14 Jan 2011

From Russia with Love

Linux was born in Finland. Linus Torvalds had an idea of portable operating system while studying in University. Once born, Linux spread all over the world. Including Russia.
One Russian organisation was developing their own operating system called MOPS Linux for several year. But nothing is forever, and MOPS Linux project was cancelled. Although team of developers remained. They continued work on system, and new members joined the team. As a result, Agilia Linux was born.
Should I try this Linux from my motherland? Why not.
So, image is downloaded. It is heavy enough - 2.5Gb. DVD-RW disk is recorded. Because of that, experiment will run on Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Chose to load from DVD. Let's go!


Agilia Linux, as its predecessor MOPS Linux, is based on Slackware. This is my second attempt to look at Slackware-based distribution after SLAX. Though Agilia is based on Slackware, almost all the links are in the far past. Developers admit that packages for Slackware won't work on Agilia and vice versa. Agilia has its own repository.
Once booted, you can see a menu which allows you to either start installation straight away, or run Agilia Linux in Live mode. Let's choose Live, I don't want to install it now. That's fine, and system continues booting. And then you see another menu to choose language. Do you think this is language for the system? No... This is language for... installation program. Yes, even Live mode of Agilia starts with installation program. But don't worry, you still have a choice to cancel it. But what is about language menu which we just had? It only affected setup program, but not the Live Agilia Linux. It has Russian menu by default. Because of that I don't think this distributive will be interesting as Live version for most of my readers. But you still have a choice to install system and get English language in installed system.
Unsurprisingly, network card (WiFi) was not found by Agilia, so I could not connect to my home network. So far only 3 distros were able to correctly recognize and configure Realtek card.
As soon as Agilia is Russian production, I expected to have multilingual keyboard "out of the box". And I was absolutely right. Russian and English keyboard layouts are active from the very beginning, you don't need to do anything for it. Even status bar indicator is on its usual place.
Everyone knows Russian products: Kaspersky Antivirus and Dr.Web are widely used worldwide.
I am happy that my motherland also takes part in Linux promotion. But, unfortunately, results of these Linux works are only oriented for Russian-speaking community. I believe time will come and many more people will be able to use these results.

Useful links (all in Russian):
http://welinux.ru/post/4164/ - interview with developers.
http://www.agilialinux.ru/ - official site
About DarkDuck
DarkDuck is a person with whole life spent in IT area. It does not mean only Linux, but also SAP systems. Learn more about him here.
If you like this blog, please do not forget to share or put it into your favourites:
You can also subscribe to this blog via e-mail or RSS, links are on the right. This is absolutely FREE!
Posted by DarkDuck (m) at 00:06
Labels: , , ,

6 comments:

  1. Vladimir Khodakov29 April 2011 at 14:46

    Hello!

    I'm small (GNOME'y) part of AgiliaLinux team ;) Our leader today gives me link to this post. Thanks for interest!

    Situation with Wi-Fi in January was bad, and some firmwares was missed. But now we includes more firmware and, maybe, your problem with Wi-Fi fixed now. You can try Beta2, which was released in February. Also, can you tell more about your Wi-Fi chip?

    We're not Russian-centric distro, and some strange things such as Russian-only live and Russian-only site will be fixed soon (I hope, very soon).

    fat0troll, AgiliaLinux team

    ReplyDelete
  2. DarkDuck (m)29 April 2011 at 21:53

    @Valdos the Fat Troll:
    When are you going to release final version? I'll try it then. Will be more than happy to write more about Russian Linux.
    I have 2 laptops, one with Broadcom 4311 and one with Realtek 8191.
    If you want to discuss details, feel free to contact me by e-mail (see About Me page). You can write in Russian there.
    Dmitry

    ReplyDelete
  3. Vladimir Khodakov1 May 2011 at 16:11

    We're going topac release final in early June if all will go fine (so, if nuclear bomb bangs in Moscow, we will release in July ;)).

    With Realtek, I think, you shouldn't have problems now, it must work out-of-the-box. With Broadcom may be variants — some Broadcom chips need wl.ko to work (which can't be binary packed due to license issues, so distros, when wl.ko present out-of-the-box are pirate).

    I will write you when release.
    Valdos.

    ReplyDelete
  4. DarkDuck (m)1 May 2011 at 23:06

    Thanks, Valdos!
    Will wait for your update!

    ReplyDelete
  5. DarkDuck (m)10 June 2011 at 16:09

    @Valdos the Fat Troll:
    Are there any news about nuclear bombs in Moscow or Agilia release?
    BTW, I usually do not need wl.ko. At least, Ubuntu works OOTB.

    ReplyDelete
  6. DarkDuck26 December 2011 at 23:48

    @Valdos the Fat Troll: Congratulations on your new release! Here is a review of it.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)