA Linux Systems and Nanjing, China-based Sun Wah Linux plan to promote and jointly develop Debian's Linux OS for Chinese and Japanese markets." Will the vast majority of code still be directly from Debian? Are they going to sell it as Debian or something else? Not saying any of this is necessarily bad.

Re:Tried already with BSD

[Coryoth]

There have been concerted effort with Linux, however, and it has some concerted long term backing. China, Japan, and South Korea are working together on this - there have various reports like this in April 2004 [zdnet.co.uk], or this in Spetember 2003 [inq7.net]. The notable aspect is that, as mentioned here [a42.com], this isn't a short term program to adopt Linux, and results shouldn't be expected immediately - rather it is a long term plan to reposition themselves to be more independent of Microsoft.

A large part of the push is making sure Linux support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean character sets and translations is robust and well developed - think of it as a massive scale localization project that reaches down as deep as they can get it.

How this current Debian push fits into the grand scheme of things (part of the larger project, at least in some sense, or just an independent push) is not clear to me, but regardless it represents a growing desire in Asia to move to a more flexible system that can be adapted to their specific needs. This isn't an attempt at promotion so much as a growing interest from China, Japan and Korea. Expect to see more such stories over the next 5 to 10 years.

Jedidiah.

What branch would they use?

[Trogre]

I'm all for supporting truly Free and independent software like Debian, but the problem of which release should be unleashed upon the general public?

Stable? Sadly, not an option due to its complete lack of support for modern hardware or moderm features. It's a marvelous example of what computing should have been in 1997.

Unstable? Far too likely to break at the next apt-get upgrade.

Experimental? Same as Unstable, but worse.

Testing? Probably the best bet, though still not recommended for production use by Debian.org.

This should be interesting to watch

[Mr Ambersand]

While it is true that there are various piracy issues to be worked out, I'm fairly confident that the Asian market will do as the west has done which is take the best of OSS and adapt it to their needs.

In fact, with Asia's help, maybe we can finally solve the problem of people following false editors and settle on the one true editor -- nano!

Re:Maybe they'll start moving a bit now?

[nzkbuk]

Personally instead of using stable / testing / unstable I've always had my sources.list use woody / sarge / sid

But I agree totally about moving from woody to sarge. I've been running it on production systems for over a year and had no downtime.

Ubuntu:

[gabbarbhai]

Because with Ubuntu, I can see all the Chinese characters in my daily spam feed perfectly. Also, they base the distro on Debian Sid, and release every six months.

Re:heh

[Rocketship Underpant]

"That's funny since the main reason I left Debian for Fedora was because of Debian's antique Chinese input support." While I haven't used Debian, I have to say that Linux support for non-Latin languages in general is pretty bad. I've tried without success to get both Suse and Mandrake to get universal Japanese input working, and I imagine those distros are still better than the conservative Debian. That's why distros like Turbolinux exist - to concentrate on making Asian text work, and work well, with open-source software. Myself, I've switched to OS X, which lets me input any language in any application at any time. No desktop OS should call itself modern or ready for international use until it can get that right.

Re:The Big Business of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI That's mostly hardware.

Interesting to note that IBM sinks $billions into Linux devleopment and Dell gets 50% of their revenue for basically doing nothing. Let's all see who can race to the bottom fastest!

fonts and input

[sql_noob]

The penetration rate of linux would still low unless certain basic requirment is meet:

- eye-easy fonts and fonts engine, the asia fonts structure is complex. In 10-12px web page they just look horrible
- out of the box input methods: intelligent phoenetic type input or chanjei should be enabled as default. (Common newbies cannot install it themself)

I know that some improvement is progressing like firefly-arphic fonts and iiimf. Unless they become mature things won't start right.

Re:Big in Japan!

[l3v1]

Come on people, Debian does not matter anymore... Sarge has not yet a totally working and usable installer, it is difficult to navigate the w.d.o website to find the damn complete iso's, the jigdo/mkisofs couple does not work well

Ignorance is not always bliss you know. It can sometimes also be blushingly stupid. On the other side, it's always fun - to an extent - to read all the tons of crap coming from people who don't have a 2 ns experience with anything Debian.

