Slashdot Mirror
Petreley on Caldera OpenLinux 2.3
A. J. Rimmer writes "Just ran across this review of Caldera 2.3 from Nick Petreley [?] of LinuxWorld. " Saint Nick likes it - says that "not only continues to leapfrog over all
other Linux distributions for ease of
installation; it also proves, beyond the
shadow of a doubt, that Linux can be
easier to install than Windows. " Pretty strong words - what do you folks like best?
I've been a Caldera customer since their first product, Caldera Network Desktop preview 1. At the time CND was very promising, offering a commercial GUI desktop, a "fully supported" Netscape license, and other goodies. When CND 1.0 finally appeared, priced at $99US, it was a steal because it included a copy of Xi Grapics' Accelerated X server, which was itself $99 if purchased separately. For that server, which was the only thing to support my brandy-new Diamond video card, and for the Gallium font server, which handled TrueType fonts, CND was the only choice for me. I dropped Slackware in a heartbeat.
Times change. Over the years, Caldera distributions were plagued by various problems. First, they dropped AccelX in favor of the far inferior (at the time) Metro-X server, and then for XFree. The Gallium font server disappeared. And throughout it all, Caldera was renowned for being a release or two behind most packages, major and minor. I spent a lot of time building new versions of many packages. Yet, as an early adopter, I was able to take advantage of their aggressive upgrade program to minimize costs for each new version of their distro.
By the time Caldera Open Linux 1.0 came out, I was ready to dump Caldera entirely and move on to something, probably SuSE. I had tried Debian, RedHat, SuSE, and even Slackware, and found each to have about as many problems as COL, though in different areas. The pressure to switch intensified when RedHat switched to libc 6, making most RPM files useless for Caldera systems.
Then came COL 2.2. Its GUI installer was impressive, though not quite perfect. They abandoned their conservative version selections, offering very new versions of most packages. Yes, it's KDE, which I used at work for almost a year, just to make sure I could speak with authority about it. I now use GNOME on my COL systems. And it's libc 6, making arbitrary RPMs typically useful again.
The key is, Caldera is now Just Another Distribution. The things that drew me to them originally--commercial packages, ultra-conservative design, phone support--have largely evaporated or become irrelevant. So take Caldera for what it is, a nice solid distribution with a cute installer and a fairly solid foundation. I've had little trouble building and installing free and open-source packages and my own software on a Caldera system, the price is competitive, the availability is comparable, so why not? It's not a world apart like it used to try to be, but perhaps more importantly, it's fully part of today's world.
Or you might just whack the whining brat across the side of the head with an old basketball shoe and make him use an old blue-screen VT100 with an acoustic coupler modem until he learns Real Computing. Whatever works.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Great, but does Debian deal with cross-platform issues? Would Debian function just as well running off the idiosyncracies of, say, a Solaris system?
Interesting you should pick those as the advantages of Debian, because I don't think they serve to distinguish it from COL. Upgrades: COL has RPM for package upgrades, and though many might argue, it's easily as good as Debian's system. And COL point upgrades come with an automated script that will analyze your system automatically and upgrade all necessary packages--a one-touch system upgrade. Also, I've never had any problem using source or messing with my COL system's internals--they are in no way "blocked". As for security, Caldera seems as responsive as anyone to security alerts; as for the default settings, they could be better, but it's not a wide-open system after an install.
Where Debian beats the skivvies off Caldera is in three areas: First, it's all free. Caldera isn't as choosy, but they're getting better. Second, and much more important and practical, is the sheer number of packages available for it. Debian dwarfs all other distros that I've seen just for the number of packages that it comes with, not to mention those available around the 'net. Third, Linux is community supported, whether Caldera, Debian, or any other distro. And Debian won't get you laughed or sneered at on a mailing list, an IRC channel, or a newsgroup, where Caldera isn't usually received as well.
My most recent experience with Debian was soured by very bad experiences with dselect and dpkg. I hear it has a new installer either in place or on the way, so maybe I'll give it another try. But Caldera is a serious contender even so, at least in my book.
xvidtune is your friend. It should have
been part of the configuration process,
i.e. XF86Setup. I don't recommend the
red hat X configuration tool; it hasn't worked
very well for me in the past.
