By Sean Lamb

Yesterday I installed the Caldera 2.2 CD that I got at Comdex over
my existing RH 5.2 install. The short review is “cool!” The longer
review follows:

This distro is really aimed at the newbie. From the boot floppy,
immediately after running LILO, the disk loads a graphical,
although text-based, interface while it loads the modules and does
some basic hardware probing. The interface is smart enough to load
basic keyboard and mouse drivers for those, like me, who are
migrating from MSWindows (it does go through a mouse test page so
you can refine your rodential setup if you need to). It also
autoprobes for the setup files and loads the appropriate modules to
access them. The first thing it does that requires user-supplied
answers is partitioning. Setup launches a custom version of
Partition Magic to create/resize partitions for Linux. I didn’t
make any changes to my partition table, so I just acknowledged
through it after determining that it could see all my
partitions.

The next step is the only step of the setup that I didn’t like
so much; it forced me to reformat the Linux partition. For a newbie
without a lot of data on the drive, this isn’t that big of a
problem. But experienced users are likely to have data that they
still want/need to keep on those partitions. There is an Expert
mode for setup that you can choose before partitioning that likely
addresses this issue, but I didn’t try that. If I really needed to,
I could have canceled setup and backed up my important data at this
time and then restarted setup. For my installation, I allowed it to
reformat the drive and setup continued.

After the partition was formatted and ready to continue, setup
asked me what packages I wanted to install. For my install, there
wasn’t an expert option, but there were a few choices here: minimum
packages, all recommended packages, or all packages. I chose all
recommended packages for this step. It installs all the core
packages and almost everything that a basic user will need to get
the machine going. However, there are a couple of interesting
choices that the developers have made for us (this option installs
Apache but not any of the Office suites). What impressed me here is
that as soon as you told it which package option you wanted, it
started copying those packages to the disk immediately, while it
still prompted for user information. This setup really shows off
the multitasking capabilities of the OS nicely.

I’ve probably got the next few options out of order, but while
it’s copying packages to the hard drive, setup asks for your basic
ethernet configuration, assigns a root password and creates user
accounts, sets up XFree86 to your hardware and resolution choices
(prompts with an extensive list of monitors but allows you to
customize the monitor choice; similar options with the video card,
but autoprobe worked for me) and tests the X configuration that you
selected. There are probably some other options in there that I
forgot, but you get the idea.

Once setup has gathered all the information it needs, setup does
something that we will probably never see from an MS install: it
lets you play tetris while setup finishes copying files. When it
finishes copying files, it turns on the Finish button at the bottom
of the screen next to the progress indicator to indicate that it is
done. It doesn’t stop your game, but waits patiently until you are
done (it also doesn’t force you to stop playing when the game ends,
if you really want to play another game right now).

After setup is done, it launches the kernel and packages that
are installed on the hard drive and boots into KDE, where it
prompts for the username and password. At this point it looks much
like a WinNT install, except that the widgets are different
shapes/sizes, it presents a list of users’ accounts on the machine
(login names only). The login window does give you the option of
how you want to login (either directly into KDE or into “failsafe”
mode that is just the command shell) as well as a shutdown/reboot
button. I’ve already found that the reboot button is very handy
here, because now I don’t have to give out the root password to the
rest of the family in case they don’t catch LILO in time and really
want to boot MSWin.

On each user’s first login to the system, assuming they choose
to login to KDE directly (which is the default option), they are
presented with the KDE Desktop Setup Wizard. This wizard asks the
user to setup a theme and asks what handy icons to put on the
desktop. One neat thing that the wizard does is that it gives you
the option of placing icons on the desktop for floppy and CD drives
that automount the media. One problem that I found was that as
myself, as soon as I setup the color scheme that I wanted, I got
logged out. It took a while to find the Wizard again, but he is
setup in the Utilities menu if you want to run it again (this
didn’t happen when I was root).

The only problem that I had with setup is that it didn’t setup
LILO for me. When I rebooted, it hung with LI. From all the reading
that I did, I knew that this was a fairly common issue, so finding
possible solutions wasn’t that difficult (it helped that I had a
second machine here that was untouched that had a modem
connection). What I found to help here was to boot from the setup
boot disk and type “boot root=/dev/hda4” at the LILO boot prompt
(change the root param as appropriate for your system). This booted
the kernel that I had installed on the hard drive so that I could
make the necessary config changes. I found that I was able to setup
LILO properly by using Lisa and following the prompts (while logged
in as root, of course). The cool thing here is that the setup boot
disk can be used as a sort of rescue disk in case there are
problems.

For me, the next step will be to setup my PNP devices to get my
sound, ethernet and modem connections working (yeah, booted in
Win95 right now). I’ll probably end up disabling PNP on those cards
and setting their configs manually to what Win95 set them up to be,
but that’s for next weekend.

Copyright © 1999, Sean Lamb
Reprinted from Linux Gazette