Minimum distance of a code Is there a way to compute minimum distance of a code given a systematic parity check matrix? I know that min dist is smallest number $d$ such that there exists $d$ linearly dependant columns. I am looking in particular to find minimum distance of binary (codes over $\mathbb{F}_{2^l}$) quasi-cyclic  of rate q/q+1. Parity check matrix for such codes have a structure
$H=[I|C_1|C_2|...|C_m]$ where each $C_¡$ is a from class of circulant matrices. It may be useful that one can treat these codes as modules.
Or even if there are any approximate algoruihms for this ?
The problem for an arbitrary binary code is NP-hard. 

Reference: Alexander Vardy, &ldquo;The Intractability of Computing
the Minimum Distance of a Code,&rdquo; IEEE Trans. Inf. Thy., Vol. 43 pp. 1757--1766.