China Builds its Own National Operating System Around Ubuntu

The Chinese government is building an operating system based on the open source OS Ubuntu. The software department of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, announced that Ubuntu would be a new reference architecture for an OS targeted at the Chinese market. Working with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the authorities plan to release the Ubuntu 13.04-based Kylin desktop OS next month, with plans to extend the Kylin OS to other platforms at a later date. The first release of the Ubuntu Kylin OS will include features and applications that cater for the Chinese market. Features include Chinese input methods and Chinese calendars, a new weather indicator and Chinese music search. Future releases will include integration with Baidu maps and shopping service Taobao, payment processing for Chinese banks, and real-time train and flight information ..
The announcement is part of the Chinese government’s five year plan to promote open source software and accelerate the growth of the open source ecosystem within China. The coordination with the global Ubuntu project will ensure it is familiar to local software and hardware vendors, and useful for export products made by Chinese companies. The Ubuntu Kylin team is now working with Kingsoft Office, the most popular office suite in China, and is creating photo editing and system management tools which could be incorporated into other flavours of Ubuntu worldwide. During 2007, the Chinese government released an earlier Kylin OS, a system that was designed to be hardened against malware available at the time, in what was perceived as an attempt to block attacks by foreign governments.
Ubuntu Linux is entering the smartphone market,
China might becomes the turning point. China also plans to expand beyond the desktop and use Ubunutu for mobile devices, cloud and servers. This could go some way to combat the dominance of Android in China, after the expressed of concern at Android’s control of its smartphone market. Now the Chinese government has made changes to alter the desktop computing and mobile landscape in the country, but what we believe the most important factor still rely on software developers. Can Ubuntu easily install most of the multiplayer online role-playing games from China ?