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Caldera

Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 released 81

Posted by Hemos from the fun-for-business dept.
A reader wrote with the news that Caldera has announced the release of its Open Linux 2.3. They have the announcement and order forms on their web pages, and have loaded version 2.3 onto their ftp site (including ISO images).
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Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 released More

Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 released

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  • I'm running the Mandrake 6.1 Beta (Cassini) right now and all I can say is "Good Stuff". I've never used Mandrake's dists before (mostly stuck with RedHat), but I'm really impressed at the amount of useful applications and cohesiveness that they've crammed together on one CD. And, on top of that, it's even easier than RedHat to install (although, not by much). Cheers to Mandrake!!

    The first time I tried Caldera, I found that their boot disk wouldn't work on my machine. It just hung there forever. Sort of reminded me of Windows :) I hope they've gotten all that worked out. I say try them both!


  • My understanding is that they are having massive problems rewriting the Novell client to run under 2.2.x kernels. Something about how STREAMS are implemented differently. They also had a full NetWare server running on Linux. This will probably go away as Novell has announced NDS for Linux.

    They're getting there. The client is stable now and they're really working with integrating the X admin stuff with KDE. It's looking good.

  • I thought Linux didn't have streams, just sockets. (thank god!)

    Why 'thank god'? Both Netware and Solaris (both using Mentat streams) can push some serious data. And if you take the streams like Apple uses in OpenTransport, it's highly extendable.

  • I'll tell you my experiences with it...
    Caldera was the first distro I used when I converted to Linux. It made the transition very easy. It's also really pretty - it uses a graphical login by default, andeven "text mode" runs in 80x30 VGA mode.
    However, there were annoying things about it that wouldn't go away. It claimed to be compatible with RedHat, but most binaries didn't work right. COAS was a nice touch, but it had a terrible interface and didn't work half the time. KDE switched back and forth from tty7 to tty8 for no apparent reason. If the mouse was in the top-left 640x480 pixels of the screen while switching from KDE's terminal, some graphical garbage would end up in the corresponding position on the screen. Changing runlevels (except using halt and reboot) often hung the computer. And the whole system suffered from the Macintosh disease - "You don't need to know that. Now be a good user and look at the pretty pictures."
    So today I backed up my home directory, downloaded the ISO Mandrake 6.0, and overwrote Caldera with it. I already like it, even though it won't work with my Matrox Mystique at resolutions past 640x480. I'll figure out what to do about that tomorrow.
    Now everyone's talking about Mandrake 6.1 - is this a stable version or not? Where can I get it?
    --
  • Fully-functional COAS... that must be something like "the unstoppable Windows NT", right? I speak as a former OpenLinux 2.2 user.
    The features are nice, of course, but its interface is lousy, it's inconsistent (especially when it comes to printers), and half the time it doesn't even work - it just exits without changing anything or even giving some kind of error.
    --
  • I'm trying to get it, but I've only got ~100MB so far. If you already have the image, put it on SlashMirror so everyone can have access.

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers

  • There is some dude in the US making fine RedHat ISO's (which in turn are distributed all over the world).

    ftp://ftp.redhat-iso.commwerks.c om/pub/redhat-iso [commwerks.com] Original Site - Slow

    Mirrors:
    ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux /distributions/redhat.iso/ [sunet.se] Fast from Europe
    ftp://www.linux.or.kr/pub/redhat-iso [linux.or.kr] Korea. Dunno 'bout the speed.
    ftp://ftp.nuri.net/pub/FreeISO [nuri.net] Dunno 'bout the speed. Enjoy,
  • Why could they not use XF86 3.3.5?
    I've got 2.2 & it don't support my chip....
    neither does 2.3... 3-4 minutes into the CD install I get the BEIGE SCREEN OF DEATH!!!! (my fault I know - RTFD..). Caldera's idea of a fix for this is to refer their unhappy customer to the SUSE(!!)website, where a fix has been posted. No mention at all of xf86.org....

    If Mandrake decides to include 3.3.5 - bugger FTP - i'll BUY the dammed thing.....
  • What's annoying about this release is though it's Caldera 2.3; the actual kernel version is 2.2.10.

    I actually liked how Caldera 2.2 had a kernel of 2.2.x; there was a synchrony. What will Caldera do when kernel 2.3 goes final? Will they then be Caldera 2.4? Confusion city.

