Announcing a New Italian Linux Distribution.
Oct 16th, 22:32 UTC
Madeinlinux breaks new ground in Italy with new GNU/Linux distribution.
Milan, October 15, 2000.
Founded by a group of GNU/Linux
enthusiasts, MLX s.r.l. has set from the very start an ambitious
project: become a reference point for Linux and Open Source
technologies in Italy.
Thus, Madeinlinux 4.0, a Linux distro
with a wholly Italian flavour, is the first product of the Milan
based company.
Even though it's the first release of
this distro, we have decided to name it Madeinlinux 4.0 in honour of
the fact that a lot of the components included, for the first time
ever even for other popular distros, have the number 4 as a release
or version number. We've included Xfree 4.0, but also the new kernel
2.4 (we include also 2.2.17 for the faint of heart), as well as the
new RPM 4.0.
Among the features we think we have
done a particularly good job in these areas:
- security: we have dedicated a study
to italian laws and regulations, so that our distribution is not only
secure in the IT sense, but also according to the standards of
italian law.
- ease of use: this does not mean fancy
GUIs or animated icons, but mostly boils down to having a simple set
of applications and programs to meet all common computing needs. If
someone wants to install the latest release of a tool that can
forecast soccer scores, and at the same time make coffee, they can
always download and install it, but we thought it would make things
less clear to include something like it in the standard package suite
(although we had a very heated debate about it, especially since we
all love coffee and soccer alike).
- Italian localization: when it comes
down to localization, we think the italian user deserves a little
more than a translation of the menu options in Gnome, or the
translation of the man pages. Although english is very widely known,
it's still not the official language in Italy (at least for some
time) and so we thought we could make life easier for italian users
by translating such fundamental items like the shell, or the boot and
error messages. Our aim is to have an operating system that has the
italian user in mind from the very start.
In addition to this we have made some
innovative choices: we give users the choice of mounting Reiser-FS
partitions; we decided to use tcsh as the default shell, and we have
included all the standard documentation in italian, plus some other
very useful manuals and guides, not usually included in other
distros, written by Italian experts, like Appunti Linux from Daniele
Giacomini, and Linux Facile from Daniele Medri.
One of our objectives was to clean a
lot of the mess that comes with other distros: the typical user will
need probably 5 or 10 applications, plus the supporting tools and
libraries, but nowadays when you install Linux you will get dozens of
programs and applications you will probably never use. Choice is a
great thing, but in this case there is a risk of information
overload. Too much choice ends up in confusing users, especially new
users who don't know which of the 10 email clients available they
should use. We've thus made some choices, which may not satisfy all
linux users, but we thought it was necessary to give users a Linux
distro that had the basic tools and applications to be immediately
productive, but just one copy of each program.
Madeinlinux comes with two install
options: a client version named Linux Facile (or Easy Linux), and a
server version called Internet Sicuro (Safe Internet).
- In the client version, Linux Facile,
we have decided to include StarOffice and Netscape, and this gives
users the basic set of programs they will most likely need in their
daily work: a professional word processor, a spreadsheet, a browser,
an email and newsgroup client, plus a few other programs.
- In Internet Sicuro, our server
option, on the other hand, since choice is always an option for
expert linux users, we have provided a solid server suite, again
devoid of all the software we thought was not so important for the
common user, but which constitutes a good base upon which a good
SysAdmin can buil his or her own tuned up version.
In this way everything fits onto one
CD only, and this includes popular software like the Apache server,
as well as the Gimp, in addition to the aforementioned Netscape
Communicator and StarOffice Suite.
Madeinlinux is available for download
at http://www.madeinlinux.com (although
at the time of this writing work on the web site is stil underway)
where you will also find useful info on Linux in italian.
For more information contact
MLX s.r.l.
via Farini 70
Milano 20159
Italy
tel +39 02 6931 1931
fax +39 02 603 932
info@madeinlinux.com
(Submitted by Michele Martiradonna of MLX)
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