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Introduction
OK, this really won't be a total review. Essentially I'll describe the
install process in an abbreviated manner. For those of you who want to
install Linux for the first time, or if you've used other distributions
before and want to know what to expect, this page tries to lay that out.
If you want a full review of Corel Linux, check
Google or a Linux magazine like
Linux Journal or Linux World.
First I'll describe my setup, then I'll describe the physical aspects of doing the install, and lastly describe each screen in the installation.
The "Hardware"
The hardware is a VMWare Virtual Machine.
It should be similar to a real PC, but with one difference (hopefully):
So far all Linux installs I've done on a VM have failed to recognise
the video card. I don't really find fault with the XFree people or the
installation programs - I'd rather they work on getting real cards working
first. Each new release and distribution of Linux seems to have more
supported cards so it's obvious they're moving forward there.
Otherwise it's a pretty standard setup. A cdrom drive, and a 800m hard disk. The system is set to boot off the floppy, cd, and then the hd. The VM has 32megs of RAM.
The Physical Labor
Put the cd in the cdrom drive, power on! Pretty simple, eh?
The Process
The cdrom drive spins up and a GUI boot screen
pops up. Nifty. The font could use work, and it's in this middle block
that the kernel reports it's boot progress. In short order the screen
changes and the same graphic at a higher resolution comes up. At this
point the License Agreement comes up.
This got discussed to death on slashdot
at their beta release, and since things have been quiet the license
flamers are theoretically happy here.
Next it requests a username. The username information seemed rather brief, I think Caldera gave better information here. Then again a single text box is about a simple as that aspect of Linux will get. Then packages. I selected the standard install here, since I was just doing a "new user" type install. The issue of partitioning was dealt with well , and my choice made it even easier. I don't really like dual boot machines, and I definitely think it makes things more complex for end users. Therefore I picked the whole disk option. OK, so four screens requesting info - including the license - and now we click install. After that all we see is a progress bar. No Tetris ala Caldera's install, but a stunningly easy install process. If you sit around and watch the bar though there are a few flaws. For one thing it would be nice if some reading material popped up here. But the biggest issue is 98%. It stays at 98% for ages. RedHat has a habit of guessing it will take much longer then it actually does take to install. I consider that a feature. Telling me it's 98% done for about 50% of the time is definitely not a feature. The video card was ignored during installation. It kind of gets addressed at boot time on a Corel Linux box. However the default/first choice didn't work on my VMWare box. I could boot into the VGA option though it was terribly ugly. Once in the VGA mode there wasn't a method for configuring the video card which seems a shame to me. That would be an excellent feature for Corel Linux 1.1!
Summary
My best calculation is 8 clicks and five keypresses will get me to a
complete Corel Linux install. It's now official, if anyone says Linux
is hard to install you are allowed to flame them at your leisure.
Seriously, I think if any computer journalist describes Linux as hard to
install, Corel should sue them for libel. I've mentioned my complaints
about the VGA mode, but that's really it. Again my running argument with
VMWare prevents post install shots, but I did install it on a real machine
and found it to be a reasonably complete Linux system. For end users
this is a winner.
Author
kevin@linux.ie. Thanks to Liam
Bedford for the loan of the burned ISO image.
You may find the following helpful: VMWare 1.0 About the author, Kevin Lyda.
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