A Turkish research institute has released a Linux distribution that it hopes will attract widespread use in Turkey due to the inclusion of features such as Turkish spelling and grammar check capabilities.
The first version of the new distribution, Pardus 1.0, was released at the end of December and is packaged with a number of open source products including the Firefox web browser and OpenOffice.org office suite.
"Pardus is expected to arouse interest in the global Linux community," said the research institute TUBITAK UEKAE in a statement. "With the widespread use of Pardus, Turkey's software imports are expected to decline dramatically, and hardware sales and computer ownership to increase consequently, as the total cost of ownership of computers drop off."
Pardus developer Erkan Tekman said that open source software is more secure than proprietary software as many people can get involved in testing the software.
"The first advantage is security. Open source software, by its very nature, is inspected by thousands of eyes from the very beginning of the development process to the release stage. If a developer or a company with evil intentions drops some suspicious code into the software, it cannot remain hidden from all these cautious eyes for long," said Tekman in a statement.
Other advantages of open source software include improved stability due to more rigorous testing and the flexibility to change the code to meet new requirements, according to Tekman.
Pardus 1.0 is available for download from the project's Web site.
Talkback
I'll believe it when I see it. A similar Welsh distribution -- Llynnuchs -- never made it to the mainstream.
The welsh language community took a deliberate and sensible decision to support existing distributions. As a result you can install and use several distributions in Welsh, including core packages like Firefox and OpenOffice.org
Pardus is not only a Turkish distribution , Pardus includes some projects like Comar,PISI,YALI which is created for worlwide use.For more information http://uludag.org.tr/eng/projeler/index.html
check out the package manager pisi, you might find it interesting. i was a developer of pisi, so let me advertise it a bit here ;) also the installer is pretty nifty and our configuration thingie (tasma - comar) is coming along very well.
what we do aim is, by making a really user-friendly linux distro, we want to introduce the idea of free software to the general public, the corporate, the government, and anybody who knows how to use a system like windows/mac os basically. turkey is a big country, and we now have a solid distribution. we definitely expect a large impact on the turkish market in the following months.
that being said, we try to make contributions to critical distribution technologies such as packaging, configuration, installation, ui integration, as deemed necessary. we also have goodies for the turkish, such as a turkish spell checker for kde 3.5 and openoffice 2. more will be coming, but our distro is not targeted at only turkish users, english is supported as well at present and there is no reason to assume more languages will not be coming out in the future.
i think english users will also find it a sleek and promising desktop distro that rivals the likes of <insert your favorite distro here>.