I attended a Linux SIG meeting about three months ago and was rewarded for my attendance by winning the door prize. It was a copy of Caldera's OpenLinuxLite on cdrom. This was pleasing but I had to confess to James Stansell, the group leader, that I had already purchased a book containing the distribution and I tried to give it back. James suggested that I go ahead and keep the software since nobody else seemed to want it. I accepted his recomendation and took the cd home for a test drive.

As I said earlier, I already had a copy of OpenLinuxLite installed on my main PC, so I didn't want to reinstall it on that machine. I figured that I would install it on another machine I had which was running Windows 95, but that I would put the OpenLinux on a separate hard drive so as not to disturb the Windows installation.

The PC is a Pentium 133mhz with 48mb of RAM, an 850mb hard drive and a 6x generic cdrom drive. Having read quite a bit about Linux and attempting unsucessfully to download it from the internet, I had heard that I might have some trouble with the cdrom but I was surprized again and found that the drive was recognised and initialized without much fiddling. I don't really want to get into the details about the installation but I do want to say that the Lisa interface is very good and it should present little difficuly to anyone who has installed Linux previously and it should be only slightly more difficult for those who have not.

When the system came up for the first time I was pleased to find that X was configured correctly and my GUI popped up when I typed the "startx" command. OpenLinux comes with a desktop called Looking Glass which I have concluded is far too non-standard to be of much use. It uses many off-beat scripts and a directory structure which is baffling to me. It appears to be very powerful but I have opted to delete it from the system due to these characteristics.

OpenLinux provides all the standard Linux programs and utilites as well as Netscape 3.0, CRiSPLite editor, Lyx-a latex GUI, and many other useful non-free programs. My favorite, of course, is Netscape. It is the easiest web browser and mail/news reader that I have come across. It isn't a Caldera product but Caldera was the company that made the ports to Linux of many commercial products happen.

If you have to have access to your ISP through a modem and you have never used Linux for this purpose, I have sad news for you. There is no easy way to accomplish this task. My best recommendation is to get the scripts that work for a friend or try to use the ones that can be found in a doc/ directory somwhere on your hard drive after installation. I struggled for months trying to follow the how-to's, books and advice from friends to get ppp to work for me. Caldera hasn't made it any easier since they don't provide any programs in the distribution specifically geared toward ppp connections to the internet. This shortcoming almost made me give up on Linux because I had to have a way to dial into my ISP from home. Without the help of my good friend Brian Kolden I would probably have gone back to Windows and started another search for an alternative operating system long before now. Thanks Brian.

I have installed and used about ten different Linux distributions and I must say that OpenLinux is by far the most complete, robust, and serious of the lot. I liked the Lite version so much, in fact, that I went out and paid good money for the Base version. It has become my OS of choice due the quality Caldera uses in putting together this distribution. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in giving Linux a go as a serious alternative to Windows 95.

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