Actually, COL comes with GNOME, it's just in the "contrib" directory. I was able to get the latest-n-greatest GNOME out of CVS and install it on my COL system over the course of a lazy afternoon, and it works great. Well, as great as GNOME works these days. I use Gtk+ and WindowMaker on all my COL systems, and had no trouble installing E. So they don't remove choice. Yeah, you gotta work a little at it, but any CD-ROM Linux distro is going to be out of date the day it's pressed, so you picks your packages as you likes them.
Very good point about the installation, though. I think far too much is made of Linux installation, both how "hard" it is (by the mainstream press) and how "easy" it is (by Nick and others, especially about COL 2.x). Sure, COL is now easier to install than Windows. So what? You do that once in the life of your system if you're lucky, only a few times if you're not. Contrast that with the thousands of hours of computing that you'll do after the install, and it gets to be quite funny.
But if you don't like Caldera, by all means choose another distro. It's more important that you are using Linux or *BSD or even Hurd than it is which distro you choose. Go with what you like and let the rest go hang. Two words of advice, though: Don't believe everything people say on the 'net. Misconceptions abound, as this very discussion ably demonstrates. Try for yourself. Use vmware to manage multiple installs if you have to. And second, times change. The Caldera of today is quite different from the Caldera of two or three years ago. Same for Deb and RedHat and Slack. So every so often, give the others a try, just to keep current. You'll be glad you did.
Quick! Name a Caldera employee!
Hmmm. Ransome Love. Erik Ratcliffe. Jeff Christensen. That's three off the top of my head. No, they are probably not known by as many people as, say, Bob Young or Donnie Barnes. But Caldera isn't used by as many people, either. For those of us on the Caldera user's mailing list, Erik and Jeff are household names. And most folks here have probably heard Ransome's name, even if they didn't recognize him as the CEO of Caldera Systems.
I can't argue that Caldera has a penetration problem in the end-user community. But they're actually pretty well known it the corporate world as Linux distros go, which is what they were aiming at, methinks.
Modeline calculations scare me...
Oh, God.. TELL me about it!
Setting up Sound: As far as I can tell, this requires a kernel recompile.
More like SEVERAL recompiles. If you're a newbie, you'll mess up. And then you'll have to do it again. And then it won't work. So you'll have to do it again. I spent an ENTIRE day trying to get my sound to work under RH6.0. Everytime I play something other than CD-AUDIO, the system HANGS. It really pisses me off.
The Linux Community as a whole needs to remember us newbies. The "Do it yourself" or "RTFM" (or oftentimes "RTF HOWTO") attitude PUTS OFF NEWBIES. We need things easier, dammit! But I digress..
Oh, and definately get rid of MOUNT thing. That seems totally unecessary to me.
I like debian the best, because of its easy upgrades, doesn't block using stuff from source or messing around with its internals, and it defaults to a nice, relatively secure setup, unlike some other distros.
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
By far, the easiest unix install I have ever encountered is FreeBSD.. just point it to the ftp and walk away.
After that, I would have to say slackware. I just installed the slack7pre1 and it was amazing and beautiful. There was no fancy gui, but all the information I needed to get the system up was right on the screen. Not to mention I got the choice of gnome, kde, wm, and e (even though those aren't all in the same category).
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
It's a good thing for the unwashed newbies to have only one WM available for installation. And although it's nice to say that knowledgable users can download other stuff off the net, downloading and installing Gnome, as an example, is hardly trivial.
Caldera (and the forthcoming Corel) should include alternate Window Managers and other non-default applications on a separate CD. That way a newbie can do an initial install, get comfortable with Linux, then start exploring "Disk 2".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I have mixed feelings on caldera 2.3. On one hand it is the easiest whiz-bangiest niftiest looking install I've seen. On the other hand, no other OS install wiped my partition table clean. I even made sure to use a separate HD to be extra safe so I wouldn't have to muck with my primary drives partitions.
Now before everyone calls me a loser and a moron. I've been installing Linux since v1.0, I've installed SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Caldera. I've installed dos 2.0-6.0, win3.1, win95, winNT (3.51 & 4.0). And I've never managed to wipe out the partition table before.