    For now, I'm running the base Caldera 2.2 with linux kernel 2.2.12 patches. That way, don't have to bother with reinstalling the whole system. I'll most probably upgrade that way to kernel 2.3; no reason to send Caldera any more money then necessary.

    Karen
  • Incidentally, whichever wanker of a moderator branded that a "troll" deserves a lobotomy.
    ~Tim
    --
  • I think the ISO images Caldera posted is a very smart idea. Not 100% sure on this, but RedHat and debian and the like don't post images? It would be much better if they did so I could dust off that cd burner I have. And if they do, they should really publicise it more.

    --
    Scott Miga
  • Actually there is Storm Linux which is also based on Debian.

    www.stormix.com

    I downloaded there alpha .iso nice GUI install. I think Debian needs a nice GUI replacement for dselect (I'm not sure what the scope of SAS is though .. I may write my own -- I think a tree based/searchable package management would be ideal.
  • Debian has distributed ISO images for as long as I can remember. Get more info at http://cdimage.debian.org [debian.org]. Usually, you have to get it from one of the mirrors listed there, but lots of mirrors are down right now, so you can get it directly.

    Red Hat doesn't distribute ISO images directly to the public, but I was able to find a few sites with them with just a few clicks on a search engine. Also, the directories on RedHat's FTP site precisely match the directories on the CD. I've burned bootable RedHat CD's, just by mirroring the directory from the server, and using the right switches in mkisofs.

    ----
  • My understanding is that they are having massive problems rewriting the Novell client to run under 2.2.x kernels. Something about how STREAMS are implemented differently. They also had a full NetWare server running on Linux. This will probably go away as Novell has announced NDS for Linux.
  • On a related note, does anyone know where I can find an OpenBSD .iso? I have looked everywhere and was basically told to either do an ftp-install or better yet to buy the cd-rom....

    As much as I'd like to purchase the cd-rom, I am a student and would much prefer to burn my own. Any help?

  • Mirrors? (Score:1)

    by seva ( 5510 )
    Are there any?

    Please post...

    /Simon
  • Caldera has Lizard, had it for a while...and with Red Hat's new Lorax beta the installer is Anaconda [HMMmmmm...]
    Anyway, it's pretty neat, albeit simply a cosmetic improvment..haven't seen Anaconda yet, anyone have any comments on it..?

  • Actually - as most people here will jump to say.

    Windows and other Microsoft software is always late cause they spend time processing bug reports from their testers and continually testing and fixing.
  • I hope it does. NetWare for Linux was a cool product when it first came out, but Novell moved beyond it very quickly. It's pretty much unusable in a NetWare 5 environment.

    NDS for Linux will be where it's at--at least in terms of authentication and LDAP support. However, it won't have the client access like the Caldera client (and there is an RPM for the Caldera nwclient in the 2.3 distro, and it's newer than the latest beta on their FTP site. Haven't tried it out yet, though.)

    ncpfs is also worth looking atl...

  • Try this FreeBSD mirror for a FreeBSD .ISO image [freebsd.org].

    As always, please buy the CDROM and support good software if you like it and use it.

    It's good to see these various distribution makers put out .ISO images. With IDE CD-burners plummeting in price down to $100-150, many casual computer users have the capability to use them. Also, when .ISOs are available, people are more likely to take a chance on a new OS/distro due to the convenience of having it all on CD and free of charge. (Got 2 Win98-using friends to try out RedHat 6.0 last month with my bootable CD.). The task of downloading 600 Mb worth of files is just too daunting for many newbies or casual users...
  • Took me over a day and a half.....

    ftp://caldera@128.253.254.56/col2 3_full_install.iso [128.253.254.56] (606MB)

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers

  • ftp://caldera@128.253.254.56/col2 3_full_install.iso [128.253.254.56] (606MB)

    SlashMirror: Where to put files for fellow /.'ers


  • Upgrades that occur in a timely fashion?! How about really, incredibly way too frequent!

    I don't know about Suse and Caldera, but Redhat has been releasing so !@#$ frequently that our patch maintenance costs are much higher for redhat than for sun, dec or sgi - and that's not even accounting for the fact that we have far more suns than redhat machines!

    What's more, redhat has been ceasing to release new patches for some of these myriad os versions pretty quickly, leaving critical production machines orphaned with regard to patches.

