Hey, Cuba is on the right track about something at least.

It is good to standardize something and then teach it in school to the masses.
This is something that we lack here. At least they should teach something about
a few major distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora) and about a few useful small
distributions like Slax or Puppy.
Is this Cuban Linux open source ? I hope they do not insert governmental
spyware into it.
In Romania during Communism they would have certainly done that.

The Cuban distribution, called Nova and apparently a Gentoo variant of
Linux, was introduce recently at the annual International Conference
on Communication and Technologies in Havana. The Cuban government says
it sees the Microsoft software it has been using, as a potential
threat, because the CIA and other U.S. agencies have access to secret
back door codes into the software. Also U.S. trade embargoes against
Cuba make it difficult for Cubans to obtain legal copies and updates
of Microsoft software. According to the Register last years conference
was attended by none other than Richard Stallman, who urged attendees
to adopt open source software.

Computers only became available for general sale to the Cuban public
last year. The dean of the School of Free Software at Cuba's
University of Information Sciences, Hector Rodriguez said that already
about 20 per cent of the computers in Cuba use Linux. He says "I would
like to think that in five years our country will have more than 50
per cent migrated (to Linux),".

Anyone know what this is based on? (just curious)

Probably Debian or Ubuntu would have been a better choice. But at least they
have something standardized and government-supported. In their place I would
have paid experts to seriously study a lot of Linux distros and vote on the best
choice for the population and support mainly that one.

Probably Debian or Ubuntu would have been a better choice. But at
least they have something standardized and government-supporte d. In
their place I would have paid experts to seriously study a lot of Linux
distros and vote on the best choice for the population and support
mainly that one.

I'm not sure of their thinking but it could have to do with being easily compile
from source, instead of relying on someone else to maintain the repositories. I
agree that it is a curious choice as Gentoo is on the decline and has been
fraught with division and disagreement in the last few years, but the same could
be said for Debian. Each has a strong user base and committed users and as long
as that holds true the leadership can squabble all they want. There will always
be a strong community as long as the users believe in it and use it.

It will be interesting to see how it shapes up. It is called Nova and as far as
I know that name was controversial when the car used it. I can't remember why
and my Spanish is poor to non-existent.

It looks like the distro will be a Gentoo with binary package. They
seems to use the same package manager than Sabayon (wich is base on
Gentoo). It is a very nice looking distro based on XFCE4.

More at : http://planet.sabayonlinux.org/?p=73

I'm myself using Gentoo and Ubuntu. Gentoo is very powerfull and
customisable. I never have to reinstall everything because of a new
version of my distribution... Everything is compiled and optimised
for my machine. It sure imply more work and more time to tune and
maintain. But I don't think it is the case for Nova wich is a binary
distro like Ubuntu. Nova will be very easy to install and use for most
people. The experience should be similar to using Ubuntu.

And "no va" in spanish means "it doesn't work!!!". GM found out after
many years. They didn't know why the "nova" wouldn't sell... Ah!
those americans... They should know that you should do better
commerce in the native language of you clients ... The client is
always right!

I found it on the Ubuntu forums, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTXIzaxfox4
I searched for it as I wanted to download and test it but have not found it
yet. "Nova" means "New".
I will keep searching for an .iso to download.
I dislike Sabayon. Yes, it is nice-looking, but very resource-hungry. On my PC
with 512 MB of RAM it barely moved and I added 1 GB a year ago to be able to run
Sabayon (this one more gig proved to be useful later). It does not fit entirely
on my monitor. Could not install it.
I gave up testing it.

Nova wasn't a good name for a car in Spanish speaking countries because Nova
sounds like no va, which means 'no go' in Spanish. I sure that isn't the case
with Cuba's adaptation of Linux in their country.

I knew that it wasn't a good name for a car. Now I know why. It could
apply to computers, too. But I am sure that the Cubans don't mind. Free is good,
no matter what the name. I can see why Linux would appeal to them. I am still
not sure about why Gentoo, but I know that it is a strong platform for
developers, so if they can make it good for users then that is all that matters.

Alexandru commented on Sabayon, one of the more usable Gentoo distros. It is
indeed resource hungry. Expect it th chew up about 16 GBs of your hard drive,
easily double what most distros use and it is very memory and CPU intensive.
Howver, it is one of the nicest looking distros and it works well, if you have
the time to compile from source. The problem is as Alexandru has figured out
that most people compile from source to make your machine run at optimal speed
and efficiency and Sabayon does not come through.

Anyway, I digress. Gentoo is a good platform as long as you have the time and
patience to commit to setting it up and compiling programmes from source code.
The tools are there with Portage, but it takes a loooonnngggg time to compile
Open Office. It took me overnight and well into the next day. I gave up on
Gentoo after that.