Like most Americans, I was issued a set of blinders and a certificate of universal supremacy at birth. However, few things expose this cultural tunnel vision as well as a world-wide phenomenon such as the Open Source movement and the associated variety of Linux distributions targeted towards specific markets or parts of the world.

I was previously familiar with Turbolinux as one of the big distributions in the original Linux explosion of the late 1990s, and still have boxes of some of their older releases for x86 and PPC platforms in the attic. Not having seen them for a long time on the shelves at the local CompUSA or in print advertising in the dead-tree Linux magazines that I read, I had assumed that they had joined other early Linux distributions such as Yggdrasil, MCC, TAMU, and SLS as footnotes in Linux history. I could hardly have been more wrong!

Turbolinux is alive and well and living in the Asia/Pacific, bringing the power of Linux to millions of people who may not know Red Hat and SUSE outside of press releases. Hey, where was I when the rest of the world started to exist?

Turbolinux was originally based on an early release of Red Hat Linux (4.2), but began developing its own tools and capabilities early on. Today's Turbolinux is well-crafted distribution with an obvious focus on internationalization, but with an equally significant interest in multimedia support. In that area, Turbolinux provides some associated software that you won't find on any other Linux distribution that I'm aware of. This review looks at Turbolinux 10f, which is Turbolinux' multimedia edition, available standalone or as an upgrade from the latest desktop release of Turbolinux (10d).

Next: Installing Turbolinux »