Compiling linux kernel

The slickest off-the-shelf face for Linux - Caldera's OpenLinux Lite, Base and Standard OSes - Software Review - Evaluation

Linux, the remarkable free OS that was built on the Internet, may be the darling of techies and hackers, but management types are understandably a bit leery of something that no one owns and no one supports directly.

Caldera Inc., formerly a division of Novell, has set out to change corporate perceptions about Linux. Caldera OpenLinux is essentially Linux wearing a jacket and tie. With value-added components and technical support Caldera hopes to remove the counter-culture stigma from Linux.

Caldera OpenLinux currently comes in three flavors: OpenLinux Lite, OpenLinux Base and OpenLinux Standard. The Lite version is a basic distribution of Linux that sells for $49 (U.S.) for a CD-ROM or is downloadable for no charge from the Caldera Web site (www.caldera.com). OpenLinux Base is a more feature-rich distribution, similar to the popular Red Hat, Slackware and Debian packages, but with a preconfigured version of Netscape Navigator 2 and a higher price tag of $99 (U.S.).

OpenLinux Standard, at $399, represents Caldera's flagship product. Unlike most Linux distributions, this one comes with licensed, integrated versions of Netscape Navigator Gold 3.01 and Netscape FastTrack Web server, plus a full NetWare NDS client. The package also includes a full StarOffice application suite and a personal edition of Adabas-D, an SQL database from Software AG.

OpenLinux Standard also sports an upscale graphical interface called Looking Glass that offers a somewhat more professional look and feel than the freeware interfaces of most Linux distributions.

Separately available products for OpenLinux Standard are WordPerfect for Linux and Wabi for OpenLinux (a Windows 3.1 emulator from Sun Microsystems).

Underpinning these commercial offerings are the amazing GNU and other freeware products that have made Linux so attractive, including languages such as C, C++, Perl, Tcl, editors such as emacs and vi, typesetting systems such as TeX and troff, and the X-Window system for graphical applications and application development.

Caldera has adopted the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) system for installing and updating software. RPM provides a robust, straightforward way to add, upgrade, or delete Linux software packages. RPM packages for software can be found alongside the traditional Unix tar packages on many Internet ftp sites.

Caldera OpenLinux is less leading-edge than Red Hat or Debian releases in terms of keeping current with new releases of the rapidly evolving Linux kernel. Caldera's approach is to upgrade less frequently but to highly stable releases of the kernel. This more conservative approach may resonate with IT managers who are more interested in stability than being at the cutting edge of Linux development.

The Caldera installation programs resemble Slackware more than Red Hat. I installed Caldera on two different machines, each with a different network card and Caldera did not successfully probe either card -- one an HP and the other a 3Com. I had to rebuild the kernel (not documented in the Caldera manual) to add working support for my cards.

Caldera's philosophy is to compile one general-purpose kernel with nearly every option available as an add-in module, eliminating the need for compiling support into the kernel itself. In theory this should make the kernel more maintenance free but in practice this isn't always desirable. The Caldera Web site includes instructions for rebuilding the Linux kernel. This should have been included in the manual.

Caldera includes a Curses-style management module called LISA which I found both feeble and buggy. When attempting to configure my network cards, I was placed into a infinite loop that required me to escape to a second session and kill the process.

I also found that some of the GNU utilities on the system, such as df, were very old. Certain command-line options I have been using for over a year on Red Hat systems were not even there. These anomalies exhibit less attention to detail on the part of the Caldera packagers than I see in either Red Hat or Debian.

Once loaded, however, Caldera presented the slickest off-the-shelf face for Linux I've yet seen. The strength of Caldera is its Looking Glass interface and its Novell client software, which is currently unavailable for other flavors of Linux.

The StarOffice software suite is no speedster, nor will it worry anyone in Redmond. Nonetheless, it's a decent enough GUI-based word processor/spreadsheet combo if you wish to use something more modern than emacs and TeX. I can't see many corporations including StarOffice in their standards mix.

Adabas-D is a 'personal' version of a solid relational database product. Its inclusion adds a bit of spice to the Caldera package, though its usefulness is hampered by a very restrictive licence.

It is difficult to imagine why anyone running Linux would choose Netscape FastTrack over the best Linux Web server available -- the free Apache Web server. Perhaps Netscape forced this on Caldera in exchange for a Navigator licence.

While the goal of introducing a 'commercial' release of Linux that will interest corporations is a laudable one, Caldera has some distance to go before the goal is achieved. Installation is not any simpler than Red Hat, Debian or Slackware, and, in the critical area of network card probing, is not even as good.

Many of the freeware portions of the package are disturbingly out of date, particularly in comparison to the excellent, and much cheaper, Red Hat distribution. Those who want the Looking Glass interface (or StarOffice or Wabi) can purchase it separately for any version of Linux. And while Adabas-D is interesting, most Linux shops are using mSQL, MySQL, or PostGres97 for their database engines.

Having an integrated Navigator Gold 3.01 is nice, but I was able to download and successfully install the latest Netscape Communicator 4.X for Linux on a Red Hat system. A support contract can be obtained from Red Hat just as easily as from Caldera, so there's little advantage there. About the only unique item in Caldera is the NetWare client, a very nice module if you have a NetWare network.

Overall, I'd rather install the cheaper, more up-to-date Red Hat Linux and purchase any commercial modules I need rather than take the Caldera package. If you're installing Linux in the first place, you're probably already technically skilled enough to roll your own system.

Make no mistake -- this is Linux, not NT. Network admins will not find a 'server for dummies' here, despite the glitzy packaging.