    We've had to say "sorry, we'll only support the last minor within a given major" (EG: 4.2, 5.2, but not 5.0 or 5.1 or 6.0), to contend with the overexuberant release schedule and lack of matching patch schedule. (patches for the last minor within a major are provided for much longer)

    Please, please, please, redhat: take a hint from the other vendors and Fred Brooks. Way frequent releases bad, more significant infrequent releases good.

    If you want a production track and a development track, that's different. But so far, I don't see any such distinction in redhat's versioning system aside from the betas. It's good to stick to the last minor within a major (although our clients hate it, and may come to hate us as a result :( ), but as far as I can tell we don't even know if 6.2 will be the last of the 6.x's until 7.0 beta is announced - so we end up waiting an additional n months before we know if we can adopt 6.2.
  • Thank you! This is more like it! I am impressed that you got it off of Caldera's site at all--it seems to be completely down at this point.

  • Check out ftp://ftp.nuri.net/pub/FreeISO
    it has debian, redhat, mandrake, storm, and FreeBSD 3.3 also.

  • ISO? Woohoo! (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @02:35AM (#1698214)
    With more and more people nowadays owning burners, it's about time ISO images were posted as standard.
  • I'm starting to get the incling that the pace at which new distributions from various vendors come out is going to be to much to handle for most people, including me...
  • How could this be compared to Debian? I really like Debian, but I've heard good things about Caldera.
  • There are so many distributions of linux out there it is becoming hard to keep up. But having ISO's is cool, though.

    -- Moondog
  • True. More importantly, we have distributions across an important spectrum. There are still those aimed at the hacker crowd (Slackware, Debian), the general market and some businesses (RedHat, SuSE) and those with major (pre-existing) commercial backing (Caldera, Corel). Many people don't like these newer distros because they dumb things down or whatever, but the surest way to get Linux into corporations is to have a known quantity backing it (with support). Personally, I'm anxiously awaiting Corel's distro, as I've always heard good things about Debian...
  • I couldn't help noticing how professional sounding the copy on the product description was. Something of a breath of fresh air.

    Also nice to see things like ddd being in the distro, and to see hardware RAID support.

    And at a very reasonable price.

  • Re:This is why we need Linux (Score:3)

    by macbar ( 81325 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @02:52AM (#1698220)

    And instead of waiting months or years (Cairo -> WinNT5 -> Win2K), we have upgrades that occur in a regular and timely fashion.

    Isn't that the problem with most software? They all produce with their deadline in mind... They rather distribute software on time than waiting a few more days to complete their software...
    Result: every week bugfixes...
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I prefer stable software, even though it might be several months old, above *new* software. And in case you really need software that is up-to-date, you can always choose for an unstable, pre-release version (cf. Debian), but then at least you know that it might be unstable...

    Mac|3ar.

  • This is why we need Linux (Score:5)

    by shambler snack ( 17630 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @02:41AM (#1698221) Homepage
    Caldera has just announced their latest Linux distro. Weeks before it was S.u.S.E. Redhat is readying a release of Redhat 6.1. What do all these have in common? Competition.

    This is why we need Linux. Everyone is taking the base software, including enhancements and bug fixes, and adding their own value to provide marketing differentiation. And instead of waiting months or years (Cairo -> WinNT5 -> Win2K), we have upgrades that occur in a regular and timely fashion. We have excitement, we have true innovation, but most of all we have choice within not just operating systems but even within Linux. I hope this continues for some time to come.


  • I'm completely torn now, do I go with Mandrake 6.1, or Caldera? Anyone have any suggestions?

  • Debian has offered ISO images for a long time. If you didn't register with them to access the ISO's on their primary site, you had to download them from a mirror, but mirrors always worked for me! As an aside, I really wish RedHat offered ISO images. I'm getting sick of screwing up a RedHat image because I forgot to capitalize RPMS!

    ~GoRK
  • Agreed!

    I love how there is rapid growth and innovation. One just has to wait a month or two to get the latest and greatest software innovations, and then it is a simple DL vs. several years and paying $100 for bug fixes and the new tech being worthlessly buggy.

  • Re:This is why we need Linux (Score:3)

    by shambler snack ( 17630 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @02:55AM (#1698227) Homepage
    What concerns me about Corel's distribution is its financial health, and the rumor that it may be a buyout target of Adobe. If it is purchased, then Adobe is one of the worse possible vendors to support a Linux distribution.

