The release date of Asianux 2.0 has been moved up by one month so that the operating system can be proposed for a massive education database to be built in South Korea, according to one of three Asian companies developing the software.
Originally slated for release in August, the release of Asianux 2.0 will now take place in July, said Jennifer Park, a spokeswoman for Haansoft Inc. in Seoul.
Asianux 2.0 is the second version of an Asian Linux distribution being developed by companies in China, Japan and South Korea as a standard Linux version for Asia. The first version of the operating system, Asianux 1.0, was released in June 2004. It was developed by China's Red Flag Software Co. Ltd. and Japan's Miracle Linux Corp. Haansoft joined the Asianux effort in October 2004.
Based on the Linux 2.6 kernel, Asianux 2.0 will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions and will be more stable than Asianux 1.0, Park said.
The release of Asianux 2.0 was moved forward in part so that the operating system could be proposed as a platform for South Korea's National Education Information System (NEIS), a national education database that will include information on every student at the elementary school, middle school and high-school level, Park said.
The South Korean government has not yet made a final decision on whether NEIS will be based on open-source software and Haansoft is pushing for the project to use Linux, she said.
