From Russia with Love

Linux was born in Finland. Linus Torvalds had an idea of portable operating system while studying in University. Once born, Linux spread all over the world. Including Russia.

One Russian organisation was developing their own operating system called MOPS Linux for several year. But nothing is forever, and MOPS Linux project was cancelled. Although team of developers remained. They continued work on system, and new members joined the team. As a result, Agilia Linux was born.
Should I try this Linux from my motherland? Why not.
So, image is downloaded. It is heavy enough - 2.5Gb. DVD-RW disk is recorded. Because of that, experiment will run on Toshiba laptop. Reboot. Chose to load from DVD. Let's go!

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Agilia Linux, as its predecessor MOPS Linux, is based on Slackware. This is my second attempt to look at Slackware-based distribution after SLAX. Though Agilia is based on Slackware, almost all the links are in the far past. Developers admit that packages for Slackware won't work on Agilia and vice versa. Agilia has its own repository.

Once booted, you can see a menu which allows you to either start installation straight away, or run Agilia Linux in Live mode. Let's choose Live, I don't want to install it now. That's fine, and system continues booting. And then you see another menu to choose language. Do you think this is language for the system? No... This is language for... installation program. Yes, even Live mode of Agilia starts with installation program. But don't worry, you still have a choice to cancel it. But what is about language menu which we just had? It only affected setup program, but not the Live Agilia Linux. It has Russian menu by default. Because of that I don't think this distributive will be interesting as Live version for most of my readers. But you still have a choice to install system and get English language in installed system.
Unsurprisingly, network card (WiFi) was not found by Agilia, so I could not connect to my home network. So far only 3 distros were able to correctly recognize and configure Realtek card.

As soon as Agilia is Russian production, I expected to have multilingual keyboard "out of the box". And I was absolutely right. Russian and English keyboard layouts are active from the very beginning, you don't need to do anything for it. Even status bar indicator is on its usual place.
Everyone knows Russian products: Kaspersky Antivirus and Dr.Web are widely used worldwide.
I am happy that my motherland also takes part in Linux promotion. But, unfortunately, results of these Linux works are only oriented for Russian-speaking community. I believe time will come and many more people will be able to use these results.

Useful links (all in Russian):
http://welinux.ru/post/4164/ - interview with developers.
http://www.agilialinux.ru/ - official site