[lug] Caldera Install.

Tue Aug 29 07:15:53 MDT 2000

I'm no Caldera shill, nor do I use it in production anywhere, but what I
can tell you is that on my PII-333/128, Tetris was very playable during the
intsall of Caldera 2.4.  The reason I didn't keep Caldera is the same
reason I don't use RedHat or Mandrake, and why I'm probably not going to
keep the install of SuSE I put on my machine last night: too much crap.
I'll go back to Slackware, methinks.  I like to install a base system with
the bare minimum of crap and go from there, installing individual packages
to suit my needs.

          Jason

Jason Packer - Computer Task Group
IBM Global Services
Business Partner System Education Coordinator
vox: (303) 924-3249 / pgr: (888) 393-7913
jpacker at us.ibm.com

Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com>@lug.boulder.co.us on 08/28/2000
04:39:02 PM

Please respond to lug at lug.boulder.co.us

Sent by:  lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us

To:   lug at lug.boulder.co.us, nclug at nclug.org, glug at lists.tummy.com
cc:
Subject:  [lug] Caldera Install.

I have a machine that I need to do an install on, and since we got Caldera
recently I figured I'd give it a try.  Figured I'd write up what I thought
about it.

The installer is fairly cute.  It seems to take a long time to read the
initrd and kernel from the CD (nearly a minute, usually it's faster
than that from CD).  It fairly quickly switches to what looks like an
libsvga init-like program that starts a bunch of things.  The last of
which is "LIZARD".  This actually starts up X and gets the install
going.

The first screen here is "Move the mouse and I'll find it".  Seems to work
fine (should on a PS/2 mouse :-).  I did note with interest that one of
the choices listed as "USB Mouse".  Hmm.

It then goes through and asks a few system questions, then gets to the
partition disc screen.  I selected "use entire disc", which gives you a
button labled "Prepare Disk".  If you click on this, the hard drive light
starts flashing and stays in this state for like 10 minutes.  From looking
at other consoles it seems that it's partitioning the drive, formatting
all the file-systems, and loading net and sound drivers.  Ok...  No
progress bar, nothing, just "preparing disk".

I tried playing with the disc partitioning stuff and thought it kind of
sucked.

THEN you have to go in and configure the networking, add users, select
install type (Web Server and Network Server are a few of the 5 options).
Then it pops you right into a tetris game, which is unfortunately
unplayable
because of all the other activity going on on the system (this is a Celeron
400 with 64MB RAM and 7200RPM IBM disc).

It's a cute installer, but:

     Ask all questions, THEN go off and prepare the discs and load.

     Tell me why we're in a game, I didn't see anything saying "Now I'll
     pop you into a game while I'm loading -- don't try playing it because
     I'll be pounding on the machine".  ;-)

Should be easy enough for somone familiar with loading Windows to deal
with.
That's who I'd recommend it to.

Just FYI.

Sean
--
 "When you first started at Pacific Tech you were well on your way to
becoming
 another Einstein and then you know what happened?"  "I got a haircut?"
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python

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