OSNews

I enjoyed the article, felt it was well done. Someone mentioned getting a person who is not a linux user to sit down and use it then write the article. Good Idea. I have been testing several Linux versions for the past 2 years looking for one that will work as a desktop for people who do not wish to "get into" Linux.

My criteria for this is a gentleman in his late 70's who has 2 machines and absolutely hates everything Windows stands for but still is forced to use it. He doesn't want or feel he has the time to go through a learning curve to use a new OS. With this in mind, I tried the R/L distro from his point of view. I downloaded the burn-44 version iso and the game iso. Installation went well on my machine into the 3rd partition of the 2nd drive. There is also a CD-RW and CD-R in the machine. My friend could have installed it with a little assist due to the partitioning of my hard drive. On his machine......no problemo.

Everything Worked! This has NOT been my experience with the other 3 distros on this machine.

The only thing that didn't work was Samba. I couldn't connect to my other machines without setting up mount points and some tweaking here and there. Nor could I connect to R/L from another machine without some tweaking. So.....with this one exception the distro looked good.

R/L Linux is based on Caldera Open Linux 3.1, so updates from Caldera will work as will Caldera packaged RPMS. Yes, I also found a dependency problem during install. However I chose to install without the dependency check and the software installed ok, and ran ok.

By the way the games CD also has Apache on it and a few other things that the average Linux person might want.....

With two cd's in the machine, I was pleasantly surprised when I put the games CD into the 2nd CD and the little icon on the taskbar lit up with a "2" indicating CD2 was being used. It mounted, I opened Konq, clicked on the RPM I wanted and it launched Kpackage. Clicked on Install and clicked off the dependencies. Bang the package installed. Can't get much simpler than that.

One of the things I didn't care for was clicking on the Redmond Distro Help and getting taken to either KDE help starter page or a dead page that said there was no help. I would have expected to get specific help about using the distro. Not generic KDE help.

Wine works somewhat, I opened Excell and Word, but it crashed on Access and it worked on Pegasus mail, which I use and a few other things. But Wine while included in many distros has a long way to go to be reliable in any sense. I would recommend Linux Alternatives before relying on Wine.

While I would not use the distro regularly for myself, I would not hesitate to recommend it to someone who has never used Linux, and is not interested in the internal workings or learning how to tweak Linux.

Sorry this is so long... but I wanted to share the experience I have had with R/L Linux.

Ray