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Summary - Nick Petreley overviews the new Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 distribution -- which he likes even better than 2.2.(2,000 words)
By George, Caldera has done it again. Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 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. And since Caldera 2.3 is based on KDE 1.1.1 (you can download the upgrade to 1.1.2 from Caldera's FTP server), some would argue that Caldera 2.3 is easier to use than Windows, too.
Put simply, Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 (see my April 1999 review) was a work of art -- but Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 is a masterpiece.
Caldera 2.2 made Linux history by delivering the most friendly installation program for a Linux distribution. The best features of that installation remain intact with Caldera 2.3, but the rough edges that I discovered with the prior distribution have been smoothed out, and Caldera added some nice extras.
As with Caldera OpenLinux 2.2, if you start the installation in Windows, it can automatically partition your hard drive to make OpenLinux coexist with Windows. Or, if you already have your partitions set up (or want to set them up during installation yourself), you can boot from a floppy or right from the Caldera CD- ROM. I booted from the CD-ROM to install my copy on two machines. The whole installation process went flawlessly both times. Each installation took about 15 minutes, which is about as long as it had taken to install 2.2.
Both test machines are based on ASUS motherboards. One is aIDE- based P2B-F with a 400 MHz Celeron; the other is a SCSI-based P2B-S with a 333 MHZ Pentium II. The former is configured with two IDE hard drives, one IDE CD-ROM, a Matrox G200 AGP video card with 8 MB of RAM, and two network cards -- the Linksys LNE100TX and a 3Com 3C905B-TX. The latter is configured with three SCSI hard drives, a SCSI CD-ROM and a Yamaha SCSI CD-RW drive. It has a Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 Ultra video card with 32 MB of RAM, an Intel Ethernet Express Pro 100 network card, and the CreativeLabs Sound Blaster PCI64 sound card...