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Caldera OpenLinux 3.2
by Paul Coltrin, TCS Member February 2001 Tucson Computer Society’s Journal www.aztcs.org - March 26, 2001 at 23:23:22:
Tanstaafl! An acronym I first learned from the book “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein. It stands for “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” In the no-nonsense Moon society described by Heinlein, if you failed to pay your air tax, you would quickly find yourself on the wrong side of the nearest airlock, sans-spacesuit of course.I find myself increasingly convinced that this acronym also applies to the PC world in general and Linux in particular. You can either pay someone a lot of money for a turnkey system and hand-holding support or you can spend a lot of time and money learning and doing things for yourself. There is no other alternative if you want a PC that is more than an expensive desk ornament.
Which brings me to the subject of this article. I was asked to review Caldera System’s OpenLinux 2.3. I have been working professionally with various flavors of Unix on-and-off for 15 years. I have also been the coordinator of the TCS Linux/Unix SIG for about 2 1/2 years and have been tinkering with Linux since the days of the 1.0.x kernels.
OpenLinux 2.3 is one of many distributions of Linux, the Unix-like “open-source” operating system. Printed prominently on the center-left of the box cover is a quote by Jason Kroll of the Linux Journal: “Ultimately, this distribution is evidence of how easy Linux can be to install, and how commercially and professionally viable it is ... for businesses this appears to be the solution.”
Did I find OpenLinux “easy” to install and “commercially and professionally” viable? For the answer to these questions dear readers, you must read on. Tanstaafl!
The OpenLinux package contains 3 CD’s, a boot floppy, and a 203 page Getting Started Guide. The CD’s are labeled: “Linux Kernel and Installation,” “Source Code,” and “Windows Tools & Commercial Packages.”
I first tried to install on the TCS headquarters PC during a SIG meeting. Even though I disabled the main hard drive in the BIOS, the Caldera partition program still recognized that it existed. Since this drive was setup for and contained software used by other SIG’s, I decided to abort the installation program before it did anything destructive.
Next I chose one of my own computers as an installation target. It has an AMD K6-200 processor, 64 MB of main memory, a 2 Gig hard drive, a 54x IDE CD-ROM, a 3 button Logitech serial mouse, and a 10 MB/sec Ethernet card. Although the OpenLinux does include software to make a dual Windows/Linux installation possible, including a version of Partition Magic, I decided to do a Linux only installation.
At first, I used the boot floppy to start the installation process, but I later discovered that the BIOS on choices were: Minimum, Standard, All (1.3G), Business Workstation, Development Workstation, Home Computer, Net Computer, or Web Server. The first time through the installation I chose “All.” Unfortunately, this did not work out. After a couple of hours, I found that the computer had locked up completely and I had to start from scratch. The second time through I selected a “Standard” installation.
Once you select an installation type the installation program runs in the background to start copying files to the hard drive.
Meanwhile, in the foreground, it prompts for user names and passwords. Next it prompts for network parameters; then for the location to put the LILO startup program; and then for the computer’s time zone.
Finally a Tetris game is displayed while the program continues in the background to copy files to the hard drive. Below the game is a progress bar that is first labeled “Packages” and then the installations to complete on my computer and for the “Finish” button to “un-grey.” Selecting the “Finish” button resulted in a successful boot into Linux.
The default OpenLinux window manager is KDE. I found that Caldera had done a very good job setting it up. It was attractive and tasteful, not overfull of doodads, and reasonably intuitive to use.
To test the commercial viability of the installation, I installed the StarOffice business suite and took the computer to a Linux SIG meeting along with a floppy containing a few Word 97 documents and Excel 97 spreadsheets. StarOffice was able to open each file. The documents were easily manipulated and the cells of the spreadsheets worked just as anyone familiar with such things would expect. StarOffice even has a macro-recorder. However, the StarOffice macro language is considerably different from Office97’s, and so converting macros from one suite to the other would be problemmatic.
Overall I found OpenLinux to be much easier to work with than the early distributions of Linux, but it still requires a fair amount of knowledge of Unix and computer hardware to install successfully, especially if you run into any kind of trouble. Likewise StarOffice is light years ahead of where Linux office software was a few years ago, but it is definitely not a “drop in” replacement for “Bill’s” Office suite. Is this the business solution? No, not yet. Tanstaafl!
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