"The only applications included with Redmond Linux
right now are KOffice, Mozilla, and a demo version of a commercial
financial management program for Linux that crashed the first time
I tried to start it. I needed more applications than what came with
the "stripped" distro in order to use Redmond Linux in any
meaningful way, and they weren't there. I figured I could probably
download them from the company's Web site, so I went there. But the
download page was nothing but a list of mirrors where I could get
the same ISOs I already had. I went to the support page and still
found nothing to download.
Sure, there are some nice utilities already bundled, like a word
processor, image viewer and graphics creation software, a
spreadsheet and some others. This is a great start, except for the
fact that they are mostly not-quite the latest KOffice components,
and not all of them are as functional as they ought to be. KWord,
especially, the word processor in Redmond Linux, has crashed on me
every time I have tried to use it, and today's test was no
exception. Word processing is an absolutely basic function for a
home or small business computer. Without reliable word processing,
a student can't even use a computer to do homework. I tried
downloading AbiWord RPMs and installing them, but ran into
dependency problems. I managed to install StarOffice 5.2 from a CD,
but not many people have StarOffice CDs sitting around. Redmond
Linux could take care of this problem by packaging a recent build
of OpenOffice, the Open Source successor to StarOffice, on a second
CD, along with several other useful (or fun) programs.
Add a later Mozilla than the 8.X version included, and include
pico as a console text editor instead of forcing new Linux users to
wrestle with vi if they have reason to do a little command line
work, and this would truly be Linux you could install on a
non-technical relative's machine with confidence that they'd be
able to use it without calling you for help all the time."
