RED FLAG INWISE 8.0 REVIEW : International appeal lacking seems like only for Chinese user base .

Red Flag Linux (Chinese: 红旗Linux) is a Chinese Linux distribution developed by Red Flag Software. The distribution logo is Tux carrying a prominent red flag. Red Flag Software Co., Ltd. (Red Flag Software) is focused on developing and marketing Linux-based operating systems and application software on multiple platforms for the constantly growing base of Chinese technology users and their goal is "Creating Incentives for Networking Life."

 As Chinese business was growing, and the World Trade Organization began cracking down on widespread copyright infringements, there was a need for a localized version of a free operating system.Hence, Red Flag was born out of cooperation between the Software Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and NewMargin Venture Capital, a venture arm of the Chinese government.


 I am somewhat skeptical about installing chinese software on my systems ? Do they have keyloggers? or somewhat of other malware hidden in their os ? They don’t appear to have publish  source code and its  itself  a violation of the copyright  license that the code is published under GNU GPL .But let not shy away from that testing this software .so I  visited their red flag site but not able to download the iso at all as they dont have good chinese mirrors for International users  .so after searching got an iso which was hosted at some site and downloaded and created a live usb using dd .  And booted my laptop with live usb . First with a surprise at graphical boot screen some star twinkling and Red flag logo can be seen and booted in a live mode and then it ask me for a language to choose english or chinese and continue then booted with a graphical kde environment of Red Flag os .





so Let start the journey .so suddenly started the installer as shown below installer is somewhat funky but like the installer as shown below.

There are different mode to choose easy to advanced for installation advanced mode worked fine as expected .

First got some error but afterwards installation resumes with a breeze .

And its shows slide shows of os while installation.

So thus installation of red flag completed and normal step like user and root password was there and pressing start journey it worked fine and  rebooted with it presented with nice dual boot grub screen something like chakra os benz boot screen .something like grub password setting was missing from this installer apart from it was nice installer . It took me around 7 mins to install os on my system .

BEAUTY N AESTHETIC

In terms of beauty is just normal kde has some wallpapers specifics to its brand .so all hue and cue of setting stuff available .

It has kde 4.10. interface and linux kernel 3.6.11

Wireless 

Bluetooth , touchpad etc worked well even wireless worked well . I managed to configure my WPA2-encrypted network without any special trouble, except a few too many clicks everything works fine .Even keys on my keypad for brightness and volume worked well.

Now applications available pre-installed in default os 

Graphics

 Internet

Multimedia

Office

System

Utilities

And some games apps that it .

software management handles through apper but it not working as internet server for international user is not accessible so couldn't find any software stuff .

Multimedia and flash 

It doesn't have any flash or mp3 or other multimedia codecs preinstalled so I was not able to play any of my movies or mp3 collection in it even couldn't watch youtube videos.

Performance wise laptop was supercool and used less ram about 300mb of usage as shown but below it shows higher as was downloading some stuff

.

  One issue I had with this linux distro as I visited Indian site it may be related to Indian users may be indian fonts are available in repos.when i visited this site it looked awkward.
http://gujaratsamachar.com/

Red flag user manual as shown below ,

I tried to run as root from my default password in terminal but to vain it doesnt seem to accept my password but its accept my login password thats strange and how screen look in dual boot screenshot below ,

TIME TO CONCLUSION

What didnt appeal that you cant update or access outside china so it blocks to particular region .Red Flag Linux makes no pretense of being an international product, although it comes in several languages, suitable for most of the world. It's not advertised outside Asia, and as such it has never reached the eyes and ears of people and this ignorance has potentially blocked great technology.  with its great artwork and aesthetic , amazing performance it is nice  kde based distro to have a look at it .I would  not recommend to users outside china as their update or site servers just dont work at all , after all has to say goodbye forever only if they open up their distro somewhat then only this can become internationally appealing .

Caution : not recommended outside china . 

u can try it using ,

1. dd
2. suse image writer


NOTE 

If  u have any issue just visit their site for information and try to download it if u wanna try it  otherwise google it out .



http://www.redflag-linux.com/