Turbolinux 10F: Turbolinux is Alive and Well
Rediscovering Turbolinux

Bill von Hagen
Monday, April 4, 2005 12:27:36 PM
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).
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