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Petreley on Caldera OpenLinux 2.3

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the saint-nick-on-distros dept.

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?

2 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Caldera's problem is its image by Lucius+Lucanius · · Score: 5

    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.

  2. Linux Ease of Installation by John+Poole · · Score: 4

    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:

    1. Setting up X: It's fairly simple to get X up and running, but it's hard (as far as I can tell) to tweak it to run well. I'm still running at 60Hz, and it's painful. Modeline calculations scare me. Under Windows it's just a couple of clicks away from the Control Panel.
    2. Setting up Sound: As far as I can tell, this requires a kernel recompile. With Windows9x, the OS installs the drivers for you. With WinNT, you have to do a bit of hunting, but otherwise it's still fairly straightforward. To me, this seems easier than rebuilding your kernel, and I've a funny feeling the average user would agree with me.
    3. Mounting Drives: I need to mount my cdrom in order to use it? This I found confusing.

    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).