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ASPLinux Press Conference

Alla Poloumieva, Andrey Savochkin and ASPLinux 7.0

Representing ASPLinux at the press conference were Alla Poloumieva, VP Business Development, and Andrey Savochkin, Senior Software Architect. Andrey is one of two Linux kernel hackers at ASPLinux.

Although ASPLinux 7.0 is based on Red Hat 7.0, it has been modified to provide the Linux 2.4 kernel as an installation option and given a new installation program that can be run from Windows to partition and install ASPLinux as a dual-boot option on an existing Windows machine. The installation program is called EspressoDownload.

The big surprise with ASPLinux is the engineering team. I was aware of ASPLinux from previous press releases, where it was titled the "only Singapore-based Linux distribution". I therefore, not unreasonably, showed up expecting to meet Singaporean Linux developers, especially as Singapore is an area known to have a great deal of software development expertise.

I was wrong. The entire ASPLinux engineering staff is actually Russian, not Singaporean. Many of them are currently located in Singapore on multi-year contracts; others are still resident in Russia. In fact, a week before the conference, a merger between Black Cat Linux and ASPLinux was announced. Black Cat Linux is one of two Linux distributions based in Russia and the Ukraine that have histories going back between four to seven years. As a result, though ASPLinux is a new distribution, its engineering staff has a level of experience in years similar to the best-known US and European distributions.

The goal of ASPLinux is to become the most widely-used distribution in South East Asia, Russia and even Europe. They have chosen to remain 100% Red Hat-compatible. "We are more compatible with Red Hat than any distribution besides Red Hat itself. ... If something is not compatible with Red Hat, we will fix it". They want the customer to feel absolutely comfortable choosing to install ASPLinux as a replacement for Red Hat. In return, they promise the highest quality engineering services. "We provide amazing support". They will be offering consulting, training & certification, applications porting, embedded solutions, applications development and clustering solutions. When asked if their training classes would support the LPI certification standards or their own standards, they had no definitive answer, but indicated they would take a closer look at the LPI.

ASPLinux will also be drawing revenue from their ASPLinux Hosting Services, based on SWsoft.com's HSPcomplete" web hosting product.

Also included with ASPLinux is ASPLoader, a replacement for LILO, installation support for a variety of languages and localization support for Korean, Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, Ukrainian (and other dialects), and English. The installation language does not have to match the normal localization; they mentioned that people may prefer to do the installation using their native language, yet need to use English by default for their work environment.

In response to questions from the Singapore press, they indicated that they have about 20 developers working specifically on ASPLinux, but approximately 100 developers available for all aspects of their software development and support services. Most of them are currently Red Hat-certified. "We do many projects based on Linux on which those engineers work, in addition to ASPLinux itself".

Overall, they emphasized that they are not concerned with their actual box sales; their installation is designed to make use of multiple, simultaneous mirrors in order to install at a speed only limited by the customer's local bandwith.

The Standard Edition of ASPLinux is two CDs plus an installation guide.