Canaima GNU/Linux is an open sourceoperating system. It is a Linux distribution based on the architecture of Debian. It was created as a solution to cover the needs of the Venezuelan Government as a response to presidential decree 3,390 that prioritizes the use of free and open source technologies in the public administration. On March 14, 2011, Canaima was officially established as the default operating system for the Venezuelan public administration. The operating system has gained a strong foothold and is one of the most used Linux distributions in Venezuela, largely because of its incorporation in public schools. It is being used in large scale projects as "Canaima Educativo", a project aimed at providing school children with a basic laptop computer with educational software nicknamed Magallanes. Use of Canaima has been presented on international congresses about the use of open standards, Despite being a young development, it has been used on the Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre. In February 2013DistroWatch ranked it the 185th most popular Linux distribution among 319 for the last 12 months.
Features
Some of the major features of Canaima GNU/Linux are:
The Free Software Foundation states that Canaima GNU/Linux is not 100% free software. This is because of the fact that some of its components are nonfree software, in particular some firmware needed for graphic cards, sound cards, printers, etc. Canaima creators opted to include these nonfree drivers in order to support as many computers being used by the Venezuelan government as possible, and to facilitate the migration from a closed source operating system to an open source but nonfree one. It is expected that Canaima, in its upcoming releases, offers an option in the installation process for nonfree drivers to be optional, being able to install a 100% free software image of the distribution if the user choose to.
Canaima has been releasing stable versions periodically since the last couple of years.
Development Cycle
Canaima uses a development model based on Debian, but some modifications were made to adapt it to Venezuelan needs. Therefore, the development cycle has the following components:
Socio-productive community: integrated by the Free Software Community, entities of the public administration, organized collectives and universities.
Tools for the support of the communities composed by:
* A forge based on FusionForge located at https://web.archive.org/web/20190611111637/http://forja.softwarelibre.gob.ve/
* A tool for project management and bug tracking based on Trac located at https://web.archive.org/web/20121126005534/http://proyectos.canaima.softwarelibre.gob.ve/
Consolidation and automated testing phase: which are based on software quality testing and evaluation criterion. This stage has an extensive use of Debian tools such as pbuilder, elida in the infrastructure upon which rests.
Certification phase: in which a committee of community members proceed to make tests of functionality, check statistics, etc., in order to release a stable version.
Cayapa Canaima
One of the community activities that has been generated around Canaima is the Cayapa. Cayapa is a Venezuelan term that stands as a form of cooperative work made by several people to reach one goal. On these meetings, free software developers get together to propose upgrades and fix bugs among other things; this activity is called a Bug Squash Party in other projects. The last Cayapa was conducted from May 14 until May 15, 2012 in the city of Barinas.
OEMs
Being a distribution promoted by the Venezuelan Government, a certain number of strategic agreements have been generated with several countries and manufacturing hardware companies:
Portugal: Agreement for the manufacturing of 250,000 "Magalhães" computers to be distributed on public schools
Sun Microsystems: for the certification of Canaima devices from this manufacturer.
Lenovo: For the certification of devices from the manufacturer for the use of Canaima.
Siragon, C.A.: Venezuelan manufacturer of computer equipment, an agreement from which Canaima is certified for use on their devices.
Use of Canaima
The most successful instances of the use and adoption of Canaima:
Canaima Educativo
It is a project initiated in 2009 by the Venezuelan Ministry of Education that provides students in primary education with a laptop computer, known as Canaimitas, with free software, using the Canaima operating system and a series of educational content created by the Ministry of Education. In 2011, 1,314,091 laptops were acknowledged as being delivered.
The national telephone company, CANTV, uses the operating system to a certain extent according to their .
Variants
There are a number of Canaima editions, maintained and recognized by community activists, that are not released at the same time as the official distribution and do not take part in the project schedule. The most significant ones are:
, a Venezuelan distribution with the goals of being friendly, light and functional for computers with low resources.
, the idea behind this edition is that it can be extended by community councils, a form of community government called "Consejos Comunales". The main aim is to deliver an operating system to the people in these councils for their everyday work, including tools for surveys among others.
, aimed at community media that has flourished because of government support, since the Venezuelan government sees most private media outlets as being heavily biased.
contains free Geomatics applications and data to perform various practices and interact with desktop applications, web servers and mapping generators.
, a new user-friendly environment containing a variety of useful tools for computer forensics.
