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Plamo Linux 2.0

On 22, April, Plamo Linux 2.0 was released. This is their first version to include the Linux 2.2 kernel (kernel-2.2.14) (though there was an unofficial 2.2 upgrade kit), and is based on pcmcia-cs 3.1.13, glibc-2.1.2, and XFree86-3.3.6, each of them well localized.

Plamo Linux (in Japanese) is a community-based, originally Slackware-based, Japanese distribution lead by Mitsuhiro Kojima.

Plamo Linux was originally called "Plagiaware" since they borrowed many packages from other distributions, but the name gave too bad impression so they renamed it to "Plamo", short for "plastic models" in Japanese, in the hope that the distribution would grow to be a system that people can change and improve the software by themselves as they like easily.

Plamo includes "Linux98" which is a port to NEC PC98x1 series, done by folks at KMC (Kyoto university Micro computer Club).

Plamo does not support Gnome or KDE very aggressively, and there is no official commercial package for Plamo, so its user base is not that huge, but it has some parts that excel other Japanese commercial distributions. For instance, as Mitsuhiro Kojima himself was originally doing development on his note PC, Plamo has excellent PCMCIA card support. One of the PCMCIA SCSI cards which is popular only in Japan and requires a driver (GPL'ed) that isn't included in the standard pcmcia package, isn't recognized by a big Japanese commercial distribution, but Plamo recognizes it out of the box.

author: Maya Tamiya, editor@ChangeLog.net.