I’ve been a Unix/Linux user for the past 8 years, mostly enjoyed slackware as my choice flavor, some Debian and Red Hat installs came along also. Now that Linux has become somewhat mainstream, I find it much easier to get around using the operating system, but I think that also took away some of its fun. It had its own mystique, no one knew what it was and it was very customizable. Well getting used to that being over, the free source revolution is underway and of course some companies are looking to cash in. Caldera Open Linux was brought to my attention by a co-worker about a year ago, he had asked me questions on a regular basis and I’d give him answers about the whole Linux thing but he could never really get it straight. So one day he told me about his trial with Caldera’s Open Linux, and how it was so simple and such a success for him that he’s spreading the word. He showed me where it was to download for free on their site, it was a nice simple .iso image file for my CD-recorder. After it was finished burning I tossed it into my spare PC’s cd-rom and let it boot up. Came right up to a simple GUI (graphical user interface like windows) menu, which let me choose very simple the different choices. Now I know from my experience with Linux that it is not an easy task to partition a drive, and make it a useable Linux hard drive file system (fs2). With this a few mouse clicks and you were rolling, it setup your mouse, network card, sound card, as long as these were pretty generic you were working at boot up. This also configures X-Windows with KDE as the windows manager on start up. It takes a little playing around but overall it’s not too bad to get your video and monitor working correctly. That’s another hard task to mess with on previous Linux installs. So after you choose the packages to install it asks you simple questions as it installs files, and then lets you play a little game of Pac Man at the end while you wait. There is a logon screen that makes it simple to log on, has a lot of packages already installed to use, including Netscape. It’s really nice for a user looking for a new desktop OS. Overall it is simple for the beginner to moderate skill level. If you were looking to try Linux, give it a shot. I’m sure you will find it easy, with a lot of functionality.



Recommended: Yes