Testing Linux

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

I'm giving some progress reports to am-info@essential.org on our office
tests of Linux.  Jamie

----
Subject: Linux install
   Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 22:28:01 -0500 (EST)
   From: James Love <love@cptech.org>
     To: Multiple recipients of list AM-INFO <am-info@essential.org>

Well, Today Charles Bennington sat down with me and installed Caldera
Open Linux 1.2 on a partition of of my hard drive at work.  Charles just
installed Red Hat Linux on a partition on this machine, so we now have 2
dual boot PCs running Win95 and Linux.  (The Red Hat machine isn't
working right yet.)

Neither of us had ever seen the Caldera Linux product, and we
encountered several problems in the install.  Some were fixed, some are
ok but could be better, and some are not yet fixed.  The main problem in
the beginning was to get the partitions right.  Once that was done
correctly, the software seemed to load ok.  Charles was doing the heavy
lifting, I was doing the watching, and I missed several steps.  The
software recognized my CD drive, hard drive and ethernet card ok.  We
had some trouble getting the video card/monitor configured, and its ok
now but will probably be better with some fine tuning.

The GUI was pretty good looking, once that was started up.  I was
surprised now polished it looks, and how easy it is to configure things
like font sizes, or "focus" options.  I choose the system where you the
highlighted screen is the active one (like Win95).  Charles apparently
likes the system where the active window is the one under the mouse
pointer.  You have a few more choices.  

Netscape was automatically installed by the install program.  A few
clicks on the Netscape Communicator 4.04 icon and we were one the web,
from linux, with our LAN connection.  I'm not using it for email until
we can figure out how to install a new user account.  I'm anxious to try
the Star Office suite which is bundled with the Standard version of
Caldera 1.2.  I'll probably try to get the Wordpefercet 7.0 which Corel
provides by ftp from their web site.  Caldera includes a large number of
programs, including a relational database, and many networking
utilities, including a secure Netscape server of some type.  They also
throw in some games.  Minesweeper looks exactly like the Win95 version!

I don't have a Linux machine at home yet, but I think I'll convert one
on the Win95 machines when I get back from next week's trip to Costa
Rica (a meeting of the Working Group on Intellectual Property for the
Free Trade Area of the America (FTAA).

But at work I'm going to try to move my email and basic word processing
over to Linux as soon as we sort a few more things out.  We are thinking
of moving several people to Linux PCs, for a trial.

I can say one thing ---  having something like this *pre-installed* will
be a big plus for people.  I can't see why an OEM can't offer a dual
boot Win95/Linux machine, given today's large hard drives.  The initial
set up is quite hard if you have never worked in a non-Windows computer,
and it would be nice if the vendors know which video cards and sound
cards were supported in Linux.

   Jamie

-- 
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
love@cptech.org | http://www.cptech.org
voice 202.387.8030, fax 202.234.5176