Vine Linux is a supreme Linux distribution with integrated Japanese environment for desktop PCs and notebooks.

Vine Linux is a compact and lightweight Japanese Linux distribution for desktop PCs and notebooks.

The whole Vine Linux distribution consists of two categories: one CD install media (Vine Linux main) which can also be installed from 1GB USB memory media; and additional package collections (Vine Plus).

Vine Linux is an rpm-based distribution with apt-rpm powered, which helps easy and straightahead package managements.

Key features:
The following are some of the key features of Vine Linux:

Graphical installation interface powered by Anaconda
Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and RAID are supported by the installer. LVM is the default disk partitioning scheme
Disk encryption is not supported by the installer
Ext3 is the only journaling file system type available during installation
RPM-based, but APT-ified
Firewall is enabled out of the box

Update (via Distrowatch):

Daisuke Suzuki has announced the release of Vine Linux 5.2, a Japanese general-purpose community distribution. This is mostly a security and errata update of the free distribution which does not contain any proprietary components, non-free applications or non-free fonts. Some of the more interesting changes include: miscellaneous package version updates (Firefox 3.5.15, Pidgin 2.7.5, Sylpheed 3.0.2, Thunderbird 3.1.6); improved video card support for various Intel, NVIDIA and ATI cards; system installer fixes, including improved detection of FAT file systems, support for SD cards and Firewire controllers, and better detection of wireless network cards; updated list of APT mirrors; the DVD edition now includes the Vine Linux manual.

Read the release announcement (in Japanese) and release notes for more details about the new version of Vine Linux.

Download: Vine52-i386-DVD.iso (1,064MB, SHA1), Vine52-x86_64-DVD.iso (1,064MB, SHA1), Vine52-ppc-DVD.iso (1,112MB, SHA1).

Recent Releases:

• 2010-11-30: Distribution Release: Vine Linux 5.2
• 2010-02-26: Distribution Release: Vine Linux 5.1
• 2009-08-25: Distribution Release: Vine Linux 5.0
• 2009-04-28: Development Release: Vine Linux 5.0 Alpha
• 2007-12-25: Distribution Release: Vine Linux 4.2
• 2007-12-09: Development Release: Vine Linux 4.2 RC1

Vine Linux 5 runs on 32bit Intel PC (ix86), 64bit Intel PC (x86_64) and 32bit PowerPC Macintosh (ppc), and all editions provide nearly equivalent experience on all archtectures.

Screenshots.