As near as I can figure it, it happened when I went into the expert/custom drive partitioning part. I don't remember (and neither does my friend) touching ANYTHING other than my table for my second HD, and yet when I rebooted my first HD's table was gone. Blah, oh well, thanks to gpart (thank you michael briztva!) I managed to recover my partition table. I haven't heard anyone else mention this, so maybe I'm just especially special.
At this point it probably doesn't really matter -that- much since both systems are good, but, debian has a package-based dependency system, not a file based dependency system, so problems like 'the libraries were there, the rpm just could find them' as mentioned in the review won't happen. If libc++2.8 is in the list of installed packages, it doesn't matter where it was installed.
:) It's also true that the theoretically 'better' package system hasn't had the hard test of being used by derivative distributions the way RPM's have, so there may be flaws that are hidden by that.
Basically, the debian package system is more powerful, flexible, and reliable. It also, it must be admitted, has had some of the most godawful interfaces ever, but that's changing. The 'apt'
system is pretty good, and works on the current 'stable' release and will be the standard installer on the next release.
With apt, basically... you type 'apt-get install ghostview' and it will download and install the ghostview, ghostscript, and whatever libraries they require. Or, 'apt-get install lyx' and it installs lyx, latex, tex, and the libraries they depend on. (Yes, it does ask you, with a tally of the total number of megs that you're installing, before doing this.)
Anyway. Debian has lots of technical and reliability advantages, as well as being the largest distribution, but, I'll freely admit it's not even -close- to being user friendly.
Anyway, I hope that one day we'll have a common package format that includes all the info of rpm and deb and any other package format out there, at which point the whole issue will become irrelevant, at least, as a matter of comparison between distributions.
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
I can't argue that Caldera has a penetration problem in the end-user community. But they're actually pretty well known it the corporate world as Linux
distros go, which is what they were aiming at, methinks.
Yes, but the question is - were they successful? My understanding, from what I've seen of the Caldera effort, is that they are positioning themselves as "different from the freebies". This might work if they had a strong penetration in the corporate market, which is historically opposed to the free software movement.
But they've been dismally bad in this sector. See, if you target corporate business, you need to make a case as to how you're good at it. Has Caldera made a good case about it? I don't think so.
Frankly, it's VERY, VERY difficult to take an open source product and position yourself as a "corporate-therefore-I'm-different-from-them" company.
It seems to me Caldera has tried to be a semi-open-source, semi-corporate distro, and failed spectacularly at both.
As an aside, media is everything. Nobody covers caldera today. So they are dead. Unless they suddenly get a clue. Are they even reading this? I doubt it.
L.
Mounting drives before using them, and unmounting after use is very logical and there are good reasons for it.
Buffering data and collecing writes together increases performance, and that wouldn't be possible is you could just eject the damn thing anytime you pleased!
It may seem unnecessary with read-only media such as CD-ROMs but what would you rather? That the OS tries to automatically mount any CD that you put in the drive? What if it's a music CD? Surely YOU should be able to tell the computer what you want rather than having it try to second-guess you all the time like a certain other OS that shall remain nameless!
If a newbie has floppy and cd icons on their kde/gnome panel or desktop that allows them to mount and unmount with a click, then they're in pretty good shape. If you configure an automounter for them, they're in even better shape.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
See, if you target corporate business, you need to make a case as to how you're good at it. Has Caldera made a good case about it? I don't think so.
Caldera was a pretty easy sell in our engineering department. I would have hated to try to explain Debian to my boss, but cutting a purchase order to Caldera was right up her alley. I wouldn't dream of suggesting it as a replacement for our 500+ engineering workstations or our 1000+ business desktops, at least not yet, but Caldera's corporate orientation made them easier to get in the door.
As an aside, media is everything. Nobody covers caldera today. So they are dead.
Um, begging your pardon, sir, if I may speak freely--bullshit. What are we discussing right now? An article by a very respected voice in the Linux community about, um, Caldera. They aren't the largest distro by a long shot, but they know how to get the word out. Count the number of articles about Debian that have appeared on CNN, and then count the Caldera articles there. No contest.
Are they even reading this? I doubt it.
