Canaima, Venezuela’s Linux Distro Venezuela Ii

Last article introduced a series of non-consecutives articles about latin american countries and their experiences with initiatives as OLPC and the Open Source movement.

Venezuela was the first one, this time i will talk about one of their linux distro: "Canaima".

Canaima is an public sponsored linux distro from venezuelan, it is designed to fill the requirements of office work for public entities which is it main goal, it includes office software (open office, standard in many linux distros), project management software (open project, planner), drawing programs, etc.

This initiative is managed by the National Center of Information Technologies or CNTI, and is being followed via this website: http://www.softwarelibre.gob.ve/ .

The objective is to use this Linux distro in every computer owned by the Venezuelan public offices.  This distro is also available to general public and it is distributed in pc’s sold by CANTV (Public Telecommunications Corp.) via its own strategy.

Canaima is based on Debian, its development cycle takes account of suggestions and code developed by users at public offices, also as in every linux distro, accepts information from general public, this information is added to a development repository which later is tested and submitted to an evaluation board who defines and deliver an stable repository that becomes the Canaima distro.

This distro includes preconfigured accesibility options for users with some type of discapacity and spanish translations on some special options of the operating system;  it also sets the starting point for additional projects focused on specific fields, as for example Canaima Educativo, targeted to schools and education institutes.

VIT, Venezuela’s technological industry, incorporated Canaima in its production line and it comes as preinstalled OS in all desktops and laptops sold and used by public administration.  As part of a series of agreements between China and Venezuela which includes the construction of VIT computer factories by both countries, Canaima (developed and adapted by Venezuelan engineers) and it’s technology was transferred to China.

More info on Canaima can be found here (in spanish): http://canaima.softwarelibre.gob.ve