Asianux 2.0 launch slated for Friday

The Asianux partnership plans to formally announce the next release of its Linux operating system on Friday at a ceremony in Beijing, according to a spokeswoman for one of the three partner companies.

Asianux is a server version of Linux developed by three companies: China’s Red Flag Software, Japan’s Miracle Linux, and South Korea’s Haansoft. Asianux 2.0, the latest version of the operating system, is based on Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel. It will be announced as part of the Red Flag World conference which opened Thursday in Beijing to mark the fifth anniversary of Red Flag Linux.

“The main announcement will take place tomorrow morning in Beijing,” said Maggie Nie, a spokeswoman for Red Flag in Beijing. “The CEOs of all three companies will be here for the press conference.”

The software will initially be available in China and South Korea, with a Japanese launch scheduled for early October, Nie said.

Each of the Asianux partners will market Asianux 2.0, which is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, under their own brand names. For example, Red Flag will offer the software as Red Flag DC Server 5.0.

While Asianux 2.0 will not officially be launched until Friday, Red Flag was handing out CD-ROMs containing the software to attendees at the opening ceremony of Red Flag World on Thursday.

Asianux 2.0 had long been slated for an August launch. However, Haansoft said in January that the operating system would be released in July so that it could be considered for South Korea’s National Education Information System (NEIS) project, a system being developed to handle student records for 10,000 schools across the country.

While the launch did not happen in July, that didn’t hurt the operating system’s chances for winning the NEIS contract. Asianux 2 was chosen for that project in July. It was billed as the largest Linux rollout to date in South Korea, according to the three partners.