Wrong again. Caldera has several employees who are regular Slashdot readers, and Freshmeat, and even User Friendly. Yes, they have aimed more at the big corporate markets than the other distros--are those the circles in which you travel? If not, maybe that's why you have this perception that they're weak. But believe me, they have a rep there.
You are correct that they have not courted the "general" community very well, and that has hurt them. But they're not the total fools you seem to think they are, either.
Caldera has several employees who are regular Slashdot readers, and Freshmeat, and even User Friendly. Yes, they have aimed more
/. or FSF community, I have yet to see them. If they are reading this, maybe they can reply, but I doubt they will, and it simply proves my point - they are out of touch.
at the big corporate markets than the other distros
But they haven't been successful at it. That was my point.
But believe me, they have a rep there.
They have a rep where? Really.......I've been following the tech media for months now, and I've yet to read a single news article extolling the virtues of Caldera. If they have a PR agency, it's doing a horribly crappy job. If they have people who are members of the
OpenLinux 2.3 addresses every single problem you just listed.
1)Setting up Xserver is cake. It does all the work for you. The hardest part is choosing your monitor out of the list. Once it has the info, it gives you a slew of configuration options. All you do is point and click.
2)Setting up sound on COL 2.3 was a snap. I didn't do anything, it just worked all by itself. Hella easier than NT.
3)You don't have to mount a CD in KDE unless you want to access it via the command line. If you use the graphical interface, it automounts for you, just like MS.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
First, my qualifications: I am the world's least intuitive computer user. My iMac regularly crashes. It took me three days to install Win98, and a lot of household disharmony besides. I shout at my computers a lot. I've flubbed (though eventually installed) several flavors of Linux on various machines, as well as WinNT, Win95 and the aforementioned '98. Basically, I am no one you want near a computer unless you are a genius at fixing arcane problems that I don't know how I caused. After a few years of messing with Linux, I must admit that my level of knowledge is perhaps closer to Newbie than, say, your average 8-year-old with a month of Linux experience. I wish I were exaggerating, but I am the one all those Dummies books were written for, and I often wish they had one for even dumber people.
...), but I would definitely suggest Mandrake as easier than Red Hat and a good option for a first-time installer interested in getting a working Linux system quickly. (A lot of Slashdotters are big fans of Slackware, and if you're willing to face a steeper learning curve, it might be more *educational* to put that on instead. It took me a *long* time to figure out the installation, but that was a few years ago and it's matured a lot since then!)
... one nice thing about not using Windows at all is the ease with which you can face reformatting at install time.:)
... Matt Walsh's Running Linux is excellent, and now in it's 3rd edition ... and perhaps you've bought a book / distro combination -- some of those are very good too, like RedHat Linux Unleashed.
Now, ehough of the self-deprecation: I run Mandrake 6.1 on my machine (K6 233, 160(not a typo) MB of RAM), and for the past few months have had 6.0. I have not tried SuSE, and haven't tried the new Caldera (I had no luck with the 2.2, though -- I never got it on, despite the slick interface).
I consider Mandrake a flat-out miracle of engineering and design, with hats (ha ha) off also to Red Hat for providing the basis.
Mandrake auto-detected both fairly-recent (ATi XPERT@Play 98) and oldish (some random 2-meg card) video cards, cheap internal modem, all drives, etc.
The default is KDE, but there's Gnome as well. kppp allowed me to set up an Internet connection relatively painlessly. (Read the first paragraph, and then realize that it still took me a while to figure out, but hey -- it was easier than Windows by an order of magnitude.)
Again, I have not tried several other of the current distros to make a comparison (they might be as good, dso on't take this as knocking the new Caldera, or recent Slackware, or
And, if you are installing Linux for the first time, take a few hours and create as complete a picture (on paper) of your system's vital stats as you can -- remember, you'll need things like your monitor's V- and H-frequencies or frequency ranges, current information about how your hard drive is partitioned (this is important if you plan to dual-boot
Also, I'd suggest at least skimming some books before you commit yourself to restarting with a boot floppy in the drive
Good luck! Save existing files you want to have later somewhere safe! Hang up a punching bag to aim your energy at in the event of frustration! Dissolve! Dissolve! Okay!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I personally use SuSe and I love it. I think the installation was fairly easy but left enuf room for customization. I used to use RH, and I have tried Mandrake and Caldera. Yes, the Caldera is simple to install, but I had odd problems with it (like it wanted to tell me that LPT1 was on IRQ -1) and I thought it was slow. Same with RH and Mandrake, they both seemed slow on my machine. THen when I put SuSE on (first 6.1 now 6.2) everything went great. It flies and works great. I think that SuSE is a GREAT company and I would definatly back them if and when they go live...
