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Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 review at Salon
Robert Rwebangira writes "There is a nice review of Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 over at Salon - read the original review.
Bottom line: The easiest Linux to install so far, but there are signs of increasing fragmentation in the Linux distributions. "
Ugh, why do accidental backs now delete this text box?
:)). Or when you call a tech support line because a card stopped working, "Have you installed any other software since the card's drivers? Yes. Well, we can't guarantee performance then. Reinstall Windows and see if it works." (Happened to me once, the moral of the story, never install anything.)
Ok, here's a little more of the quote from Salon:
The various Linux distributions continue to morph into distinctly different identities. Does this mean that the Linux market is fulfilling the predictions of open-source skeptics by beginning to fragment into incompatibility, just as Unix did efore it?
Obviously, since there is multiple distributions, and they all aren't identical (by definition), nothing is compatible, right? And until we have just one distribution, we can never achieve the utopia that is Windows. That is the only reason Linux exists, right?
Now, to put a distribution in its perspective, one must understand the target audience for it. In OpenLinux 2.2's case, the hard core hacker isn't their target. So there isn't things like rxvt, many console editors, etc. They chose the KDE route and most likely the newer people that try OL will stick with GUI programs for a long time. For optimum performance, you probably don't want to muck with RPMs from other distros, but stick with whatever Caldera puts on their FTP site.
But, after the play around in COAS and what-not for a bit they may want to learn more about the underlying things. Just realize that without proper studying up on what you're doing, you can cause things to get messed up. In a worse case scenario, you'll have to reinstall, though I'd urge you to first research why what you did wreaked havoc. You can usually find a simpler solution (restore a default config file and re-edit or whatever).
This is where the beauty of Linux comes in. If you want to dig deep into just about anything, you can. There is no one company saying, "No! You cannot know what all the keys in the registry do (or any undocumented "feature")! Now go back home and use IE!" (not to point any one company out
Let's face it. The vast majority of the media doesn't care. It's about entertainment, not news. They want hits, viewers, listeners, etc. So they have to do what they can to win people to their medium. I basically gave up on them when a local TV station's teaser for the news was something like, "10 ways your kids will kill themselves with household items. Tune in tonite for part one of our weeklong special." Shocker headlines is what advances a career, not journalism. Their job isn't to hunt down the story, look into allegations, discover the truth, etc. That's all just folklore of days long ago. Now it's just repeating what a "source" told them and ending there.
So here we are. This fringe group, coding in dark basements with piles of Fritos, that doesn't behave like Windows, programs aren't identical to Windows, etc. Until we pack up our bags and work to make Windows perfect (like one of them put it), we will never be well represented in the mass media. And they'll keep churning out this drivel that gets 100,000 hits in it's first day on the 'net and think nothing is wrong...
Every time I hear about the fragmentation of Linux, I start wondering just how hard it would be to partially fix that. I mean, we have the LSB right? But what are we gaining from it? I think the big things than need standardization NOW are file locations and package formats. With Linux seeming to gain popularity, it'd be nice if when you're told to edit "/foo/bar" it's actually there, instead of finding it at "/bar/foo/bar" or something. I realize this is being worked on but what is being DONE?
Packaging is another problem. For those who don't understand or don't want to use source, we have packages, right? But there are tgz, slp, deb and rpm, which is 3 too many. There needs to be a package format drafted (and it's the LINUX package format, NOT the distribution package format) that addresses the shortcomings of current packagers as well as integrating their good features.
Of course, with file locations being the same and all, we'll have no problems with packages from one distribution working with another. Commercial distributors need to think about the good of Linux rather than the good of themselves at this point, even if it does mean boxed programs say "Runs on Linux Standard 1.0" instead of "Runs on Distribution X". We'll all benefit.
I found Caldera 2.2 to be missing quite a few things. While it's nice that it's geared towards non-techie/non-linux users, it leaves a lot to be desired for someone who is.
/mbr from a boot floppy to get to my miniscule doze partition to install boot magic.
:)
For example, there's no rxvt, no compress, no uncompress, no pine, no jed/joe/jove/pico.
I guess you're supposed to use vi/emacs/kedit, but frankly vi's no fun and emacs can be slow, and kedit is no good if you're not running X.
The lack of rxvt in inexcusable, IMHO, because no matter how great kvt is, it just doesn't work with the vga font and there's no way to turn of utmp/wtmp logging, so it's no good for bitchx, and if you have 10 of the darn things open, you have 10 logins.
