Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 Review

Michael McPherson sent in a link to Nicholas Petreley's Glowing review of Caldera that appears in the current issue of LinuxWorld. Talks about the windows based install program and a lot more.

Comments

My problem with reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had all of the following installed for at least a year each during my Linux career: Caldera OpenLinux, Red Hat Linux, Debian, and Slackware.

Here's what I think:

Slackware is the most fun. Instead of wasting time watching TV nights, you can come home, compile stuff, write all kinds of nifty scripts of your own to do system administration tasks, and so forth and so on. I had a blast for years running Slackware 2.0 all the way up through 3.0, learned something new about a Linux tool every night, and it made me feel as though I was working on one of those venerable old '80s Unix workstations. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, I got a job and school got more intense, and suddenly I didn't have the time to keep it up.

So, I switched to Red Hat 5.0 for the package management and supposed "ease of maintenance". Red Hat's installer is niftier than Slackware's, but once I got going, I discovered that Red Hat has some serious problems and limitations: for some reason, their gcc setup won't compile anything out of the box; better to download and install your own gcc configuration. Red Hat also somehow manages to make it difficult to install anything other than a Red Hat RPM -- getting a downloaded copy of Netscape to run under Red Hat can be a challenge, where it was always easy to do such things with Slackware. In the end, I became frustrated with Red Hat and decided that it was fine for those that didn't want to bang on their systems at all, but for those that did, there was just too much "search and repair" to do.

Then, I switched to Debian 1.x and later, 2.0. Debian was very like Slackware in some ways. During install, I could choose a large number of packages in a very specific way and the dependencies worked well. The package manager is the best, in my opinion, but is also a little harder to work with at first. There were no real problems, and on the whole, Debian is a solid (if slightly personality-less) distribution, and I was fine with it. The amount of software packaged for Debian is incredible, and I preferred the Debian tools to the graphic-based Red Hat tools. Still, Debian just isn't exciting for some reason; it's not shiny metal, more like concrete: strong but uninteresting. This is silly and personal, of course, but it's how I felt. I still used it, though, since I didn't want to go back to Red Hat and didn't feel that I had the time to use Slackware.

Then, someone gave me a free copy of OpenLinux 1.3, and I thought "may as well" and backed up my Debian installation on 8mm and gave OpenLinux a shot. What a system! Install, especially when dealing with odd devices, is better than any of the others (including Red Hat), and is smooth and fast, without a single reboot from the time you insert the floppy to the time you start KDE, which is included and installed for you. It was the first time that a distribution installer had been able to figure out support for both of my printers using LPD and ghostscript, and install both a raw and a PostScript buffer for each, with a filter to automatically route most files to the correct spool. The KDE desktop was preconfigured and included icons for Netscape, BRU, and a bunch of other included applications. Experimenting has led me to believe that the gcc installation is the best of any of the distributions I've tried; nearly everything compiles out of the box. Even the installed threads implementation works, which is amazing for a libc5-based distro. All of the tools were the very latest; I found that I could install a 2.2 kernel, compile, and install it right away without breaking its "Changes" file dependencies or downloading other software.

What am I saying?

I've tried the big four, and of them, I prefer Slackware and OpenLinux. I'm still using OpenLinux 1.3 now, and am seriously considering buying 2.2, though I've also toyed with the idea of going back to Slackware with 4.0.

I've heard lots of people just dismiss OpenLinux as a dying, boring distribution, not worth anybody's time, but I think that what people miss is that OpenLinux has taken the time to get the guts right and make the "unintersting" stuff work (as has Debian), and has then gone the extra distance by including KDE and so forth. In my opinion, it's the most corporate-safe of them all. OpenLinux is quality (which Red Hat sometimes lacks) coupled with intuitiveness (which Debian sometimes lacks) and correctness (which Slackware sometimes lacks). It's the only distribution in my opinion which is similar in quality to commercial Unixes.

I am not a Caldera employee. No, I don't make my own distro. *sigh*

Debian?

[gas]

I think Debian fixed this problem long ago. (With 2.0) I've had both libc5 and glibc2 a long time now and never ever had a problem with it.

But here might be some problem I just have not encountered? I really don't know much about this and I've never had a reason to look into it. It has just always worked.

Nobody's mentioned COAS yet...

[roystgnr]

Caldera Open Administration System, that is. The article gave it a passing mention.

It's been in quiet development for at least a year now, Linux Journal claims it's going to be modular, GUI based & vi-compatible, it looks like the only serious competitor to Linuxconf, and it fills the software hole (user friendly & newbie friendly system configuration) that Linux needs most desperately.

Linux is currently at a state where any PC or Mac user could switch to and use it, as long as they had some guru to log in as root whenever mucking around in /etc is called for. I'm hoping we'll see enough improvement with Linuxconf or COAS that Joe Avg. Macuser will be able to handle those tasks as well.

A couple more things I'd like to have cleared up:

Is COAS under the GPL like they said it would be? What non-free software (if any) is on the Caldera 2.2 CDs?

Petreley mentions having to muck about with /etc/ld.so.conf "when adding new libraries" - does he just mean new libc5 libraries, or would I really have to futz around pointlessly every time I make a semi-weekly upgrade to some bleeding edge libs? If it's the latter, count me out. Red Hat's been supporting libc6 & libc5 programs side by side for a year and a half now without that kind of kludge, and all the trouble I've ever had to take was run "ldd" on libc5 programs to make sure all the libraries they want are in /usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib

The best solution, of course, would be if Corel recompiled WP8 (or hurried up on their 2000 product) so I could ditch libc5 compatibility entirely.

Caldera provide a NEWBIE form of linux

[johnjones]

ok why do I say that I have seen the ditro and it looks good but has a few bugs but updates are a comeing

first caldera is THE distro to Lure 9X users away from their over indulagance in hardware

I managed to get my whole house to go over to it a DirectX programer and a VB (doodler not a programer) and that says something why because they wanted to use something to get work done and Caldera has this and thats it !

it works it dosnt want you to recompile the kernal it dosnt want you to edit .conf files so it is perfect for the over 45's office still working in dos spreadsheets they are NEWBIE's and this is what they want !

redhat if for performace and tweaks caldera is not ok thats my Veiw anyway


HAVE FUN install it on the office machine and watch people gwap !!!

Glibc6 upgrade fest

[eyepeepackets]

Hmmm, this library problem has been a pain in the proverbial butt for awhile now, perhaps it's time to make a big push and move to glibc6 ASAP. I most certainly would be happy not to have to deal with this library problem any longer and I surely don't want to have Microslug whackin' us on the head about it. My opinion is that the change-over has been put off and ignored for much too long, but for understandable reasons.

The big problem is what to do with all the legacy programs which no one in their right mind wants to lose. Perhaps a community-wide Library Upgrade Festival would work, replete with sponsored prizes for those who convert the most code/programs from the old library to the new, etc.

I've noticed that the Slackware folks are moving to make the glibc6 more inclusive in their new 4.0 distribution (3.6 had run-time support for glibc6 compiled programs -- was great as long as you didn't need to compile.) Most of the other distros have already made or seem to be making moves towards glibc6, so it's surely happening. I can't help feeling as though I'm moving from apartment A to apartment B and it's taking 2 years to make the move complete. Ugh.

Another possible solution is to move to dual library cross-compilers as standard issue. There is a fella who put up a website talking about how to do this -- no mean feat, I assure you. This or something similar seems to be Caldera's solution to the problem and it is a viable solution, although there are some nasty traps and pitfalls for the unwary.

Anyway, something has to be done and do I admire Caldera's attempt at a solution, even if it's only a temporary fix to a lasting problem.