On Thursday 30 May 2002 03:55, Richard Bos wrote: - A good distro to add to the 4 would be one in the former Sovjets states, a - good example would be http://www.altlinux.com. With this distro a wider - geographical area would be covered. My personal experience tells me that this would depend on many things. While there are a lot of very good computer specialists in Russia, most are Win centric. Most of those that I knew that dealt with Lin (St. Pete), did it at a hobby level. The Baltic Republics have a far better track record in my opinion. Hell, they already had not just Intel PCs, but also Macs just after The Wall fell and had their own Mac OS localization projects for Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian going at that time without any support from Apple. Support for software products made within the CIS can be horrendous. A good (bad) example of this is the excellent Win e-mail client The BAT! which is produced in Moldova. Support is non-existent. They have apparently based their business model on excellent coding and making a fast buck. The whole problem with the former Soviet Union conundrum is that most Westerners are not aware of the vast differences in development and education in the various autonomous and semi-autonomous regions, oblasts, etc. The best bet would be to find a good distro that emanates from the Baltic Republics, St. Pete or Moscow and obviously supports Russian. On the other hand, we have a number of Russians on the list, why not ask them why they prefer using SuSE to a locally brewed distro? Nastrovia tavarisch ;-) Brian