Likewise the lack of compress/uncompress. I know it's not used that much anymore, but it's still handy to have in a base install.
The installation is fairly nice. Since it's geared at desktop users I'm not going to scream to loudly about the fact that there's no non-X based install option. I experienced on hitch with the install, it automagically installs lilo to the MBB instead of the MBR since it comes with Boot Magic. I already had lilo installed, so I had to go back and fdisk
The startup screen is nifty, minimizing what you see on boot, change anything around, recompile your kernel, and you're bound to get a bunch of big red "FAIL"'s next to events though. The Caldera Open Admin System can be confusing, and the apps are not well integrated. They really need a gnome/kde control panel type interface that unites the apps.
I have to mention the price point. It's $29.99 at CompUSA, with a $10.00 mail in rebate. The RedHat box sitting next to it on the shelf is $79.99. Which is a newbie, who doesn't know if he'll stick with linux, more likely to pick up? Probably Caldera. Will Caldera help the newbie stick with Linux? Probably not.
At any rate, I've gone back to my home-burned Linux Mandrake 5.3 (RedHat 5.2 with kde and some updates), with an obscene number of hacks and changes.
Personally, I can't wait for a glibc based slackware.
Ok, I am neither a Linux user or a Windows user (I'm an OS/2 user, primarily). I've tried installing Linux in the past, but it usually winds up being taken off my machine because it's just too much of a headache.
I have to say that this time, I think Linux will stay on my machine for at least a little while. Caldera OpenLinux has by far been my most pleasant encounter with Linux to date.
The install process is much, much easier than RH 5.2 -- although it's not without it's problems. I couldn't install OL2.2 on hdc, b/c when I did it wouldn't boot, it couldn't be added to Boot Manager, nothing. I would up having to nuke NT (what a shame) and using that partition on hda as my Linux partition. Then, it worked ok. It took me about a day to figure that out.
Since then, I've had only a few problems. I haven't been able to get my sound card to work (a Crystal TidalWave 128)... yet... and it took me forever to figure out the trick to getting StarOffice to install. I still haven't figured out how to configure my printer.
On the other hand, I find the documentation that Caldera provides to be very good. While the user's manual doesn't go into Linux in-depth, it covers some very important things -- including how to configure a kernel, which I was able to do (hey, not a big deal to most of you, but _trust_ me, what a rush). I was able to install it on my laptop, and for the first time I can use a PCMCIA modem on it. And Caldera's web site has a great knowledge base, I'm very impressed.
I've seen some concerns that people feel Caldera is trying to "dumb down" Linux by making it boot straight to a graphical system. Trust me -- this isn't happening. KDE is an ok desktop (not the Workplace Shell, though!) but it can't do everything. I've already had to delve into the depths of man files and HOWTOs to get everything working.
What Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 _does_ do, however, is give us newbies a "safe" starting point -- a place that looks familiar to us. We'll make tiny little forays into the horrible world of the blinking command prompt, and if it doesn't work we'll retreat to a good solid game of Freecell or Reversi. When we actually do something right in that horrible place, we'll feel more comfortable with it. Sooner or later, we'll be able to edit configuration files with the best of you.
Anyway, it's not a perfect distribution, but it's a pretty good one.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I have tried to install OpenLinux 2.2 on my box and I simply quit trying after 3 hours. I have been running Red Hat 5.0/5.1/5.2 and the RH installer always worked without an itch. Here are the problems I encountered: 1) If you try to install on an hard disk that already has ext2 partitions; you are screwed. You will have to use Partition Magic and reallocate all the space to one big primary partition. 2) The Lizard installer detected my vanilla ATAPI Toshiba CD-ROM but when it was time to install the software, I got some message that it didn't find any media to install from. 3) I tried the text-based installer. No Disk Druid to setup the partitions and when I got to configure the mouse, the installer could simply not deal with my Logitech Mouseman. Conclusion, it seems that the folks at Caldera have tested their installer from the perspective of new users that want to install Linux on a drive that shares space with Windows. It seems to work for that configuration. For people that already have some distro of Linux running, I would suggest to stay away from this product. It simply not suitable. Yethi.
The sense I got from my conversations with him was that he was overall positive about Linux, the progress it's making, and its prospects for the future. That perhaps doesn't come out very clearly in this review, but he was quite fair and reasonable and willing to learn in email.
