LinuxPlanet: DistributionWatch Review: Caldera OpenLinux Workstation 3.1 Beta

“Caldera has a well-deserved reputation for not being on the
cutting edge with new releases. They have always considered
themselves to be a “business” Linux, one that takes a more
conservative approach to upgrades in the interest of stability.
Most readers will know of someone who’s still running kernel 2.0.x,
or even earlier, because it’s still working and doing the job that
it was built to do. If it works, don’t fix it. This has been
Caldera’s mantra for years, so I was surprised to see just how
current the 3.1 beta distro is.”

“The kernel is 2.4.2, as you might expect. With a *.*.0 kernel,
just about anything that changes that last digit is likely to make
it more stable rather than less, so Caldera probably felt they
didn’t have to choose between up-to-date and stable. I was pleased
to find that Reiserfs support is built right in, not only to the
kernel but also to the LIZARD installation process. This, of
course, is something that other distros are also adding or have
recently added, so Caldera isn’t unique in this feature. Still, it
was quite nice to be able to build the root filesystem directly in
Reiserfs format, without undertaking the complex process of
migrating an existing system to Reiserfs.”

“The levels of the desktop-related packages are very recent:
XFree86 is at 4.0.2, KDE is at 2.1.0, and Qt versions 1.45 and
2.2.4 are both preinstalled. Freetype version 1.3 and Freetype2
version 2.0 are installed co-existing (don’t ask me how this
works), though there were no preloaded TrueType fonts.”

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