-Lynch Man
I don't agree the "mount thing" is useless. I really like being able to mount a Win98 VFAT partition, or mount it read-only, or not mount it all. It's a slight hassle with floppies and CDs I'll grant you. But the system really needs to know when, where, and how a removable device is available. Several good options for more transparency are available and being developed it seems. I don't want to lose the detailed control over mounting file systems Linux provides though.
If Caldera automounts floppies and CD's from the desktop that suits me about perfectly.
Then I doubt seriously that you've been following the tech media for more than two months.
/. have either never tried Caldera, or they tried it quite some time ago. Give it a fair try now, and I think you'll see it's the only distro at the moment that can even attempt to seriously challenge Microsoft.
I've been following Caldera's progress for several years now (since it was a rogue project in Novell, even), and if you'd been paying any attention, you might even have found several of the posts I made right here about the surprising quality, stability, and incredible ease of installation of the 2.2 release. It's not perfect, and Caldera (as do other Linuxes) has a long way to go, but it's really quite good, and a very solid product.
Although it's anathema to those here who take their distro choices religiously rather than seriously, a very good case can be made that Caldera is the best Linux distro for corporate deployment on either the server or desktop side.
Caldera seems to rub some folks here the wrong way because it's a well-integrated distro rather than the Linux Construction Kits favored by some of the developer community. Caldera is not for everyone (that's why we have multiple distros!), but they have an excellent chance of becoming one of (if not the) predominant mainstream distros.
Finally, I find that most of the Caldera-haters here on
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
This is true for anyone who competes with Microsoft, but it's not true for the intra-Linux competition (i.e. RedHat vs Caldera vs SUSE, etc).
The only thing that distinguishes one distro from another is happy users. It's just too easy to download a different distro if the one you have doesn't suit you.
Not too long ago I was shopping for another distro. I had been a slackware user, but I was getting tired of .tgz packaging. I started with Caldera because they were the easiest to download off the net and install off the net. I created the boot floppies, and then did an NFS install over the net.
But I soon discovered that the number of packages available for Caldera were few in comparison to the number available for Red Hat. So, I downloaded a new set of boot floppies, and rebuilt. I used Red Hat 5.2 for a few months until I tried to install gnome and enlightenment. I was able to do this, but keeping it up to date was an incredible pain!
I have settled on Debian. Not because I think that Debian has great PR. And not because I think that Debian's image in the community is immaculate, but because it is by far the easiest distro to use and keep up to date.
My point is this: product quality is the only thing that matters when price is not a factor. I respect your ideas, but I think you're really stuck in the microsoft model for getting users, and I don't think it applies to Linux.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I recently had to install RH 6.1 on a newly wiped machine. Ugh!
The 6.1 installer reminds me of Windows. It's very buggy if you choose any non-default options. I kept getting dropped into the Python debugger, until I started deferring to the installers default suggestions. This is a real problem that could tarnish Linux' reputation, since RH is, in the US, the leading distro. Until RH addresses this issue, I think I'll be recommending Caldera to the newbies.
On the other hand, I did successfully install RH 6.1, while setup of Win NT ad Win 98 kept swooning on this machine (which is why I installed Linux so I could run NT under vmware!)
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>Buffering data and collecing writes together
>increases performance, and that wouldn't be
>possible is you could just eject the damn thing
>anytime you pleased!
This was one of the bestthings about the long-lost mac floppies. Physical ejection was under program control, giving a chance to unmount (which to varying degrees at different times, macos did).
Somewhere along the way I saw a pc with similar drives, but it seems to have been lost along the way . . .
I've seen it happen twice, once on my K6, and once on my thinkpad. For no apparent reason, its fdisk shifts the labels of all of the partitions up by one. Fortunately, I didn't have a partition 4 either time . . .