    It worries me quite a bit because of the few visuals (screen shots) of some of the work already done with the Corel distribution. And Corel is the only other distribution I'm aware of that is based on Debian.
  • Seriously- I had no idea they had a bad rep. Is it a particular decision, product or license? Also, considering they are GPLing the backend to their installer, do you think it will cause any problems for Debian? ~luge
  • Take a look at the FTP site. Unless some crack addict converted a bunch of .deb's to .rpm's as a joke. Also, only potato (dev stream of Debian) is packaged and tested against a 2.2 kernel, and X3.3.4 isn't going into stable (slink) untill 2.1R3 (any day now, my new VooDoo3 and I hope since I'm too lazy to mess w/ unofficial or build myself :)
  • Its not really derived from either.. It uses RPM as a package manager, which is a redhat GPL'd program..

    rpm is a good idea, brings some software management to the table.. just kind of weird no one followed the same package format that sun/sco use wich seems to work pretty well.. i guess it isn't gpld so it wouldn't work :)

  • they advertise the jdk 1.0.2, I wonder if that is what is on the distro or a typo, it also makes me wonder what other libs they have that are old. They need atleast the jdk 1.1.3. It otherwise looks pretty nice for a newbie, but I am not going there, my system is already configured. Maybe it they ahd a RH to Caldera upgrade or something . It is not so much that the stuff I have woudln't work, as the reconfiguring of a system to get it tuned to where you are sooo comfortable.
  • well, the selling point of COS, is that it is easy, and a steady/consistant OS.

    part of linux is choices, you have a choice of mandrake if you love goofing around with millions of things..

    and you have a choice of Caldera, if you like a consistant look, feel, and stability with ease of installation and use.

    I'm not saying the others are not just as simple with the new installation wizards and stuff, i'm just saying COS solves a specific market.. not just a genaralize catch all :)

  • Re:So many distributions... (Score:3)

    by cybrthng ( 22291 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @08:25AM (#1698237) Homepage Journal
    Just choose a vendor that solves your OS needs. And follow the product. once a year/6 month product cycles is good.. Caldera Open Linux 2.2 has been out for a while now. Same with RedHat 6.0 and such. Just a plethora of distro's to choose from, but once you find one you like, there really not pushing out too many products..

    windows just sneaks in new updates with web browsers and other lil things, so it doesn't seem like you contstantly upgrading :)

  • I'm currently use Mandrake 6, and I might consider getting the new Openlinux ISO (A bit of a pain over a very unstable 56k connection) if it supports the Yamaha PCI Audio YMF724 sound card, which doesn't work at all under Mandrake 6 right now. (Hey, I got what I paid for...it was free) If I can't get that to work I'm going to invest in the Sound Blaster Live Value...can anyone clue me in on how well these cards will work? Thanks, and sorry if I'm too off topic! :)

  • Still looking for mirrors... anyone know where??

    Thanks

  • NDS (Score:3)

    by Gleef ( 86 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @04:04AM (#1698241) Homepage
    I noticed they've stopped advertising NDS support. Have they given up? What was the point of their cross-licensing agreement then? Can't someone come up with a decent NDS client for Linux? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would gladly pay money for it.

    ----
  • Did someone try to start an install of this distro ? It seems that the big fight between distros will be the userfriendliness of the installation :
    Mandrake has lothar, RedHat has Lorax what about Caldera ?

    I would prefer more and more fonctionnalities ...
  • I'm completely torn now, do I go with Mandrake 6.1, or Caldera? Anyone have any suggestions?

    Woah. What a question. Are you trying to start another 'my distro is better than yours' war?

    OK. I'll give what is probably the most sensible advice you'll get. Since you didn't say exactly what you'll be doing with the installation, it's my guess that you're not too sure. If this is the case, get both distros (hell, get as many different ones as you can) and try them out. You'll find that you like different aspects of each distro, but you'll probably find one you like best - YMMV.

    Nick.

  • The install smokes debian.

