Linpus Linux is a

Fedora Linux Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream source ...

-based

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

created by the

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

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

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

support for the Chinese and Japanese languages. A special version, Linpus Lite, was written to run on devices with lower-cost hardware such as netbooks. 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-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 PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

(640×480). The Acer

Aspire One Acer Aspire One is a line of netbooks 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 were based on the Intel Atoms. Later, model ...

and Norhtec Gecko netbooks 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 enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

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 kind ...

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, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

WMV Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

and a few other

codec A codec is a device or computer program 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 on a signal or ...

Nagware

The Linpus system contains not only the

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

operating system, but also Acer-specific " shareware" - users classify this as "

nagware 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 ...

," 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