However, if you don't have the listed hardware, or you're trying to do something a little unusual (like use the VGA out port on a Dell Latitude CPi), it can get challenging quickly.
Not really. If you've got video working at all, then it makes no difference whether you're going to the screen or the VGA port. Once the X server is on good terms with the NeoMagic controller in the CPi, then you're set. Just use the BIOS hot key (Fn-F7 I think - anyway, it's the one with the little picture of the CRT on it) to toggle display output from screen to CRT to both. The only thing that might be tricky is finding a way to switch from LCD to CRT under software control, but this is problematic even under Windows and still requires custom software for each particular machine, since there's no standard API for making the call to change that. The BIOS hot-key is handier anyway.
Oh, and I speak with some authority on this as I was Dell's Program Manager for Software for Latitude and Inspiron when the CPi was released. So far as I know, I was the first person to ever install Linux on a CPi (a few months before it went on sale), and as a matter of fact, it was Caldera!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Just a few days ago we had a /. item on the code fork potential in Linux, in which Caldera was pointed out by Bob Young of Red Hat as possibly causing a problem due to their extensive use of third-party proprietary tools.
Will in Seattle
My long-winded point is that if one of the distro's hasn't already fixed this problem then they might alienate would be Linux users. As I said I don't really blame the distros because Partition Magic even suffered, but I just think it is something that needs to be addressed if it hasn't already. There has already been one Windows guy posting here complaining about having to type 'startx' to get X11 started. Certainly people like him aren't going to want to play with drive geometries.
I know RH, TurboLinux and Debian have gotten injections of funds from the big corporates, but what about Caldera, SuSE and the other distrbutions?
Prolly happens, just I (or the public) never hear much about it... (or people don't make as much fuss about it, which is the same thing really).
So, I suppose the question is.. who is investing in Linux Distributions, and where? Does anyone keep track of all this?
Spose this is a little off topic, but I'd like to see Caldera and SuSE get some backing like RH and the like. They all do very useful stuff for the Linux community in general, and it's nice to see them getting a helping hand occasionly. (It also tends to put off those who believe RH is taking over Linux! But that's another story.)
IMHO this is the best thing they could have done. When I first started using Linux I would play with the different options that appeared when I right clicked on the root window. I don't know how many times during this initial exploration of my new Linux environment did I manage to completely change how everything looked and worked. More often than not there was no obvious way to change it back.
By bundling only KDE Caldera have acknowledged that one UI is better than lots. They have realised that the geeks who want the flexibility will probably be willing to either:
- download a different WM
- get one off another CD
- create their own themes
- any or all of the above
Congratulations Caldera for having the sack to pick something and stick to it.--------------------------------------------
my blog: good times, man, good times
Warning: this isn't totally related to Caldera; but Caldera and Nick's experiences with it illuminate the issues herein.
From the article (emphasis mine):
Obviously anyone can come up with quite a large number of reasons why this particular situation exists. My personal favorite is the oft-cited "reckless abandon" with which incompatible versions of libraries are created. Honestly, though, it really doesn't matter. The package management system should make this transparent.
RPM seems to have become the crown prince of package management because it (a) has most of its sh*t together and (b) by virtue of being in what is widely regarded as the single most popular Linux-based distro out there. Many have even argued that it's cross-platform -- i.e. given RPM packages compiled for any system other than Linux, it will work on said system. (And to a degree, it does.)
Unfortunately, even with all the standards in the universe, there just plain are too many things that differ between system A and system B. Red Hat and Mandrake have not had to deal with this on too large of a scale because Mandrake is a direct derivative (and I am operating from hearsay here -- I have not yet had the opportunity to use Mandrake) of Red Hat. But as more and more distributions out there use RPM, we will start to discover more and more inconsistencies that perhaps RPM just isn't up to.
Ah, but this is the world of open source. :-) We can change these things, either by modifying RPM, another system, or by creating a new one altogether with bits and pieces.
An ideal package system would be able to read some sort of platform spec file (or perhaps query an interactive spec program?) and determine just where libraries are supposed to be, for starters. It would ask the same spec where to get those libraries if they weren't around. (You could always do the Microsoft thing and include the libs you needed with your package, but I thought we were trying to get *away* from waste) :-) Along those lines, library packages -- or any others pulled in automatically as dependencies -- could also be marked as "dependency-only" and removed or possibly archived when no longer depended on.
