Nova (operating system)

Nova
Nova 7.0
DeveloperUniversity of Information Science
OS familyLinux (Unix-like)
Working stateActive
Source modelClosed source with some open-source components (5.0 and up)
Initial releaseFebruary 2009; 15 years ago (2009-02)
Latest release9.0[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 2 October 2023; 11 months ago (2 October 2023)
Available inMultilingual
Platformsx86-64
Kernel typeMonolithic (Linux)
LicenseGNU GPL
Official websitehttps://www.nova.cu/

Nova is a Cuban state-sponsored Linux distribution launched in February 2009.[2][3] It was developed in Havana at the University of Information Science (UCI) by students and professors to provide free and open-source software (FOSS) to inexperienced users and Cuban institutions. While the initial version was Gentoo-based, the developers switched to Ubuntu beginning with Version 2.1.[4]

In May 2016, discussions about a new version 6.0 were underway.[5] However, by 2016, Distrowatch had marked Nova as discontinued.[6] and its website, www.nova.cu had been taken down. Nova re-entered development later, and version 8.0 was released in January-March 2022.[7]

In early 2018, its repositories and download server (repo.nova.cu) was shut down temporarily, with users being told to switch to CentOS, after which Nova resumed development a couple months later. By early 2019, the distribution website was again active and DistroWatch listed it as under active development.[6]

  1. ^ https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=nova. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference reuters was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Timothy Prickett Morgan (12 February 2009). "Cuba crafts extra-communist Linux distro: Down with the Microsoft bourgeoisie". The Register. Retrieved 24 May 2011.
  4. ^ "Who are we?". Nova — Distribución Cubana de GNU/Linux. n.d. Archived from the original on 7 August 2011. Retrieved 24 May 2011.
  5. ^ UCI. "Se ultiman detalles para migración a Nova 5.0 en la UCI". Archived from the original on 4 October 2016. Retrieved 12 July 2016.
  6. ^ a b DistroWatch. "Nova". distrowatch.com. Retrieved 13 May 2016.
  7. ^ DistroWatch. "Nova". distrowatch.com. Retrieved 4 March 2019.