@ Carlo:

Carlo thanks for letting us know what it was. I’m…er…botanically challenged…heh.

@ Brian Masinick:

Brian I took one week of basic, intensive Japanese and promptly fled the class because it was way too hard. Yes, I am a wimp.

Thanks for reviewing something out of the ordinary, Jim. I always enjoy reading about different distributions. I do not try out every single one, and I am going to pass on this one, but I still value the information.

Did you learn any Japanese or any culturalisms along the way? Back in the mid nineties when I was at Digital, I worked with a Japanese employee who was on six month assignment with our Internationalization (I18N) department, where I worked at the time. I had a GREAT time with Toshiki and a number of other team members, as well as visitors from several other countries. A few years later, I ran into Toshiki again, when he was once again on a six month assignment. The years in between had caused me to lose the ability to understand his accent and I could barely understand him, but it sure was good to see him anyway. I enjoy cultural differences very much!

The wallpaper are cherry blossoms which are very famous in Japan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_blossom

=)

I’ve had the English/native language problem with other distros developed for non-English speaking markets. But on the other hand, I’ve had the same problem with English-centric distros translated into other languages. So the problem seems to be common.

I installed Vine 5 on my desktop, and I have to say, I was astonished. Distro is great, fast, I really like the rpm installer, you can install any rpm package via that little proggy, so, I installed OpenOffice 3.1.1 downloaded from Openoffice.org, and I also installed Firefox from mozilla.com site to avoid Japanese preference since the version that comes with Vine is a community edition made to prefer japanese sites and language. Codecs were easy peasy, self-build packages built from source, newest packages, a veru good kernel, everything works great. I think, Vine Linux 5 is somewhere between RHEL 5.3 and Fedora 11. Just were it should be. I recommend it.

Hmmm…thanks for the heads up about those problems, Joe. That’s good to know.

I enjoyed this distro as well. But I fond some oddities if not irregularities:

In the 64 bit version when I tried to install Abiword, dependencies were missing, couldn’t make spell check work in OpenOffice, and installing multimedia codecs from Synaptic caused these codecs and other files to be downloaded and installed from source. Also, gnomebaker and brasero were wonky.