    Jim
  • If I was you I would not get the sound blaster live value. I have one and although creative labs has released a beta driver for linux, it only works with kernels 2.0.36 or 2.2.5 by default (I've gotten it to work with 2.2.5 - 2.2.9, but anything newer doesn't work). The driver is not only beta, but fairly crappy. Only one of the speaker outputs is available, and I've had some problems with the line in. I would recommend either a sb16 or an sb pci 128 or something like that. There are already drivers in the kernel for those cards, and I havent' had any troubles with them.
  • Well, probably the most important thing is the GUI based setup, that looks very window-ish, to the text-menu and CLI based Debian setup. If you are a new user, you will probably feel more confortable using Caldera. I also have made some good experience with Caldera's file layout, and their admin tools (in older versions). The main problem with these things is, as usual, that you have less choice. For example, Debian comes with at least 3 mail daemons, and can each configure quite nicely. With the usual GUI-based dist, you have only one. And, even worse, if you used to configure your system by hand, you are quite likely to screw up your admin tools. In other words, if you are used to configure your system by editing text files and dont want to change this, or you want freedom of choice which programs you use, keep your Debian.
  • From the earlier Lorax announcement, it appears RH 6.1 will have Pentium-class kernel optimizations, like Mandrake 6.0 and 6.1. Does Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 have the Pentium-class optimizations?
  • I suggest you logon to ftp.calderasystems.com and leech to your heart's content... The price is simply to get a shiny new CD with the upgrade and new files of the distro, new docs, new crap... Download is the way, baby!
  • i have been trying to dl the iso from caldera's site -- not only is it slow as a dog, but it keeps stopping about 10-20 megs into the dl...server must be taking a beating we need mirrors!

  • I purchased OpenLinux 2.2 because I wanted the installation support and I noticed 2 things.

    1. There is a lot of flakiness in OL 2.2, for example it doesn't really install everything that it says it has installed, their version of kde has started to act very flaky on me, after running for about two weeks with no problems, now my network daemons don't shut down properly and I have to hard reboot. COAS, the admin utility has many short comings, the biggest being that it only works about half the time.

    2. Caldera's support sucks. It took them close to three weeks to get me back the information I got from usenet in 7 hours, and I suspect that the only reason I got an answer them is because THEY read it on usenet.

    I'm thinking about heading over to SuSE.

  • Ouch. I've been labelled a troll. I can't see what I've done to deserve it, other than use an exclamation mark when proclaiming a relative value.

    In fact my article has some useful facts and describes both the good and the bad things about the Debian distribution. It deserves a much better score.

    Now how does this meta-moderation thing work...

    Zooko

  • The good things about Debian are that it is technically sophisticated and stable (even the so-called "unstable" versions are very stable), and that it is developed by thousands of hackers which means there are more packages and newer versions. (There are currently... 3944 packages in potato.)

    The bad things about Debian are that it takes way too long between stable releases, and there isn't a GUI for install, package management, and configuration.

    Hopefully Corel's contributions will fix all of the bad things, making the perfect free operating system!

    (Note that currently the Debianistas are undergoing a crisis about their organization and personality issues and many are dissatisfied with how things are done. I considered mentioning this chaos in the list of "bad things about Debian", but I thought about it and realized that all of the hundreds of packages that I use still work great and that from my perspective as a Debian user the only thing I can legitimately complain about is the lag time between stable releases and the lack of idiot proof, pretty GUI tools.)

    (Also note that I said "the perfect free operating system" instead of "the perfect free Linux distribution", because Debian can be layered on top of any suitable kernel, in theory. Work is already progressing on Debian-GNU-Hurd. Anyone want to build up a Debian-OpenBSD for me? :-))

    Read all about it in the Corel's Linux Distribution white paper [corel.com] or visit linux.corel.com [corel.com] for news and job openings...

    Zooko

  • Actually, the nice thing about COAS is that its goal is to NOT break when files are manually edited. I don't know yet if its 100% effective, but thus far I have been able to both manually edit configuration files as well as use the COAS tools.

  • I like Mandrake better. Better support. No Contract needed... I have installed Caldera 2.2. The installer is cool. I just burned Mandrake 6.1b with its new cool installer. But have not yet loaded it. Currently downloading Caldera 2.3 iso. I will try both and compare them... again.

  • Screenshots available (Score:3)

    by Stink Juice ( 70923 ) on Tuesday September 07, 1999 @05:04AM (#1698264)
    There are screen shots available of some of the new Lizard screens most notably the ability to configure sound cards (finally!!!) during installation. Go to http://www.openlinux.org/lizard/screenshots.html for all the screens.

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