Linux does have some serious shortcomings with respect for the point-and-drool Windows user, and some way to present a foolproof interface to those users will be necessary if we care to capture that market -- and I realize that not all of us do. There are legitimate concerns about fragmentation and incompatibility; the fact that they will probably be resolved in the near-term future doesn't constitute any kind of guarantee. These are things that I worry about, and I'm pretty confident about Linux.
The thing that most struck me about Andrew Leonard was that he seemed reasonable, friendly, and open-minded. I'd say he's probably a good journalist for us to approach -- politely, mind you -- to discuss our opinions about Linux and Open Source. Just bear in mind that the absence of a glowing review is not necessarily a slam, and that criticisms don't necessarily constitute FUD.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You have a good point when you say The problem, says O'Dell, is that there is a "strong tendency for configuration files to become hopelessly corrupted" if users try to use both GUI tools and command-line direct intervention at the same time.
Tools such as linuxconf always have a "shaky" feel to them. Furthermore, other solutions to this problem (AIX, NextStep, Windows) always seem to involve a binary configuration database.
I don't know if any real work is being done in this department, but GUI's such as KDE are always going to be pure eye candy if you can't do any system configuation there.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Simply put: system configuration is functionality orthogonal to an end user desktop, period.
There are so many counter-examples that it's probably not worth even starting. Anyway, the world does not begin and end with standard unix.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually I think I misunderstood you and we are actually in agreement. (orthogonal does not equal incompatible).
My original point wasn't that it was difficult with a GUI system (it shouldn't be), just that it's difficult with the stew of text config files in regular unix.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
that /. should roll it's own distro. Think about what would come from that. We have freshmeat serving up some great file, some good programmers and a ton of hardware hackers on here. I think we could take the lead in the LiNUX distro race.
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Andrew Leonard's columns are usually pretty good, but this review is borderline FUD. It follows the standard format: loads on the praise to establish warmth and credibility, and then slams Linux with a heavily biased report of negative issues. The issue here is fragmentation and incompatibility. Yet the examples he gives have no specific relevance to Caldera OpenLinux. They are not even specific to different distributions. The entire second half of the review makes the point that KDE and other GUI systems don't work well with each other, or when users tweak config files by hand. But nowhere does he say that he tried an alternate GUI on Caldera or edited a config file directly. This is not a fragmentation issue, because this area is already heavily fragmented, and always has been, because Unix simply does not have a standard configuration format or API, which makes this an application issue, not a distribution issue. What he fails to mention is that GUI configuration standards are actually converging as GNOME and KDE become the standard Linux GUI environments. His agrument is very shallow when you realize things are getting better, not worse. The real fragmentation problems, such as startup script differences and file locations, are mentioned in a single sentence with no examples.
I am new to Linux but very experienced with Windoze (which I quickly discovered means nothing). I am a programmer, but all of my prior programming experience is for Windoze. While my experience hasn't been that helpful in the Linux setting, at least I am familiar with computers, scripts, etc. in general and can apply this to Linux. If I didn't have this experience, I would REALLY be screwed. Anyway, I bought OL 2.2 because I was afraid that being a Linux newbie, I would have difficulty getting anything else to run without a great deal of pain. My idea was that I would get OL installed and use it to learn the basics of Linux, and then move on to another distro. Well, I've had it installed for a week, and I am wishing that perhaps I had chosen something like RH 6.
For starters, Partition Magic crashed halfway through, so when I tried to use LIZARD to install, it said I had no prepared Linux partition. Luckily I am familiar with fdisk and I fixed the problem. Other than that, the installation went without a hitch, except the fact that I put in an incorrect parameter for my video card and had to run XF86Setup to fix it.
After some difficulty, I also got PPP set up, with no thanks to Caldera support. It's obvious that I just need to go through the HOWTO's'; they're much more informative, though they can be technical for a newbie.
My biggest complaint is that while the "totally graphical" interface is nice for a newbie, if everything doesn't automatically configure during installation (like my modem, printer, and sound card), you really need to dispense with the graphical stuff and get into the guts of the system. I wish I got to see my boot messages on boot instead of using dmesg afterwards. I have asked Caldera 3 times as to what some of the items in their graphical boot sequence represent, but have not yet gotten a response.
So, that's a newbies impression of OL 2.2. I will probably use a different distro next time, because I feel I will have more control over the install process and the system configuration. Plus, many of the references I have purchased use RH as an example, and some of the info is distro-specific. I also chose OL for the price, but now I wonder if I got what I paid for.
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--"A man's Palm is his best friend."
(IIIx, that is...hehehe)