“Caldera Systems Inc. has elevated the Linux desktop market with
its latest incarnation of OpenLinux. The package, which
includes the operating system, office suite and Internet tools,
makes Linux a viable alternative to Microsoft Corp.’s various
flavors of Windows on the desktop.“
“The CRN Test Center installed OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 on an Acer
America Corp. notebook computer with an Intel Corp. Pentium II
processor, and a white-box system with a Pentium III processor.
Several different installation methods are available, including an
install launched from within Windows, with an option of installing
a special version of PartitionMagic to facilitate repartitioning
the hard disk. That method allows Windows and Linux to exist on the
same system and, by using the included special version of
PowerQuest’s BootMagic, to select which operating system to run
during bootup. To ease data migration, OpenLinux supports read-only
access to Windows partitions to allow users the ability to copy
files and data from Windows to the Linux partitions.”
“OpenLinux can be installed via the included boot disk, allowing
a native installation of Linux to unpartitioned and unformatted
media. The disk runs a utility to validate hardware compatibility
before launching Orem, Utah-based Caldera’s Linux installation
wizard, called Lizard.”