Linpus Linux is a

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. It was originally developed in 2003 as a continuation of the Red Hat Linux project. It contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to b ...

-based

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

created by the

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

ese firm Linpus Technologies Inc. Linpus was designed specifically to fully support the Asian market, with full

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

support for the Chinese and Japanese languages. A special version, Linpus Lite, was written to run on devices with lower-cost hardware such as

netbook A netbook is a small-sized laptop computer; they were primarily sold from 2007 until around 2013, designed mostly as a means of accessing the Internet and being significantly less expensive than regular-sized laptops. At their inception in l ...

s. It has both an icon and tab-based "Simple mode", designed for new users; and, a conventional style "PC mode" for those wanting a more

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

like interface. It is targeted at handheld devices with smaller screens, and supports resolutions as low as

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the IBM PC compatible industry within three years. T ...

(640 × 480). The Acer

Aspire One Acer Aspire One is a line of netbooks and laptops first released in July 2008 by Acer Inc. Many characteristics of a particular model of Acer Aspire One are dictated by the CPU platform chosen. Initial models are based on Intel Atoms. Later, ...

and Norhtec Gecko

s come with Linpus Lite Linux pre-installed, there is also a version of the Acer Revo 3610 and 3700 with Linpus Linux pre-installed. A version for normal desktop computers and servers is also available, as well as a Multimedia version called Linpus Media Center. The Media Center version offers an "Upgrade pack" to purchase

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

licenses from MPEG-LA for

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

, WMV and a few other

codec A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

Nagware

The Linpus system contains not only the

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free ...

operating system, but also Acer-specific "

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

" users classify this as " nagware," because it asks you to register on Acer's website and purchase a full version. The fact that the Acer distribution contains this software prevents the system from being considered a fully free, open operating system.

References

External links

* RPM-based Linux distributions Linux distributions used in appliances Taiwanese brands Linux distributions {{linux-distro-stub