Thing is, Debian SID is just as rockingly good as any other distro you could find (telling this with almost two years of debian "testing" usage). Not a wonder you can also find debian sid-based other distros out there.

For some years now no other distro (which were quite a lot) was allowed to come out of vmware to replace my debian. I constantly keep checking out and evaluating other distros, and if I find something better, then I will surely change without hesitation. Till then, I'm happy with it. The only other distro that has made me happy for a time was slackware.

Another piece of so-called news

[Donny Smith]

What kind of bullshit is this?
The submitter has no clue about Linux in Asia, but then again, that's why we have editors (perhaps replacing one of current editors ... oh well)

a) Linux I18N still sucks (you don't need Unicode support on a DHCP server, but still) so it's not like they're not using Debian because they like Windows (or Red Hat).

b) Everyone knows what kind of user base Debian has - it's certainly not "enterprise". Academic, department, small & medium enterprises, individuals - yes. Enterprises - no.
Which is why there are other distros that do what enterprises require (certifications, commercial vendor backing, alliances, etc.) so it's pointless to push Debian to those who don't want it. Good luck, though.

c) Why would enterprise users buy support from these guys? Debian is by users and for users - as much as I'd like them to succeed, I don't see what diff will their efforts make in light of low-cost enterprise Linux clones like CentOS (not to mention decent low-cost commercial distros like Mandrake, Turbolinux, etc.).

Re:Enterprises

[willgott]

Debian will not be accepted in the enterprise world until the debian project change its goals. After a heated discussion on #debian I realised that the debian-developers do want to create a "universal operating system", but the universe they talk about is theirs. They care about need for stability and the use of free software, but not for much else it seems.

In order to illustrate this point I take the example of debian's un-scheduled releases:
Me: When do you release the new stable?
Developer: When it's done.
Me: Okay, but when is it done? Do you have any idea?
Developer: I already told you.

An enterprise want to be able to predict/plan for new releases, but with debian it's hard. They could have set target-date at least.

Current problems with debian according to me:
* Non-scheduled releases
* To old software (yes, it's problem for servers and not just desktops)
* Developers want to create an OS for themself and not one that suits most people.

In short: Debian isn't written in order to be popular. It has been created by developers for the developers themself. Since very few of them own a company their is no place for the needs of an enterprise.

Hopefully, another distribution will soon take debian's place because it has gone rotten.

Re:fonts and input

[spacehunt]

To give the problems a bit more perspective:

1. The firefly-arphic fonts have legal issues and will never be accepted in Debian proper unless they are cleared;
2. At 10-12px, the ideal would be hand-tuned bitmaps for each of the tens of thousands of characters. Problem can be sidestepped by having larger default font sizes and/or better antialias and autohinting algorithms (these are being worked on), a la OS X/Aqua;
3. While the design of IIIMF is excellent (disclaimer: I am the one mentioned in the PR who is on OpenI18N's SC), due to its unconventional design it has the reputation of being unapproachable by input method writers;
4. GB18030 has the largest defined character set (at least the same as Unicode if not larger) and is the Chinese standard. Products are not allowed to be sold, period, unless they have GB18030 support, and that includes having a font with all the characters.

Enterprise Software

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, that's the GOOD thing about Debian, and if Debian DID become 'Enterprise Level', I'd stop using it.

As an Enterprise software application developer, when I hear the word 'Enterprise', I think 'massively overpriced, buggy piece of crap' - because that's what every single enterprise system I've seen or worked on is.

Enterprise software is just software that is slapped together as quickly and cheaply as possible, but sold with the most expensive sales and marketting that can be found - because Enterprise software is sold to CEOs and CIOs - people who don't know enough technically to judge the value of the product anyway, but will buy it because of expensive presentations and varying levels of bribery.

If you buy enterprise software, you're getting what you deserve.