One thing RPM does well, though, and I wish more open source projects did -- it maintains the ability to run on the command line, in batch mode. Graphical programs run on top of it. We must never lose that delineation.
Do you really think that *every* single monitor is listed in that list??? I personally have a PowerComputing 17" monitor, and it is *not* listed anywhere in that list. Nor do I know the chipset. When I first installed, I did not know the timing specifications either. The way I found out was to run a program in the MacOS that gave me the timings. I then converted them to the backward specifications the various configuration tools use (each is different) and I finally had the modeline I wanted. That was a lot of trouble.
What should be done is to have a recommended menu of screen sizes -- like the MacOS or Windows or BeOS or any other decent gui OS. If it cannot detect the correct timings, then it should tell you and interactively work with you to get it working. Right now, it leaves you in nobody's land should you fail to install your monitor. Why is it so hard???
-B
Quick! Name a Caldera employee! OK....now, name a redhat employee. See what I mean?
In open source software, momentum to harness enthusiasm is everything. This includes media momentum, developer momentum, slashdot momentum, USENET momentum. Try this thought experiment - how many posts about Redhat can you remember reading in the past week? Now...how many posts about Caldera can you remember? My guess is, not many.
Redhat has a close relationship with the community. It knows how to play the media, even if it stumbles over IPO embarrassments. OTOH, Caldera seems to put on the cloak of Yet Another Corporation. At least, that's the impression I get.
I bought a book with a caldera CD a couple of yrs ago. For some reason, I got the impression that Caldera was trying to differentiate itself from the linux community by portraying itself as "Commercial" and not just a freebie company. Maybe this is an unfair characterization, but that's the impression I got.
This strategy is not new. Every other month, a company tries to portray itself as superior because it doesn't depend on the services of freebie programmers; it has its own skilled workforce. If anybody from such companies is reading this, let me repeat - this will not only screw your image in the open source community, it will not make any headlines in the commercial world.
So what is the magic that endears a company to the open source world? Why do linux users flock to redhat or SUSE but ignore caldera? I'd say it's being in touch with the community.
It doesn't make any sense to take a community product and hawk it with detachment. If Caldera has a clue, they need to change their attitude. Simply making a better product won't win the war, as so many dead software companies have proven.
L.
I did my first Linux installation in over two years a couple of weeks ago, and I must admit things have improved to a point where I was able to get most stuff working fairly well. It was faster than a WinNT 4.0 install, too. There are still a couple of things that I found a wee bit arcane, though:
Overall, I'm impressed with how far Linux has come in the past two years, but after a weekend of fiddling there are still some faults apparent. I'm sure I'll find more as I keep fiddling with Linux in my spare time (the various package mechanisms worry me), but it is getting better. I just don't agree it's as easy as Windows (overall).
No, Caldera is *much* more likely to include proprietary tools in their distributions. I don't know how much you know about them, but they follow the old convention of calling a product 'Open' when it isn't.
:)
RedHat handled the rdist thing well. If you read the Caldera review, note the proprietary tools... the OSS sound system (not lite), KDE (based on non-free Qt), Star Office 5.1 (free for non-commercial use, but generally annoying and bloated, I'd consider the registration at least nagware...)... now compare to another recent slashdot item: RMS Linux. Comparable to Debian in freeness. Hmm.
Bob Young was pointing out a truth that should be acknowledged, and I will go one step further with this. Caldera has always wanted to be the next Microsoft. Hence the old DOS lawsuit, 'OpenDOS' (which really isn't yet), and now 'OpenLinux'.
I'm glad they're making an easy to use distribution, and it's gotten better and more free (probably because of the community at large, not them) but I have yet to see that they're doing it for the right reasons. And since I haven't seen them do that much of anything for the right reasons yet, I don't trust them.
RedHat, however, has earned my trust by figuring out that their users don't want or need proprietary software, and eliminating much or all of it from their distributions. (remember MetroX? Back when I had that, I tried it out. It sucked. Therefore, I use XFree86. It rocked. I never looked back.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.