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Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 23:37:42 +0200
From: Michele Martiradonna <mmartiradonna@madeinlinux.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: New Italian GNU/Linux Distribution

Announcing a New Italian Linux Distribution.
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 www.madeinlinux.com <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